Sculptural Supports

I really like the way Cura's auto-generated tree supports form themselves sometimes.

This one looks to me like those gosh-darned Duke Boys stole th' moonshine truck and jumped it over th' crick agin. Or maybe it's a truck being pulled down to hell by some kind of sand-tentacle-elemental critter.

The model is from m_bergman's 1:100 "LRDG Chevrolet" set. The truck is about 65mm long.

Austin Ten Staff Car

I need some more softskins for my 15mm BEF, and while I was looking through what m_bergman has to offer in that line, I found a set of Austins he has designed. There are various Tilly light trucks, a civilian Austin Ten, and this one, the staff car.

So, now my FHQ senior officers have something comfortable to zoom about in. After all, we can't expect them to have to suffer like the common soldiers.

Regrettably, the layer lines on the front windscreen make it look a bit like it has a venetian blind hanging in there, but that won't be all that noticeable when it's on the wargames table.

BEF Matilda II 1940

 Last night I played an early-war game of Battlegroup with Steve Hoare, and realised that I had neglected my 15mm infantry tanks tragically. Therefore, I resolved to print some more Matildas, in this case the 1940 version with the trench-crossing tail installed, and the armoured Vickers gun in the turret.

I modified the model slightly, both to ease printing and to allow for the addition of magnets under the turret. I also chopped off the 2 pounder and left a socket there, for later installation of a new gun turned from a bit of brazing rod. I got some very visible layer lines on the sloping panels of the hull; I'm printing another one up on its end, which should ameliorate that issue a bit. I'll never get rid of them entirely (unless I get a much more expensive resin printer) but if I can mitigate them as far as possible, I will.

Here it is alongside a Battlefront Matilda II
I assembled and painted quite a few years ago.

Later That Day...

This is the hull that I printed standing up on its end. As I hoped, the change in orientation gave me a much cleaner print, and the top surface detail is quite a bit crisper. Printing the sloping panels in this orientation compresses the layer lines, so the diagonals are smoother — there are still layer lines visible, but they'll pretty much disappear under a coat of paint. Another benefit, though less important from an aesthetic point of view, is that there's a lot more detail in the track links. They're not usually all that visible on the wargames table, but it's nice to know it's there if I want to look at it.

The down-side is that it increases the printing time by about an hour, but that's not a huge deal. It means 7½ hours instead of 6½ (plus another hour or so to print the turret).

2 pounder turned from a bit of brazing rod, using a cheap electric drill as an impromptu lathe.

Tiny Terrain

I'm continually impressed by the level of detail my Ender 3 will give me with its stock 0.4mm nozzle.

This is one of the Ulvheim Ruins pieces I got from Thingiverse (didn't record the url, sorry) shrunk down to 20% for use with 6mm games.

The vehicle is my 1:285 model of the 1930s British Burford-Kegresse machine-gun carrier that I had printed in resin by Shapeways, and the 28mm figure is, as usual, Sergeant Measureby, for scale.

Louca Giant #2 — WiP

I'm very tempted to paint him with a singlet tan-line.

I finally got around to printing the second of the pair of Duncan Louca giants I have. (Here's the first one).

It's scaled to 66%, and printed in eSun PLA+ black with Tom Tullis' FDG Ender 3 miniatures profile, but with a layer height of 0.08mm instead of 0.1mm.

I really like this pair of giants; they look very much as I've always imagined D&D hill giants to look: massively strong, but not gym-ripped, and moronically aggressive. Redneck skinhead giants.

Once the primer goes on, all the tiny printing flaws immediately leap out. I'm getting some very minor layer shifting from time to time, and there's one layer that looks under-extruded about half-way up his feet — it makes him look a bit like he's wearing those creepy toe-slippers. However, the print flaws are minor enough that they should pretty much disappear when the paint goes on.

Flame Skull

I printed Miguel Zavala's Flame Skull, and put it on a clear acrylic flight stand. It's shown here with the ever-reliable Sergeant Measureby and his +3 Spear of 5mm Increments.

I struggle a bit with painting flames and hotness, like hot metal or lava, but I'm relatively happy with how this turned out.

I got a bit of stringing amongst the flame spikes, but I can't say that was unexpected.

Turan I (with added rivetty goodness)

This is the version of the Turan I based on the same model as that in the previous post, but with rivets added.

They are monstrously out of scale of course, but nevertheless I do prefer it with rather than without. The rivets on the original vehicle were a fairly prominent feature.

Turan I (15mm)

This is a Hungarian Turan I of WWII in 1:100 scale, from a model by m_bergman. I've added some track pins to give the tracks a bit more visual interest, but otherwise the model is unchanged from his original design. The figure is a 15mm German from Battlefront.

