Matilda 1 (15mm)

 

I've finally finished my 1:100 (15mm) A11 Matilda 1.

I abandoned it for a long time, but came back to finish it over the last couple of days.

It's online now at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/a11-matilda-1/

Air/Rafts

 

I found an STL for a 1977 Traveller version of an Air/Raft on Thingiverse, so I re-scaled it to more or less 15mm to fit with my elderly RAFM Traveller minis and printed a couple. The one on the left is resin from my Mars Pro, the barely distinguishable black one on the right is FDM from my Ender 3.

The blue one at the back is one that I clobbered together ages ago from a Hot Wheels toy.

The resin version took about 50% longer to print than the FDM one, but comes out smoother. The FDM print is fine, but the supports in under the dashboard are a bit of a nightmare to remove, and if I was going to do it again I'd probably fill in that space since it's not really necessary for a gaming model.

When Marc Millar invented this thing back in '77, I assume that either (a) he was envisaging some kind of force field to protect the passengers, or (b) he had never sat in an open-topped vehicle traveling at 250 kp/h.

Also, why the slash in Air/Raft? I've always found that incomprehensibly dumb, and if the slash character was closer to the hyphen on the keyboard I'd assume it was just a typo.

PHB Statue Remix

 

Some years ago, when he was just starting out on his mission to sculpt everything D&D, Miguel Zavala did a model of the demon statue from the front cover of the AD&D Player's Handbook.

Compared with his more recent work, the modeling was pretty low-rez, but the shapes were basically sound.

I took that old, old STL and remixed it, smoothing out the faceting and giving the surfaces a bit of stone texture. I also separated the brazier bowl and flames to their own objects.

I haven't printed this one yet. I think I'll probably have to make the surface texture a lot more exaggerated to get it to show up in an FDM print.

I printed and painted the original version of this model back in 2018, and put up a post about it then.

Interwar Micros

I've been revisiting a bunch of my interwar vehicle models, rescaling them to 1:285 for micro gaming, and I've put them up on wargaming3d.com in packs of six to eight models.

This first one is British: a Birch Gun SPG, a Peerless armoured car, a Lanchester Mk.II, a Burford-Kegresse half-track MG carrier/APC, a Lancia armoured lorry, and a Carden-Loyd Carrier Mk.VI.

It's available at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/british-interwar-micro-pack-other/

The next one is also British, but it's tanks this time.

There's the A1E1 Independent, the Vickers Medium C, The Vickers Medium Mk.III, The Vickers Medium Mk.II and II*, and the Medium Mk.II Hornet.

It's at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/british-interwar-micro-pack-other/

 The third is a bunch of Soviets.

This is the Komintern heavy tractor, the T24 medium tank, the Austin-Kegresse half-track armoured car, the Garford-Putilov SPG lorry, the Benz-Mgebrov armoured car, the T27 tankette, the SU18 SPG, and the T18 light tank.

You can get this pack from https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/interwar-soviet-micro-pack/

Flowify - Blender add-on

I've recently been introduced to the Flowify add-on for Blender, by Artisans of Vaul on Youtube. It's an add-on designed to ease the process of applying geometry to the surface of another mesh, and it truly is excellent at that task.

It's quite possible to do this using only native Blender, but its is a job that can be a bit excruciating and time-consuming, and being able to have all of the hard work done for me behind the scenes is just great.

It's one of the more expensive add-ons I've installed at fifteen yankeebucks, but I think it's well worth the money.

Artisans of Vaul just put out a video on how to use Flowify to create a name plate for a miniature base, so I whipped one up for the figure of my puny but beauteous barbarian, Aedan Comarren that I created in HeroForge.

Later that day...

I printed the base and glued to it the mini of Aedan that I'd printed and painted some time ago.

I learned from this that for lettering in this scale, I'd be best off using a very regular font such as Futura, and it would probably be best in all caps.