Flocking Flock

 

I'm trying to make some modelling flock, with only limited success.

This is made from bits of a kitchen sponge, whizzed up in a blender, coloured with ordinary house paint kneaded through, dried in the oven and then ground again in a little electric coffee grinder.

It's not utterly worthless, but I was hoping for a smaller grain size than this. Also, the sponge is yellow, so that affects the final colour.

As it is, this is really no better than the sawdust flock I made some years ago. In fact, it's probably a bit coarser.

I'll give it another go with some white open-cell upholstery foam, which should colour more accurately, and will hopefully grind down to fluffier bits.

15mm Ruin

 

It has been a while since I've done any 15mm terrain, so I slapped together some 3d printed ruin bits from Printable Scenery and made a simple box for my little men to hide in.

The figures are PSC's plastic 15mm paratroopers.

Found Terrain

 

When I was stacking the first batch of firewood for next winter, I kicked this little knotty chunk of twisted pine, and thought that it would make a good rocky outcrop.

So I painted it, and added some foam-flock mossy patches, and voila! A rocky outcrop.

Shown here with the 28mm Sergeant Measureby, to the left, and a pair of 15mm PSC plastic British paratroopers in front.

Barrels Galore

 

I printed and painted some 28mm scale barrels, because barrels will always come in handy.

There are 36 of them.

I was thinking, as I put them away into storage, that the resources available to us now for tabletop miniatures gaming would have been absolutely inconceivable when I first started playing roleplaying games in 1981.

Now I can produce 36 in-scale barrels on a whim; back then it's the sort of thing I could only have achieved if I had money pouring out the wazoo. Which I seriously did not.

New FDG Bits

I backed the recent Kickstarter by Fat Dragon Games, and today they started sending out links to the STL files for the new stuff. This openable dungeon door is the first of them that I've printed and painted.

One thing about this piece, with its rather narrow base, is that when it's open the weight of the door tends to pull it over. That will probably be less apparent when it has other floor tiles next to it to rest on.

I've trimmed off most of the base, since I don't use clips and things to hold everything together. I find that securing everything together slows setup enormously, and also print times for the trimmed versions are somewhat faster.

The new tiles are half-height (i.e. low walls), which I'm much more likely to use, since they make handling miniatures much easier than the full-height versions.

Next Day:

I printed a bulk lot of door pieces, and one of the doors fell over about two thirds of the way through and so was incomplete.

I whipped up a barred grill top piece and glued it on to the incomplete door, and hey presto, fixed.

Terrain, Ensmallened and Tinified

 This is one of Printable Scenery's 3-piece 28mm terrain pieces that I've joined together digitally, solidified, and rescaled to a 6mm size. It's ended up about an inch long, and printed on my Ender 3 in eSun black PLA+.

This was an experimental piece to see if pieces like this for 6mm wargaming would be worth printing by FDM, and overall I'd say it's a definite success. There's some detail missing in the shutters, but the roof tile and brick textures show up well.

Print times are an issue though. This was printed at 0.1mm, and it took quite a while — printing a whole wargames table of houses would take me a week or two at least.

For that reason, and with the side effect of giving me better detail resolution, I'd be better off filling up the build plate of my Mars Pro and printing six or nine at a time. I'd have to hollow it out to save on resin, but that would be no big deal.

Emplacement/Entrenchment Components (15mm)

 

After working on a 3d-printed gun emplacement recently, I realised that for the most part I would have been better off with printed components that I could assemble with traditional modeling methods into emplacements or entrenchments. So I got to work in Blender and whipped up some basic pieces that I can print and work with.

The main revetments are 60mm long by 12mm high, for use with 15mm figures, and they can be pretty easily cut up, either digitally or physically after printing, to create shorter runs if need be. They're fairly period-agnostic; I think they could be appropriate for any cannon-using wargamer from the 1600s onward.

I assembled them into a complete emplacement that would fit most medium guns, and I'd fill out the glacis with foam and plaster and what-not. The 3d printing just takes care of the fiddly bits. The individual components would be more flexible, but the pre-assembled print is less trouble if what you want is a 60mm square.

I think that for entrenchments, a fire-step piece might be useful, though it might just get in the way of placing figures.

The STLs are available at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/emplacement-components-60mm-x-12mm-revetments/

I think it likely that I might add to them over time, as I find new bits that I'd like to have.

Gun Emplacement

 

I think I found this 15mm gun emplacement on Thingiverse. It was some time ago, a couple of years at least, but I've just got around to printing it on my Ender 3.