I've also done and printed a version with some rivet detail as well. Whether it's a worth-while addition I'll find out when I get it painted, but I do like a good rivet on my tank.

With rivets, in the raw white PLA+.

One thing I can be sure of is that they will make painting the turret markings more difficult. Ah, the sacrifices one must make for one's art.

Toldi IIa (15mm)

This is the Hungarian Toldi IIa of WWII. Unfortunately I don't have any Hungarian infantry figures, so these Germans will have to do.

The tank was printed on my Ender-3 in PLA+ using an experimental Cura slicer profile, still being fine-tuned.

Fat Dragon Printing

I watched the most recent Fat Dragon 3d printing video, in which the guy (Tom Tulliss) stepped through his Cura settings and explained what each of them does, and why he chose the settings he did.

I'm not quite as ignorant as I was a couple of months ago, but nevertheless I found it quite illuminating. I thought I'd give his Ender 3 miniature-printing profile a try, to see how it compared with my own hodge-podge. I used one of the Fat Dragon skeletons as a test subject, as they print very reliably without supports.

The mini has been given a very light airbrushing with a pale grey primer so that it will photograph, but no other post-processing.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the profile, from what I see here. Improvements over my own profile are slight, but definite enough to encourage me to keep using it. Next I'll try it on a 15mm tank model (the other thing I print a lot) and see how it serves for that purpose.

Regrettably, at the time of writing YouTube has gone doolally, so I can't link directly to the video. I'll try again later.   The video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqEWl51s9Rw

Later....

As I said I would, I tried the same profile on a 15mm tank, in this case a Hungarian Toldi II of WWII.

 At first glance, it looks OK. I certainly got much, much less stringing than I do with my own Cura profile.

However, all is not well. Not completely, at any rate.

Shell separation

In several places I got significant separation between the shell walls and top layers.

That may be for a number of reasons; for a start, this is printed at a much lower temperature than the recommended range for eSun PLA+ (195° rather than the 205° to 225° recommended by the manufacturer). Also, I think there's a shell overlap option in Cura that it might be worth looking at, if I can find it again.

I shall have to make a little test model to dial in this stuff, something that takes significantly less than 5½ hours per iteration to print.

Duncan Louca's demons, Part Tres

This is the third of three big-mouth demons from a set by Duncan Louca.

I tried a much more chaotic colour scheme on this one than I did on the first two, and I can't really say that it's a great success. However, inertia will no doubt keep it this way forever now.

Duncan Louca's Demons, Part Deux

This is the second of Duncan Louca's set of three demons with exceptionally large mouths that I've painted.

I like his sculpts a lot.

This has been printed on my Ender 3 at 0.08mm in PLA.

Mr Blobby

Model by Franklin Burger:
https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-46858

I found this model somewhere on the internet, alone and uncredited, so I have no idea who made it or what it is or anything. People have suggested that it's a Kirby, whatever that is, with a human face pasted on.

I like it, and I'll print about a dozen of them, and make up some stats to use them in my D&D campaign in some way.

The original model was only about 1.5mm tall, so I've rescaled it by 1500% to roughly 20mm.

Sculpting in Blender

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3148420

I'm in the process of teaching myself a little bit about digital sculpting in Blender. This is the latest fruit of my digital loins.

This poor guy got chained up and stuck in a hole for no other reason than that I failed to plan ahead to making a body and limbs for him. I probably could cobble something together by stretching and moulding from its base, but it wouldn't be ideal.

I've put the model on Thingiverse, both as it's seen here, and just as the bust. I strongly suspect that the chained up version would be quite tricky to print successfully; those chain links are bound to be problematic.

Just the bust
Printed on my Ender-3
at 0.08mm layer height
in eSun white PLA+

Airbrush Stand – Complete

Here is my airbrush stand, in all its 3d-printed and wooden glory. The next thing will be to get quick-release hose couplings for them all, though that may be a while away.

Airbrush Stands

The STL for this one, for the Badger 105, is at
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3135372

I have several airbrushes, each of which excels in their own particular realm, but swapping from one to the other is slightly inconvenient.

They're stored safely in a nice rosewood box, which is attractive, but doesn't keep the airbrushes easily to hand.

So, I'm in the process of designing and printing stands for them. Each one has a slightly different geometry, so a one-size-fits-all solution isn't going to work all that well.

This is the first one off the printer, for my Badger 105 Patriot, the workhorse of my stable. I'm just waiting for some replacement parts for it at the moment, but normally it's the brush I go to for just about everything.

