03/05/2022 Today’s Topic: NMM Basic

Hi all, welcome again to an unappreciated and unrequested helping topic.

This time, I will talk to you about the basics of NMM. NMM is an acronym that stands for Non-Metallic Metal and it means that you want to reproduce the reflections that occur on metal on your model. Doing this instead of using metallic paints takes longer and it's harder, but you want to do this because the reflections that occur on a Metallic painted Model are unnatural, because they are the reflections of a small miniature. Doing NMM instead means replicating the reflections as if your model was of a human scale.

To approach NMM there are many ways. @Musha proposes to start with metallic weapons. This is the best start because the difficulty of NMM resides in the different surfaces a piece has. Metallic weapons have the least amount of surfaces and are pretty easy to do. Therefore, if you are starting from scratch, the best method is this one:

Now, if you want to scale up your game, you have to think of different shapes. As always, Musha has you covered. The video below shows how to approach NMM on a more complex miniature.

However, no matter the shape or the complexity, the starting point of each NMM work is to isolate the shapes and treat every shape as its own piece. Even if you are trying to replicate the effect of metals, the reflections are artificial and the illusion is easily broken when you are turning your model. NMM comes from the classic painting, and there the perspective was forced by the picture itself, therefore you couldn't break the illusion.

While here we have some more advanced techniques and ideas for Gold NMM:

Yours,

Jaka