this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Nerf

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Welcome, Nerfers! This is a place for Nerf, Modifications, Homemades, Assassins, Office wars, Humans vs. Zombies, BoomCo, Off-brands, Water Blasters . . .

We're intended to be like /r/nerf except not dependent on reddit.

Are you new to Lemmy? Please click here to expand.

Lemmy is a lot like reddit. For most purposes you can treat it as if it is reddit.

The main difference is that when you view your front page or search for other communities, you have a choice between "subscribed" (what you've already joined), "local" (a small subset of communities) and "all" (every community that this server knows about).

discuss.online is one of many Lemmy servers and many of the communities that you see here originate on other servers - but this networking is handled behind the scenes. This decentralization makes Lemmy resilient but you can still use it just like reddit.

A longer explanation can be found here.


Rules

We have some idiosyncratic rules. Please click to expand and take a minute to read them before posting.

  • Don’t spam (post excessively) or excessively self-promote. That means at most 1 post per day, and less than 1/10ths of your posts and comments each may be self-promotion.

  • No low effort content.

  • Only post thrift finds on Thursday - where "Thursday" starts at 1AM GMT-07 and runs for 24 hours. This corresponds to daylight Thursday for most of our readers.

  • Don’t recommend or show dangerous practices, such as these. There is to be absolutely no deliberate weaponization, even as a joke or against nonhuman targets.

  • Pirated/knockoff versions of hobby-made designs should not be shared; don’t give pirates free advertising.

  • Respect community standards (below) and stay on-topic (further below).

Community standards

We maintain a higher standard of civility here than an average forum. Please be nice, and be forgiving: the other guy might be literally a kid.

We have moderate post quality standards here; nerfchatter is very lax. If you'd like to ask a question, please try googling it first.

It’s “blaster/dart,” not “gun/bullet” - because the latter can lead to things that we'd rather avoid. This is a common mistake, but it is a mistake. Similarly, it's good to be clear that realistic blasters shouldn't be used in public spaces for the benefit of our young readers.

What we aren’t

  • 3d printing questions not specific to nerf should go on 3d printing communities.

  • You can buy/sell/trade/“what’s it worth?” on /r/nerfexchange (though we may make an exchange Lemmy community later).

  • No scripted battle footage. We have to ban this so that we don’t get flooded with it. This is very easy to find on YouTube if you for some reason want to see it.

  • No memes/jokes; there may be rare exceptions for discussions of ongoing events. Again, we have to ban this to not be flooded by it. Memes/jokes are very welcome at Nerfchatter.


Tags

Tagging makes your post easier for people to find.

You can tag a post by including a tag (including the square brackets) anywhere in the title. As a rule of thumb, we suggest that tags higher on this list take priority if more than one could apply.

Resources

[help] - Asking for advice.

[download] - A 3d printable blaster or accessory that's ready to download and print.

[guide] - Writeups (and occasionally videos) describing how to do something.

[review] - Reviews, usually of blasters but also of mod kits etc.

Playing

[event] - An upcoming game looking for players.

[LFG] - Looking For Group.

Showing off

[completed] - A completed project: paintjob, performance mod, integration, etc.

[WIP] - As above except not completed but still something you want to share.

[selfpromotion] - Do you have something to sell? Is this a link to your own YouTube channel? We’d appreciate it if you’re completely upfront about it.

[thrift] - "Hey, look what I just found for cheap in a thrift store!"

[armory] - A picture of your entire collection.

[conceptart] - Concept art for hypothetical blasters, often wit weird and wonderful operating mechanisms.

News

[availability] - Did an anticipated blaster just get released early? Did Amazon accidentally list the DZ Tomcat for a few dollars again?

[1stparty] - For hobby news such as announcements, press releases, and leaks from major manufacturers.

Discussion

[theory] - Ideas, usually on the technical side of the hobby, that you'd like to discuss.

[meta] - Information about this community.


Links

DartSweep: A system for finding games and groups with more features in development.

(old) Map of Active Nerf Groups

3D Printed Blaster Library

Hobby Blaster Catalogue

BritNerf: A traditional forum catering to British foam flingers.

Nerfy Discord Servers: There's tons of Nerf servers on Discord.

Blasted.de: A German forum (and mostly German-language, though English is welcome too).

NerfHaven: A 20+ year archive of information. Not accepting new members.

Interactive Motor Chart

Flywheel Setup Picker

Lipo battery guide, charging, safety tips

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[–] Sketchpad01 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Also does anyone have any recommendation on taking better photos of these nerf guns, mine always suck

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I wouldn't go so far as to say that this sucks - but, yes, there is room for improvement.

  • Good lighting improves a picture in both subtle and unsubtle ways: better colour rendering, more details, and (assuming that you're using a modern camera which automatically adjusts shutter speed based on lighting) also a sharper image. The best and easiest lighting to use is daylight. I've found that having lots of lamps to bounce light around a room also helps, but lamps are just an OK supplement and poor substitute for a big window.

  • A clear background helps to draw attention to the blaster itself as there's less detail to compete for visual attention - plus, an uncluttered space just looks nicer. I sometimes put blasters on the floor if there's no other clear space available.

  • Composition-wise, having a blaster occupy nearly the full frame of the picture makes it feel weirdly cramped where it's close the edges of the picture. Zooming out a little helps - but not too much. It's IMO more important to have space in front of the muzzle than behind the stock so that the blaster feels like it's pointing "into" that space. (For the same reason, it's generally considered bad for a picture of a person looking sideways to clip the frame right in front of their face - but having a frame edge right behind them is OK).

Zack Freedman has a lengthy video on the subject of making project videos that people want to watch. About half of that also applies directly to project photos that people want to see and much of the rest can be adapted.

The 80/20 rule applies to pictures of nerf blasters, except in this case it's more extreme: less than 20% of the effort that a professional photographer would put in can get you more than 80% of the results. Just taking pictures in daylight, with an uncluttered background, and with basic composition can produce very good results.

Also, if you'll excuse a nitpick - it's "blaster," not "gun," to avoid misunderstandings that can be both disruptive and dangerous.

I hope this helps.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Everything Herbert said, plus my own two cents:

For better or worse, I tend to angle the blasters across the whole frame. I guess I'm trying to get it as large as I can unless I'm trying to stage something differently.