Friday 12 February 2021

Opel Maultier Variants (15mm)

 



I've been messing about in Blender, making a bunch of variants of 15mm Opel Maultiers.

The two on the right are ambulances, one closed up and the other with the back doors open and the steps down. Third from the right is an office/radio body. The others are fairly self-explanatory I think.

They're based on Bergman's Maultier model. I've just refined it a bit and added some stuff that I already had lying around in my design folders.


And here's another one, reusing some seated German infantry I originally put together as passengers for a SdKfz 7.

I had to put them through 3d Builder's Simplify operation to get the STL down to a reasonable size, but it imposed no real visible penalty, while dropping the file size from 95MB to about 11.


I did a test print of the ambulance variant with the open back doors and steps down. Taking into account my inexperience with resin printing in general, it printed okay, so I don't foresee any issues with any of the others either.

The STLs can be downloaded from my page on Thingiverse.

4 comments:

  1. Hey, those are great, and useful to the East front in particular.

    Now that you have the resin printer, what are your thoughts about the FDM printer? Even setting the resolution issues aside, it seems like the resin gets to the tabletop faster, with less total cleanup.

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    1. It certainly prints faster, and with better resolution. I use water-washable resin, so cleanup is relatively painless — I don't know that I'd be so sanguine about it if I had to be messing around with alcohol baths and the like.

      The down-sides are the tiny build volume, and the cost of the resin. Here in NZ it works out to over $90 per litre, and though each vehicle or mini uses a relatively tiny amount, it does mount up: I'm almost through my first 500ml bottle already. Also, the resin is relatively fragile, although this eSun water-washable stuff does seem to be a bit more resilient than some of the older formulations.

      There are bigger resin printers available, but not for my wallet. The FDM printer will still be reining supreme for terrain and the like for some time, I should think.

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    2. $90 a liter! That is ~$65 USD On the other hand you can get a lot of miniatures from a liter... if the prints work out!

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  2. Those are really nice.

    Cheers,

    Pete.

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