I doubt very much that 3d printing it saved me any time over modeling it in traditional media, though it did save me a bit of effort by providing the basic forms. I still had to add some ground texture so that the lip of the emplacement didn't look too smooth and regular, and to apply and paint the dirt and vegetation flock.

The gun, a German 10.5cm howitzer, was printed a while ago on my Mars Pro. Somewhere I have some Peter Pig 15mm artillerymen to crew it, but right this moment I have no idea where they are.

The emplacement cavity is 75mm in diameter, the whole thing is 130mm.

Blacksmith's House (28mm, WiP)

 

I have no memory of where this model came from; I suspect it was a Humble Bundle I went for a few years ago. I printed it a year or two ago on my Ender 3, and it's just been sitting around waiting for me to do something with it.

Now I've primed it and glued it to a bit of MDF, and started the groundwork with sawdust and dirt. Where I'll go from here I'm really not sure. It's a bit uninteresting just as it is.

To be honest, I'm not quite sure why I printed this in the first place. I have no real use for it for tabletop gaming. Still, it's something to do from time to time.

15mm Walled Garden

 

While I was organising my workroom today, I found some pieces of wall that I found somewhere (probably Thingiverse) and printed a very long time ago, and thought I should probably actually do something with them.

They were intended, I think, to be the surrounding walls for a cemetary, or maybe a walled garden. I've chosen to go with the walled garden enclosure, since a bunch of headstones would tend to get in the way of placing troops inside the walls.

I glued them together and put them on a piece of heavy card, with the edges chamfered down thin. I added some rubble and vegetation flock, slapped on some paint, and bing-bong-bosh, there's another piece of terrain for 15mm soldiers to hide behind on a wargames table.

I've included a 15mm PSC German 81mm mortar team, for scale.

Old Stone Ruins

 

These is another terrain piece from Printable Scenery, cut into two pieces and printed on my Ender 3 at 0.2mm layer height in eSun PLA+. I printed it using Tom Tullis' terrain profile for Cura 5, but if I were to do it again I'd bump up the number of walls to three or four, as the columns proved to be quite fragile and broke off easily when I (repeatedly) dropped the pieces.

I began (after gluing everything back together again) by priming everything black, and then spraying a downwards zenithal white to define shadows and highlights. In retrospect, the zenithal spray could probably have been skipped, as the next painting step pretty much obliterated it.

I painted splotches of three colours all over everything: yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and Van Dyck brown, in roughly equal proportions. You can see the result in this photograph, and as I imagine you'd agree, at this stage it looks pretty awful. I used Maimeri gouache acrylics for this step, thinned down until they're quite liquid.

Once the spotty paint was dry, the next step was to over-wash everything with black.

This technique was originally developed for railway modellers' cliff faces and such-like, and it works better on plaster or similar absorbent material, as the paints and wash penetrate into the surface and the black wash evens out the tones a lot more. However, it still works on this unabsorbent plastic, if not quite as well.

Once the black wash has thoroughly dried, the next step is to dry-brush everything to knock back the darkness and bring out the edges to delineate the forms.

I used Vallejo VMC Buff for most of this, and then some VGC Elfric Flesh (a very pale off-white) to catch the upper edges.

After dry-brushing, I went over everything, stippling very thinned-down Elfric Flesh with a natural sea sponge, to give the weathered stone a bit of textural variation. Many areas got two or three layers of this treatment.

The terrain piece is usable just as it is, but a next step would be to add some moss and grass flocking in amongst the cracks of the paving and in various of the crevices.

Printable Scenery - Ruined Crypt

 

I bought and printed this model from Printable Scenery * some time ago, but have just got around to painting and flocking it.

It's scaled for use with 28mm miniatures, and printed on my Ender 3 at 0.2mm layer height in eSun PLA+.

* I can't find it on their website any more, but I expect it's there somewhere. Their catalogue is quite extensive these days.

** Ah, here it is: it's part of a set called Hallowed Mausoleums 

3d Printed Hedges

 

I got some STLs for hedges from https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/hedgerow-bocage-terrain-for-6mm-10mm/

They're presented as being for 6mm - 10mm gaming scales, and they're certainly best for those, but they're also quite usable for 15mm. In any larger scale though I think they'd just look like a herbaceous border planting.

