Scale Model Helper - utility for color matching

[GreenDragon]

Hi folks, I've been working on a free (no ads) application for Android mobile devices (requires android 4.0) for a bit now, which is intended for scale model builders and miniature painters.

You can download Scale Model Helper for Android at the link.
I also have an online version of it, as well as a blog where I will be posting further updates.

Right now I have FS, RAL, RLM, Humbrol, Revell, Tamiya, Vallejo, Testors, ANA colors in it, but I will add as many color brands as possible. I'm also planning to add a color inventory features and other stuff.

Anyway, check it out, and let me know what you think.

 

[Einion]

For anyone interested, my reservations about this posted on CMON:
http://www.coolminiornot.com/forums...ale-Model-Helper-a-utility-for-color-matching

Einion

 

[megroot]

I have no idea what I should do with it.
Some explanation will make it better.

Marc

 

[GreenDragon]

I've built this to make it easier for builders to find matching colors brand. For example, if you have a model that calls for FS 15048, you can look it up in the application, and see the colors that are matching it from various color brands, such as Tamiya X3 Royal Blue.
Or if you need a specific color brand and you prefer to use colors from a different brand, you can look up colors that are matches it.

 

[Mirofsoft]

 

[Gary D]

Sounds awesome! Kind of like a cross reference table for enamel and acrylic model paints? This will come in handy for people who can't get certain brand name paints in their part of the world. I for one have built model kits that call up paints that aren't sold in my area of the country and it will be nice to see if there are alternatives at my fingertips so to speak.
Not all of us are that skillful at mixing paints. I prefer to leave it to the manufacturers who know exactly what they are doing.
Now if we can only get a decent oil mix chart.....

Gary

 

[Mirofsoft]

can try
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=F-q9vAdZozQ


best

 

[GreenDragon]

Sounds awesome! Kind of like a cross reference table for enamel and acrylic model paints? This will come in handy for people who can't get certain brand name paints in their part of the world. I for one have built model kits that call up paints that aren't sold in my area of the country and it will be nice to see if there are alternatives at my fingertips so to speak.
Not all of us are that skillful at mixing paints. I prefer to leave it to the manufacturers who know exactly what they are doing.
Now if we can only get a decent oil mix chart.....

Gary

Yep, that's exactly one of the incentives that made me start this. The biggest scale model shop here in Israel carries mainly humbrol, a bit of revell and very little of tamiya, and even then their color range is very limited.

 

[GreenDragon]

Version 1.5 is now available:
- New color brands: Citadel / Games Workshop
- New color standard: British Standard - a set of standards used in Britain for construction and engineering, including colors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Standards). I've included BS381C, BS5252, BS2600 and BS4800
- Search improvements: I've switched to an OR mode from the previous mode, which was a simple text search without separating the search terms, because I've seen people doing searches on multiple words, but because they weren't exactly the same as the color name, they didn't find what they were looking for. However, this caused a bigger problem, in that later searches would bring back a lot more results than what people actually wanted to search for.
I did some changes to the grid and searches are now happening on the server side. This enables me to share the search code between the online version and the Android application, and being able to do better searches.
Search will now be an AND mode between each term, so searching for "blue angel" will find all the colors that have both "blue" and "angel" in them, for example Testors 2023 "Blue Angels Yellow".
Also, you can search on exact text by wrapping the search term in double quotes, and you can search only specific color brands by prefixing the color brand name and a colon to the search term, for example, fs:blue will search for anything containing the word blue in only the FS color brand, and fs:"blue" will search for exactly the word blue in the FS color brand.
See the Advanced Help button in the applications for more details and examples.
- Search will no longer search in the RGB values to prevent false positives when searching for color numbers.

I've also reset the poll for the color brands in the next version, so vote for your favorite color brand. Reaper so far is in the lead. Let me know if there are other color brands that you want to see.

 

[GreenDragon]

It's a somewhat small update, but I wanted to finish it before getting to the new features I've been planning.

Here are the changes:

- Added Reaper colors
- Added Gunze colors
- Fixed bug when searching for some colors with the word grey, for example "ulthuan grey"
- Due to seeing people trying to search for specific brands but not adding colon, which would have returned zero results, I've added an option to search for specific colors with numbers without the colon. For example, instead of searching for "h:86" , you can write "h86" and get the same results. This will only work for searching for specific color numbers, otherwise you still need to separate the color brand and search term with ":" as explained in the Advanced Search section.
- Improved search speed

For the next version I'm planning a color inventory feature, as well as some more interactive features (flagging a color match and similar). I want people to be able to have access to their color inventory from either the online or the android versions, so I'll be doing an optional login of some sort, probably based on either facebook, google+, or just an email and password option, and the actual color inventory will be hosted on my server.

I'm also having some ideas about actual physical tools but I'm keeping it under wraps for the moment, I need to see how well it'll actually work out.

Scale Model Helper is a utility to make it easier for the scale model builder and miniature painter to match colors from different brands. There is an online version and an Android version.

 

[GreenDragon]

Well, it's been 8 months since the last time I've released an update to Scale Model Helper, which is a lot longer than what I've been planning. I was having problems creating what I wanted with the application, and work was busy, so I didn't had much free time left. I did however managed to solve the technical problems, and I have more free time, so hopefully the next updates won't take as long.

Since it's been so long, here's a quick reminder of what is Scale Model Helper. Scale Model Helper is intended to help the scale model builders and miniature painters in their every needs, from color selection and matching, to scale model building to-do and shopping lists, whether you’re building armor, aircraft, ships, cars or trains. There is an online version at online version and an Android version.

Here are the changes in this version:
- Added P3 colors
- I've added support for marking colors in your inventory. It's very basic right now (you can see an example of how it works here, but will serve as a base for other online and shared content features that I'm planning. I'm using facebook as the identification mechanism as I didn't want to deal with usernames and passwords for now. An important feature is that this inventory is shared across both the online and the Android version if you login to facebook on each application.
- I've started a UserVoice site for Scale Model Helper. UserVoice is a site that lets me get feedback from people with bug reports and more importantly, ideas and features that they're interested in seeing in the next version, so I can have a better idea of what to work on next. The main portal for it is here, give it a look, browse around, and vote / post about ideas and features you'd like to see next.