So far I have designs for the following:

• Badger 105 Patriot at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3135372
• Badger 200 Single-action at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3135516.
• Badger Krome at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3137556

Badger 200

Badger 200

Here's the stand for the single-action Badger 200.

I don't use this airbrush a great deal, but it's a good example of its type, and quite cheap. It would be a good airbrush for a beginner who's a bit intimidated by double-action brushes.

Here's a stand for the Badger Krome, a truly superb airbrush, though possibly not the best choice for a beginner.

I've enlarged the nose of the stand slightly to fit the ugly rubber cap that is supplied with the airbrush, the only thing about it I don't like.

Badger used to supply very nice nickel-plated brass caps for their airbrushes, which both looked nicer and stayed on better. However, this horrible thing is what we get these days, so I've accommodated it.

The cap can be left on the airbrush, or it can be pushed into the nose of the stand and just act as a soft collar within the stand to further protect the tip of the airbrush when it's not being used.

The STL is available at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3137556

It might also fit the Sotar 20:20, but I don't know for sure because the Sotar 20:20 I ordered and paid for from Midwest Airbrush Supply* more than a year and a half ago never arrived, and they've been pretty much uncontactable about it. (Do you detect just a teensy hint of bitterness?)

* NOTE: I'm not going to link to the bastards because I don't want to inadvertently send any business their way. Fuck them.

This is the last of them, for the moment at least, a stand for the Paasche Talon.

I seldom use this airbrush as I've found it to be something of a disappointment in terms of its build quality. Its trigger and valve tends to stick, and the cup is so large that it obscures the view if I try any close-in work with it. If I use it at all now, it's just for coarse work like broad terrain painting.

The STL for this stand is on Thingiverse at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3141265

Zenithal Priming

There is a miniatures-painting technique that has become quite common these days, called zenithal priming.

It's aim is to provide a priming layer of under-painting with highlights and shadows already in place, and this is achieved quite simply.

The figure is first primed entirely in black, and then a lighter colour, usually pure white, is sprayed down on to it at a slight angle from the vertical. The areas sheltered from the spray remain black, while the upper surfaces become white, with gentle gradations of tone between them. Personally, I prefer to finish with a light over-spray of white at a much lower angle to lighten the bulk of shadows, leaving pure black only in those areas that would be completely shadowed.

The ideal tool for this is, of course, the airbrush, but it can be done with aerosol can paints. The spray cans produce a much coarser spray; the individual droplets of paint are larger, so the resulting under-painting will appear much more granular.

It can also be done entirely by hand with a brush, though of course that is a much more labour-intensive method. It's a technique that is much used by picture painters who want to establish the tonal masses of their composition before they start applying colour.

The technique really shows its value when speed-painting using transparent inks and glazes, but it's also very useful when painting with opaque colours because the tonal variation really accentuates the contours and surface details of a miniature, which makes it easier to plan and predict how paint can be applied.

Big Mouth Big Tongue

This is a model by Duncan Louca, one of a set of three demons.

I've printed it at 0.08mm in PLA, scaled at 150% which brings it up to about 50mm tall. I added a base of my own, as the models are provided baseless.

This is the same model, but printed at 100%.

I had to re-print its left arm and do a bit of surgery, as the first print had a support failure which left it without a left hand-claw-tentacle-thing.

Friar Tuckish

Here we have yet another of Reaper's plastic Bones miniatures, from one or other of their Kickstarters. I don't know the SKU.

He's a stout fellow, in every sense of the word, but I get the feeling he might be a bit of a bastard if you cross him.

This guy is painted as a more or less mediaeval European mendicant friar, though the weapon is one the Japanese call tetsubo, an iron-bound club-staff. It was notoriously used by some of the militant Japanese Buddhist monkish sects for killing people without (theoretically, though probably not actually) spilling their blood. There was one sect who carried their sacred bits and pieces in a casket into battle, and threw it into the enemy lines to inspire the monks to a fanatical frenzy to get it back. They were, let's face it, completely barmy.

Pit Howler

This is the Motleyverse Kickstarter freebie STL that I posted about a few days ago. It's been printed at 0.08mm in no-name PLA.

I've replaced the file's original thick disc base with one of my own 25mm paving bases.

It's not a stellar print; the thing's front-left paw is completely missing, as Cura decided it didn't need any supports... which it clearly did, and the mouth detail is a bit messy.

The bony spikes on its back ended up looking a bit more like candy corn than I had intended.

Ah well, it will just have to do, as I can't be bothered taking any more trouble with it.

Tortoises – Finishing Comparison

Clickupon to enlargenate

I decided to paint the Tortoise I printed most recently, the one printed with tree supports rather than zig-zag verticals, without any surface finishing at all apart from string removal.

