Catsy

That's correct--the original gaming purpose for which they were intended was to be used on a hex map, so they'll work best on that. However, for playing something like BrikWars--or even something like brick-built Warhammer/40k--you could just as easily use them on any open, flat playing surface, like a floor, your kitchen table or any kind of wargaming terrain. Absolutely. I need to take a picture of it, but I have one of the new LOTR Ringwraths mounted on his horse, affixed to a 2S on the front legs and a 4S via the hollow studs on the back legs. They line up perfectly and work a treat! Thanks! I made it; that's one of my custom pieces (as is the Chell fig holding it). It's created from a few modified BrickArms, some cut-up white Lego motorcycles helmets, and some miscellaneous styrene/acrylic bits.

They can't be placed directly on a baseplate--that would require stud notches cut into them like Lego wedge plates have. I considered that possibility but it would look absolutely terrible--the notches would obliterate two points of the hexagon and possibly break up the four angled sides as well. And it would still constrain the stand to the four cardinal directions of the Lego grid, which would defeat the purpose of using a hexagon rather than simply a Lego plate. :) With that said, you can use a 1x2 plate (or a pair of jumper tiles, or any combination that effectively adds up to the same thing--in the below picture I based the stand on a 2x3 plate) surrounded by some tiles to achieve that effect, like so: And of course as one of the above pictures shows, they will fit flush against a 2-wide plate and otherwise comport with System. I tried various arrangements of jumper tiles and regular plates to try creating a hexagonal grid that would accomodate these out of pure Lego, but there's just no way do it--the geometry of a grid of squares versus a grid of hexagons is completely incompatible.

Hello, everyone! As some of you may know, I've been an active part of the minifig customization community for several years, though only a lurker on EB for the most part. Most of my work has been with customizing BrickArms, but I also have an extensive "portfolio", as it were, of custom minifigs. My main project for the better part of the last six months, though, has been to bring to market a new custom accessory: hexagonal minfig stands. And it makes something of a story, so please bear with my verbosity and skip to the pictures if this is TL;DR. I've been playing tabletop games since I was a kid, and for most of the last 15 years I've been playing in a series of tabletop RPG (roleplaying game) campaigns with a good friend who is an outstanding GM (gamemaster). We play out combat scenes on a one-inch hex map, which helps everyone visualize the spatial relationships between characters and enables a lot of tactical complexity in combat. Most people use painted miniatures on a hex map for this, but these are expensive, fragile, take a lot of time and skill to paint so that they look good, and can only really be one particular thing without a lot of hand-waving. So some years back we made the shift to using minifigs on the hex map. Minifigs work great for gaming--as any of you who've played BrikWars or Evil Stevie's Pirate Game can attest! One of the best parts about character creation before a campaign is when we get to root through the GM's organized collection of minifig parts and put together our "character". There's just one problem: they don't like to stand up on their own, and there aren't a lot of options for making them do that. The CMF series stands are 4x3 studs, which is far too big to fit in a 1" hex. The MFW stands are great--I have a bunch of them and have used them extensively in the past to display my custom figs--but they're round and if a character gets nudged even slightly out of place it's nearly impossible to tell what hex they were facing. You can also stand them on plates--for the last few years we've been using 2x3 plates and this works fairly well, since three studs = 24mm = 0.94", which fits perfectly in a 1" hex. But they still tip over pretty easily from side-to-side if someone bumps them, which happens a lot in a crowded battle scene. Will Chapman of BrickArms is a good friend of mine, and once when I was over at his shop I happened to mention how we used minifigs for tabletop gaming. This led the conversation towards my desire to have a hexagonal minifig stand made especially for gaming, and Will was kind enough to prototype it for me and run some for our game. After posting pictures we quickly realized that there might actually be a real demand for such a thing beyond just my own gaming group, and Will was kind enough to offer his skills as a designer and his contacts and resources to help me get set up to bring the stands to production. And now they are! The stands come in two different designs: the clean and simple HX2S with two centered studs, and the HX4S which additionally has two hollow studs along one edge, intended to allow you to add status markers, health tokens, or anything else. Both styles also have two tubes on the bottom directly below the center studs, for stacking the stands or using them as a building element. The stands are 24mm from face to face--three studs, in other words--and exactly one plate thick. After that long-winded explanation, you're probably like "TL;DR, show me the pix already". ;) So here's a gallery showing off the stands and some of the uses to which I've put them so far: CAD view of The HX4S: The HX2S is exactly the same but without the hollow studs on the side. An in-game usage example: (edit: fixed; for some reason the 640 version of the image is broken on Flickr) Used in a Lego scene (which I need to redo now that I have them in tan! and dark tan): Minifigs standing on most of the available colors (some of which are easier to see than others): Used to help display BrickArms prototypes: Paired up with some of my favorite custom minifigs: Used for Lego microspace battles: Demonstrating their full System compatibility as a building element: You can see more images of them in my Hex Stands photoset. G.I. Brick was selling these at BricksCascade a few weeks back, and they were a huge hit there. Both G.I. Brick and BrickArsenal are now carrying them on their sites in 17 colors (color-matched to the equivalent Lego or BrickArms colors), and I'm working on lining up a UK reseller as well. I'd love to hear your feedback on these and any ideas you might have for how they could be used! I'd especially like to hear from tabletop gamers or anyone who's gotten their hands on some, but any and all comments are very welcome. Unless it's "you suck and so do your stands". In which case, well, sorry, but I like them and I'm making them anyway. :) Cheers everyone!

