Printable Scenery (Again)

It's easier, when playing the skirmish-level Chain of Command, or even company-level Battlegroup,  to have building models that you can actually put troops inside. It's not absolutely necessary, but it does cut down on note-taking, or reliance on increasingly fallible memory, if you can see at a glance which troops are where. Up until now I've been using my card buildings, and though they're fine as markers, they don't have accessible interiors.

With that in mind, I bought some more models from Printable Scenery, to go along with the modular ruins I bought from them and printed a while ago. The models are sized for use with 28mm figures, but I've scaled them down to 60% for use in 15mm games. They could probably go down to 50%, but this size suits me well enough.

This particular one is the French Town House from their WWII range, and it costs about ten yankeebucks.

Even scaled down, and printed at quite low resolution (0.24mm layers), there's a fair amount of printing involved. These three pieces ended up taking about twenty hours, all up.

They're well designed for wargames use. Each floor is separate, and they sit together quite securely with peg-&-socket joints at the corners. There are no internal walls, so it's easy to access figures placed inside, but there is a little decoration applied on the floor and around the walls so that they don't just look like blank boxes inside.

This, and others in the range, are also available as bombed-out ruined versions.

All in all, I'd say they're pretty good value for money. I've seen much worse resin models going for a lot more money, and though twenty hours is a long time to print, it's still a considerably shorter time than I'd have to wait for a model to arrive through the post.

Highly recommended.

Later....

Front

Rear

Here's the first one, with a very, very quick paint-job.

I haven't painted any of the insides (except for a primer coat) and probably won't, since the innards aren't really very important except as troop containers.

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Next Day

This is the next one, the Shop, also about ten dollars.

I had slightly less success with the printing of this model, probably because I did all three pieces in one hit, pretty much entirely covering the build plate, rather than doing them one at a time in the safe centre portion. I notice some slight lifting on a couple of corners on the second storey piece, and I got a bit of breakage of delicate details like window bars, banister and stair-well rail spindles. However, none of that really matters a great deal; I can just call it battle damage.

The brickwork and interior detailing would really benefit from being printed at a higher resolution, say 0.12–0.16mm, but of course that would about double the print time, which is already about 20 hours at 0.24mm. If I had a second printer, I'd probably do that, but I find it very frustrating to want to be able to print something, knowing that the printer is going to be tied up for another day at least.

There's at least one more piece that I want to get and print — well, two really, since the farm house in this image is a separate purchase. That's the French Farm set. That's about $22 all up, ten for the farmhouse and twelve for the walls and outbuildings. It looks to me like it would make an excellent centrepiece to a wargames table.

Aaaaaaaaand.......

Here it is. Took a lot of printing, and now it needs a coat of paint. At the moment it's all just free-floating (the wall sections are clipped together) but I think I'll probably put it all on a permanent base, along with some scenic rustic farm stuff. I can, after all, print more pieces if I need them separately.