First Print

After one or two minor hiccups, here's the very first fruit of my 3d printing loins.

It's a ruined house, a terrain piece for 6mm wargaming.

It's not very impressive, and it's not very ambitious, but I selected it as my first print for several reasons:

1. Being a ruin, it might still be usable if the print crapped out
2. It's small, so shouldn't take too long to print (it still took an hour and a half)
3. It doesn't require any supports
4. It wouldn't take up much filament, and I don't have much filament just yet
5. It only took a few minutes to build in Blender and spit out an STL file.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with it as a first go. I suspect I could drop the quality settings a bit and still get a perfectly usable model, and a lot quicker too — I shall have to experiment to see where the sweet spots are.

There's a texture on the vertical surfaces — a pattern of vertical lines — that I'd like to avoid, if I could, though it probably wouldn't be all that noticeable from arm's length. Just how to avoid them, or even if it's possible, I don't yet know. The layer lines themselves are barely noticeable and would most likely disappear entirely under a coat of paint.

Later...

That first model was printed at 0.1mm layer height. I did another at 0.2mm, with minimal visual difference but printed in half the time. I'll try another couple at 0.3 and 0.4 and see at what point the printing artifacts become too obvious to bear... I suspect, for a model like this, I could go quite high and still get something that will look OK on the wargames table under a coat of paint.