...so to speak. ;) That technique with rubber bands and lever bases never fails to make me LOL. And the technique with minifig hands for high heels is genius--well done.

Many of you probably know Geoshift--he's an extremely talented minifig customizer and hands-down one of the best minifig painters in the community. Some time ago he posted a very informative Q&A post in his photostream. People have been adding information to it over time and it's a great resource. Personally, I use acrylics. You can use enamels, and if applied and treated properly they are very durable, but acrylics are water-soluble and much easier to clean up, it's easier to fix mistakes, and they don't require toxic chemicals with toxic fumes to clean your brushes. Acrylics can actually be quite durable if you treat them properly and apply primer first. I use Testors clearcoat spray (matte) to seal my minifigs and accessories, but you can also use satin or semi-gloss if you want something closer to the finish of Lego plastic. It won't stand up to heavy play, but it's perfectly fine for display or use in building and photographic Lego scenes. It *will* rub off sooner or later if you apply it to a surface that will receive friction (e.g. studs).

Completely agree. As nice as the U-mag can be, the tab-slot system really needs more love, and the resulting changes to the Sten look much nicer and more realistic; the U-mag and the raised stop on the opposite side felt a bit bulky.

Hi folks! Some of you may already know me, particularly those interested in BrickArms or minifig customization. For those who don't, my name is Brandon, although I go by Catsy just about everywhere--including at my day job. ;) I've been building with Lego since the late '70s, though I went through a very long dark age from the late '80s from which I emerged about eight years ago. While I wasn't particularly interested in minifigs when I first came out of my dark age, that changed when I discovered BrickArms and started blending Lego with my previous hobby of painting and converting wargaming miniatures. Thus began a career--if you can call it that!--in minifig customization. Don't let the intro post and low post count fool you: I'm not really "new" here; I've been lurking on EB for some time but only registered last year in order to answer a post someone left asking permission to model one of my MOCs. But nobody knows who lurkers are, so here we are. Those who follow my work will also know that for months I've been in a creative slump, almost a "dim age" really--which is partially due to my day job and real life demands, but also from the time and energy spent on the minifig accessory business I've been working on establishing: Catspaw Customs. In fact, I'm about to head over to the MCW subforum right now to talk a bit about that... ;) Cheers!

I replied on my photostream, but just for the record I'll chime in here as well. My usual answer to things like this is that I don't mind if people try building or replicating something that I've built as long as they're not trying to claim credit for it. I don't think people "own" building techniques, and I think everyone benefits from sharing them. And really, at the end of the day GLaDOS is Valve's intellectual property, not mine. So I guess my answer would be: you're welcome to try. But I have serious doubts about whether or not anyone could build this in LDD or even MLCAD. It uses a lot of ball joints and unorthodox or outright illegal connections, parts connected at weird and organic angles, hollow studs strung onto flex tube, inside-out tires, parts I can't imagine you'd find in LDD, and such on. You can't even see a lot of the internal structures--for example, I drilled a 1/8" hole through the center of a 2x3 plate in order to run wiring for the LED. (Nobody who's followed my stream could accuse me of coming within shouting distance of being a purist...) I am interested in a comment by Superkalle earlier in the thread, that you can't see credits in an LXF. Is there truly no metadata in the LXF format that would allow you to add credits, copyright, contact info, ransom notes, or anything else to the file? If true, that's a pretty awful format. At any rate, if you post it on the Internet, please just make it clear somehow that it is based on something I built but that the LXF itself is not my work. And good luck.