These sorts of things are quite easy to make with some ice-block sticks and clump foliage, but the advantage (to me) of 3d printing is that I can just click-and-forget, come back the next morning and pull a bunch of hedgerows off the printer. Of course they need painting, so they're not entirely labour free, but painting them takes very little time or effort. Also, they're pretty well indestructible unless you jump up and down on them with hob-nailed boots. I can just toss them into a box without fear that they're going to lose any foliage.

Here they are alongside some 1/300 scale (5-6mm) Heroics & Ros Napoleonics, Spaniards in point of fact.

In this scale they're easily bocage-size. If you wanted smaller hedgerows, they're easily rescaled down in the slicer, and they'd print a lot faster too.

In 10mm (1/150 - 1/144 scale) they're also large enough to represent bocage.

Unfortunately I don't have any 10mm infantry. I printed this 1/150 Bishop as a test of one of Mr. Bergman's 1/200 scale models, just to see how it would look on the table, but I don't actually play in that scale. I would though, if I were starting out again from scratch.

In 15mm they're still head-high hedges, suitable for planting around pastures and what-not.

It would be a simple matter to rescale them a bit to create 15mm bocage, though unless you have a big printer the larger STLs would probably not fit on the print bed.

Craters, and More Craters

 

Fat Dragon Games has a freebie crater STL from their "World War Tesla" stuff available on DriveThruRPG. I nabbed it and printed some, variously resized in singles as well as merged into doubles and triples.

I'll use them to display barrage aiming points for BG, and they could also be used to indicate artillery-broken ground for WW1 games and the like. Or giant insect burrows for RPG games, for that matter.

Making one or two or three craters using traditional modelling methods is a trivial matter; making one or two or three dozen of them starts to get to be a bit of a chore. With my 3d printer, I can just set it to printing a dozen of them overnight and then forget about them until the morning when they're done, all thanks to the magic of FDM robotics.

Abandoned Lighthouse

Clickupon to embiggenate

I'm not sure who was the author of this model, nor where it originally came from. It might have been Thingiverse, it might have been from one of the Humble Bundles of STLs I've collected over time. All I know about it is that it's named "Abandoned Lighthouse", and it's scaled for use with 28mm figures.

It prints in several parts: one for the island, one for each floor of the tower (of which there are five), one for the roof, and a couple of light options. The one I've chosen is a simple brazier, the other is a sort of magical egg-light.

The tower sections include some interior detail, and it comes apart so that miniatures can be put inside.

I painted the stonework using the "leopard spot" technique.

First everything is painted in loose splotches of  raw sienna, burnt umber, and a sort of terracotta orange. The paint is quite loose, so it flows around and mingles a bit at the edges of the other colours.

In retrospect, I think yellow ochre would have been a better choice for the lightest tone, and burnt sienna for the middle.

At this point it all looks fairly terrible and gaudy.

Next I overpaint it all with a couple of layers of a black wash.

This tones down all the clown colours and unifies them tonally.

It all looks pretty dark now, but there's a variation in tone underneath the black wash that still shows through.

Then I dry-brushed with a cream colour, and highlight with pure white.

This lightens everything substantially, and brings out the surface detail of the model.

In this photo, I've also made the very first start on some vegetation, but at this point it's more like a bowling lawn than a wild weed patch.

Ships from Printable Scenery

 

Our AD&D group are about to take to the high seas, and that being the case, I thought it might be useful to print a couple of ships.

They're both from Printable Scenery; the top one is their fluyt, a small square-rigged merchant ship of Dutch origin, and the bottom is a lateen-rigged dhow, an all-purpose Arabic type used from the North African coast right over to India and beyond. I haven't given them any masts or sails, because they'd just get in the way in their use as gaming terrain. We'll just have to imagine masts and sails. I also haven't given them any cannon, since I don't hold with those sorts of shenanigans in my AD&D games. That's what wizards are for.

They've both been printed on my Ender 3 in eSun PLA. The figures are various 28mm fantasy miniatures; I don't have much in the way of actual sailor-men, though I think I've got a few pirates from the last Reaper Kickstarter I went in for; I shall have to dig them out. 

2021-08-16: And More

And now, some more.

The white-primed ones are, from left to right, a brig, a couple of 8-oar longboats, and a skiff.

I still have a sloop and a frigate to print.

I've tried out some masts on the skiff. They're made from 4mm and 6mm dowels.

Even without any other rigging, some simple masts go a long way to making the boats look more like sailing vessels, and they shouldn't impede the playability of the models to any great extent. Additionally, for those ships that have fighting tops, they'd actually be present on the model rather than having to represent them off to the side or something.

