Staghound

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I've been occupying my insomnia the last couple of nights with this — it's a British armoured car, the Staghound Mk.I, from WWII, modelled in Blender in 1:100 scale.

It's not completely finished yet, as usual. There are bits that I've forgotten, like the headlights. I'll get around to it.

I've piled it up with a whole bunch of clutter, and there may well be more of that to come. 

 A bit later on...

I like to have human figures in my vehicles, both to give a sense of scale and to make them seem less like an army of autonomous robot vehicles when I'm playing at Toy Soldiers with them. 

To that end I've opened up one of the hatches and bunged a generic AFV commander in the hole. 

NOTE: I've put the STLs up online, and they are available at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/mojobob_hoochyman_staghound_mk_i 

 

An Indeterminate Number of Days Later...

Here is concrete evidence that I am in the process of printing this model. It's my Mars Pro, printing this model.

I would have got on to it sooner, except that I had to replace the FEP after a misprinting disaster about a week ago, and I'd been putting it off due to my Chronic Procrastination Syndrome (I hear that a cure is years away).

 ...and later that day

The test print went well. No issues at all to speak of.

We see it here with both turrets, closed and open, though I only printed one hull and set of wheels. 

I've given it a brown primer coat, and I'll be painting it in the Light Mud (SCC 5) and Black scheme for Italy.  I already have a Battlefront Daimler armoured car in those colours, so I might as well continue.

 

 

 These are the Vallejo paints I'm using:

• For SCC 5 Light Mud — VMA 71.028 Sand Yellow.
  VMC 70.987 Medium Grey is a good brushable match.
• For SCC 7 Dark Olive Green — VMC 70.888 Olive Grey 

I have, in the past, used VMC 70.988 Khaki for SCC 5, and it looks okay, but in scale I think it's a touch dark, especially when washes and what-not have gone over the top. 

 

 Xmas Day

Shiny! So shiny!

 We're at an intermediate stage of painting now.

All the various bits have their base colours on, along with a few washes here and there to accentuate detail, and now I've given everything a couple of coats of gloss varnish in preparation for some oil washing.

The gloss finish helps to stop the pin washes from discolouring the underlying paint, and it will be mitigated at the end of the painting process with an overspray of matte varnish. 

Raupenschlepper Ost 1942 - test print

Quite some time ago, I designed this model in Blender. It's a simplified version of the Raupenschlepper Ost, with the cab made from plywood instead of stamped from steel, and with a canvas roof. They went into production in 1942, with the aim of making production faster and cheaper.

But I never did actually get around to printing it. Mainly because its hollow cab would have made printing quite difficult.

Today I filled in the cab and cargo bed with a solid block, but in the cab I kept half of each of two crewmen visible, so that they could be painted in a kind of bas-relief style. It seems to have worked reasonably well, and the model printed on my Ender 3 without any issues at all (except that I initially assembled the running gear the wrong way round, and had to tear it off and re-glue it). 

It means, of course, that there's no interior detail visible, but for a gaming model that doesn't disturb me too much. 

 Several days later...

I've got it painted now, in a post-1943 colour scheme. All in all, I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out. 

Old Character Minis

 

I took some photos of some of my old character minis with my iPhone, just to see how they'd turn out. Meh. The lighting is pretty crap, but then it was all pretty ad-hoc.

From left to right: Fnord, Smirnoff, and Aedan Comarren. 

 Here's another attempt. Also pretty meh. Somehow I kept activating the iPhone's focus lock, which was annoying, and the tonal range is quite compressed. It's certainly a convenient camera to use, but I think a proper SLR is going to be more useful for this sort of thing.

And here we go with a photo taken with my Nikon D3500 on my lighting stage. The tonal range is wider, though the details are not as sharp — I can set the camera to do some pre-sharpening, but I prefer to do that sort of thing in a proper photo editing app. I don't have a macro lens for this camera, so I have to stand off a metre or so. One day, when I win Lotto, I'll get a macro lens, but until that happy day it's not a high fiscal priority.

Paper Garden Shed

 

I don't remember where I got this from, but I vaguely recall that it was part of a set of download-and-print paper buildings for Warhammer.

I printed it years ago, and found it when I was organising (hah!) my workroom, so I put it together and gave it a base. It looks like I might have intended it for 15mm gaming, not 28mm — Sergeant Measuresby  would really have to bend down to squeeze in through that door.

Three-dimensional models are all very well, but it cannot be denied that these fold-up 2d models are a lot quicker and easier to get on to the tabletop, and I think they can look pretty good too. 

Mörk Borg

 

I was given a copy of Mörk Borg for xmas by Carl.

It's graphically very interesting, though it doesn't make it immediately clear exactly what it is (it's a RPG) nor how it's played (still don't know).

I'm hoping that close examination of its grunge-magazine aesthetic will reveal its inner nature.

I do really like its presentation, even though I have no idea what's going on.