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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 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.

That is a great list to compare paints of different paint makers to find a comparable color . Do you plan to add Reaper Paints, GW, and Testors to your list?

Something else you might want to do, I'm not sure what FS, RAL, RLM are, have a key or spell everything out. Otherwise great work on your list!

As a miniature painter with not much exposure to the scale modeler world, I don't know what FS, RAL, RLM represent. So, would it be possible for you to display the full names somewhere? Breaking down Vallejo into their main paint lines (model color, game color, model air) would be great too. The paint ranges I would be interested in seeing on this are: Citadel (current and older ranges if possible), Reaper (masters series mainly, but others wouldn't hurt), P3, Vallejo (model, game, air), and Coat d'Arms.

I like where it's going, but would like to see some more of the miniature games paint standards on there in the future. Very cool project.

Yep, I've got these companies on my todo list, and I've added P3 and Coat'd Arms to do.
I've noticed that I've missed including the Vallejo categories in the online application, I do have them in the Android application.
I've been planning to add a legend for what the color standards are, so that'll be in the next update. I'll also be adding a section in the blog that will show what's on my todo.

RAL is RAL is RAL - it's a industry standard set of colours used a lot in the building trade. I've been using it for years & still don't know what it stands for!!
I guess the other 2 are similar.

 bubber wrote:
RAL is RAL is RAL - it's a industry standard set of colours used a lot in the building trade. I've been using it for years & still don't know what it stands for!!
I guess the other 2 are similar.

For that matter, here's a short explanation of the standards:
FS - Federal Standard - used in the american army and navy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Standard_595)
RAL - used in europe, it originated from germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAL_(color_space_system))
RLM - used by Nazi Germany, it's not actively in use today (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Aviation_(Germany))

Just released version 1.4 of Scale Model Helper. It contains the following changes:

- Testors / Model Master colors (not including Floquil and Pactra which are about to be discontinued)
- ANA – American Army-Navy Aeronautical color standard
- Added some basic terms and definitions for colors
- Color filter will now search on each search term separately. For example, previously a search for “red blue” would not have found any results. Now it will return results for either the word “red” or “blue”
- Any search on the word “gray” will also search automatically on the word “grey” and vice versa.
- Any color with no specific rgb value will now have a background color of the general row color. For example, previously a color that didn’t had any other matches would have a blank background color, and the color would show in the RGB column. Now it will have a background color.

I've also setup a poll on the website for what colors you want to see in the next update.
If you don't see the color that you want on the poll, let me know and I'll add it.

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.

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.

Do you have a hex code available for each of the different codes?

It'd be useful to be able to reference what Wild Rider Red is in hex.

If you need help then i can assit with the p3 sections.

 AG. wrote:
Do you have a hex code available for each of the different codes?

It'd be useful to be able to reference what Wild Rider Red is in hex.

You mean the rgb values? you can see it in the RGB column at the start. Or did you mean the specific rgb values for each color ? hmmm... I think i'll add an option to show / hide the specific rgb value per color, but can you give me an example of how it'd be useful ?

It'd be useful to some for working out complimentary colour palettes, or for converting from miniature to digital mediums.

Hex codes are like this #000000, #FFFCCC etc.

 AG. wrote:
It'd be useful to some for working out complimentary colour palettes, or for converting from miniature to digital mediums.

Hex codes are like this #000000, #FFFCCC etc.

I do have plans to add an option to find a matching or close color by rgb... I'll take that into account.

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.

Great work and useful but i have some recommendations for online part. mosly it is user interface features that would make the app function smoother.

1. you only have the vertical scroll bar IF you move the horizontal scroll bar all the way to the right.
2. For speed when loading initially, i would only have 2 or 3 colors systems on load. Let the user pick the other ones as needed. The lag with the load and the small loading button that gets lost made me feel like the app was lagging out. Let the user determine what loads.
3. The whole bottom area where the color system selection, filter, and search can be made much smaller.
4. Use radial buttons or check boxes for color systems selection. How you have it now, when you click to omit a category it actually looks like you are selecting that system and can be confusing. Plus it would take up less space.
5. Put the search bar above whole table and not in the bottom center. Users are used to search bars in the top right or top center like on a website or in there browsers. Place the color terms and definitions after it. I would have a separate menu below the search that has a check marked or radial selection of the color systems, with a check mark indicating that they are loaded. This way the app loads people can check the definition and search, have a list of systems all in order. The eye follows it down from the top to the bottom
6. I would pick a sans-serif font, like verdana or arial, as serifed fonts look horrible when they are small and/or on colored backgrounds
7. You need padding between the text in the cell and the top of its cell. It gets hard to read.
8. There is white space between the cell and the color block within it. It should line up smooth like how it does with the RGB colors.

Just my 2 cents. I do this stuff a bit for work. I will definitely bookmark this and use it as i do a bunch of military models and fantasy stuff and this is pretty spot on. If you have any question send me a pm.

steve

steve2112 wrote:
Great work and useful but i have some recommendations for online part. mosly it is user interface features that would make the app function smoother.

1. you only have the vertical scroll bar IF you move the horizontal scroll bar all the way to the right.
2. For speed when loading initially, i would only have 2 or 3 colors systems on load. Let the user pick the other ones as needed. The lag with the load and the small loading button that gets lost made me feel like the app was lagging out. Let the user determine what loads.
3. The whole bottom area where the color system selection, filter, and search can be made much smaller.
4. Use radial buttons or check boxes for color systems selection. How you have it now, when you click to omit a category it actually looks like you are selecting that system and can be confusing. Plus it would take up less space.
5. Put the search bar above whole table and not in the bottom center. Users are used to search bars in the top right or top center like on a website or in there browsers. Place the color terms and definitions after it. I would have a separate menu below the search that has a check marked or radial selection of the color systems, with a check mark indicating that they are loaded. This way the app loads people can check the definition and search, have a list of systems all in order. The eye follows it down from the top to the bottom
6. I would pick a sans-serif font, like verdana or arial, as serifed fonts look horrible when they are small and/or on colored backgrounds
7. You need padding between the text in the cell and the top of its cell. It gets hard to read.
8. There is white space between the cell and the color block within it. It should line up smooth like how it does with the RGB colors.

Just my 2 cents. I do this stuff a bit for work. I will definitely bookmark this and use it as i do a bunch of military models and fantasy stuff and this is pretty spot on. If you have any question send me a pm.

steve

Thanks, I really appreciate the feedback. I don't like the online interface myself, and the grid is causing me no end of troubles, but I wanted to get some initial amount of colors before spending time with it. I've created a feature for it on the UserVoice site, and I'll probably work on the whole interface issue next (unless a mass of people will suddnely vote on the other features