The down-side is that installing the masts is going to be kind of a pain in the arse.

2021-08-19: Sloop

Here we have the sloop, a single-masted vessel, 300mm (about a foot) long, not including the bowsprit.

Nearly done with the actual 3d printing, just the frigate to go. Apart from that, it will all be just messing about with bits of dowel and some rudimentary rigging.

And later that day...

The first two sections of the frigate have completed printing.

It's a rather patchwork affair, as I ran out of the black filament and swapped over to finish off a spool of this light blue: in truth, that wasn't the best idea as that blue is pretty bad filament, and its inter-layer bonding is not great, resulting in a rather weak print. I haven't had great success with any coloured filaments at all apart from white, grey and black.

However, it will probably do okay for this purpose, though I've swapped it out for some grey PLA+ for the stern component.

The stern will take as long to print as these two pieces together; about a day and a half.

2021-08-21: the Brig

In scale, this would be a pretty tiny brig. The crew complement of a Napoleonic brig-of-war was about 130 men, and cramming 130 28mm figures on to this model would be challenging, to say the least.

2021-08-22: the Frigate

Now the frigate is finally finished printing, and a good amount of time it took too. It doesn't look all that much bigger than the little brig beside it, but it is longer, broader, and much taller, and whereas the brig's two components took about a day to print, the frigate's three components took more like two and a half days.

I've got it primed and pretty much ready for painting, but when that will happen I don't know — I'm getting kind of sick of these ships now.

Printable Scenery Ruin

 

This is the front half of a two-part ruin from Printable Scenery, printed on my Ender 3. It's scaled for use with 28mm figures.

I had originally intended it as a vehicle for using my new static grass applicator, but that turned out to be such a useless piece of junk that I reverted to my old favourite, foam flock. There is a bit of static grass on there, but it was applied via the old sprinkle-and-blow method, rather than via this new-fangled static electrickery.

This is the back half. It's a bit less architecturally interesting than the front, but it has its moments.

And here they are, both together.

Photo Stage Paddock

 

From time to time I have an urge to photograph my models on a more naturalistic background than a plain white, grey or black background. So I threw this little photo stage together.

It's on a 180mm circle of heavy card that I had lying around that I had cut for some other, now long forgotten, project. I painted it with blotchy mud-brown acrylics, and then went to town with various grades and colours of foam flock, and a few tufts and patches of static grass. There's some actual dead leaves on there too, fairly thoroughly pulverized in a small blender I keep in my workshop for that sort of thing.

The 28mm Sergeant Measureby is there, as usual, for scale.

Another 3d Printed Ruin

 

This ruin, again from Printable Scenery, was printed in two parts, and took about three days of printing all up. You can see a big gap between the front and back sections; I haven't yet decided whether or not I'll fill it or leave the model in two pieces.

There are quite a few stringing boogers remaining, and normally I'd scrape them all off, but in this case I intend to use them as the basis for some creeping ivy on the walls and pillars.

Unlike the mausoleum I completed recently, this model is going to have a whole heapin' helpin' of grass and moss added after the painting of the stonework is complete. That's going to be a while away though, because I want to mainly use static grass, and I'm waiting for a static applicator to arrive from Canada — and that's probably a month or six weeks away, under current conditions.

A couple of days later...

I've applied some limited colour to the ruins with various washes and glazes, and until the vegetation goes on, that's about all the colour there will be.

As well as some grasses and bushes around the base, I want to add some mosses and things growing on the stones of the ruins themselves. I find this tends to seat the structure within the scene, rather than making it look like it's just been plonked down on to a scenic base.

Several days later...

I've made a beginning on applying some vegetation to the ruin.

At the moment, the glue is still quite wet, and I'll let it dry out completely before I go any further as the colours will change a bit, and I want to be able to see just what is going on.

I'll probably have to knock back some of the more lurid colours by spraying a filter over them, but we shall see.

Most of the ground cover is foam flock. The mossy patches are static grass, and the bushes are lichen of some sort.

Mausoleum

 

Here's another terrain piece from Printable Scenery, this time a ruinous mausoleum. It's one of a pack of three (one of which is in two parts).

I have not yet decided whether to leave the mound bare and stoney, or to put some grass flock on it. I'm leaning towards leaving it though; I think it adds to the Gothic atmosphere of the thing.

I printed it on my Ender 3; it took about 28 hours I think.

As usual, Sergeant Measureby is there with his Spear of 5mm Increments, for scale.