Both models have been printed with identical quality parameters: 0.08mm layer height, 10% triangular infill, and printed fairly slowly. The one on the right, the first, has had many of its surfaces scraped down to remove as much of the printing layer lines as I reasonably could. The one on the left, the newer model, has not, but has just had paint applied straight over the surfaces as printed.

There is certainly a visible difference between the two models when seen in close-up, but with paint on, at tabletop distances, the variation in surface quality is pretty much invisible. For purely gaming purposes, I'm doubtful that the extra time and effort involved in smoothing down visible layer lines is really all that worth while.

Tortoise

 This is the Tortoise, a British WWII super-heavy assault gun. Half a dozen prototypes were built, but its main intended purpose was smashing through fortifications like the Siegfried Line, and by the time it was ready, there was no longer any need for it.

This model is 1:100 scale (15mm), and was printed in PLA+ on my Ender-3 FDM printer.

eSun PLA+, 0.08mm layer height

I printed a second one, using Cura's tree supports, just to see how it would do. Apart from the stringing which seems to be an inescapable feature of this filament (brand unknown), it printed fine for the most part.

However, I cannot figure out at all how Cura's tree support placement algorithm works. You can see, under the gun barrel and along the bottom of the side-skirts, supports are clustered together in dense groups, and then there are long bare gaps.

With my printer in its largely stock setup, I can just bridge those gaps, but not completely cleanly. If the same number of supports had been spaced evenly along the length of the area to be supported, it would have printed much better.

Now, I'm impressed with anyone who can figure out this sort of programming wizardry to begin with, but I don't think it can be denied that the algorithm could do with a bit of refinement. It would be even better if I could manually add or delete supports in Cura; it's possible in another slicer app (Solidify3d), but that costs quite a large number of yankeebucks, so I'm unlikely to get a copy unless we win the Lotto.

Magic Missile d4

Here's another design for a 4-sided die, this time marked from 2 – 5 for use with the D&D Magic Missile spell.

The file is on Thingiverse at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3115258

Romanesque D4

These are some 4-sided dice I designed a while ago and just got around to printing. I've stripped them off their supports, but haven't done any more cleanup than that so far.

I wanted them to look Roman-ish, so apart from using Roman numerals, I've tried to echo elements of Roman architecture in their shape.

They seem to roll adequately randomly, from what I've seen so far. I'm working now on refining some "baked in" supports (see below) so that I don't have to rely on Cura's occasionally inexplicable support placement.

They're a fraction more foot-friendly than the caltrop-tetrahedral d4s, but they've still got some pretty stabby points on them

There's a printable STL file available for download at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3115170 . The fin-like structures at the bottom are supports which will need to be stripped away after printing. I had to enable "Print thin walls" in Cura as they're only 0.4mm thick, and with my 0.4mm nozzle Cura wouldn't slice them reliably without that setting enabled.

Ganging Up

When I'm printing things like the Printable Scenery ruins I've mentioned before, I first create and re-size the assemblies I want from the individual component STL files, and arrange them into a compact group, using Blender. Then I export a single STL of the whole group.

When that STL goes into Cura to be translated into a gcode printer file, I'll fill up the platen with as many copies of it as I can fit, so I'm printing multiples at once rather than having to restart the print job over and over. Laying out several models for the same print run is called "ganging up", it's a very old term that comes from 2d printing.

Of course, with an FDM printer this increases the printing time in a 1:1 ratio; twice the models means twice the printing time. It doesn't really save me any actual time, just the faffing about between print runs. On the other hand, a DLP resin printer, which uses an LCD screen to project and expose each layer sequentially, the amount of stuff on the platen has no effect at all on the print speed; it runs at a set rate per millimetre of height, so it pays off, in terms of printing efficiency, to cram things together.

The down-side to ganging up on the platen is that if for any reason the print fails, then you've lost  at least twice as many models and wasted twice as much filament (or resin).

In this picture, I've got two iterations of the STL I exported from Blender. That pretty much fills up my platen, though I could possibly have put some other smaller models in the corners. Not this time.

More Corporate Gouging

Well, bugger.

It appears that PayPal now want me to pay a seven dollar fee on each and every single transaction I make using them. That seems rather excessive to me.

They used to be a convenience, but I guess now it's time to look for other means of transacting business online.

Paint Test — 3d-Printed Ruins

This is my first painting test for the ruinous bits and pieces I've been printing, from elements by Printable Scenery.

My focus has been on speed of production, to get them on to the gaming table as fast as possible, rather than creating gorgeous diorama-quality miniature models. To that end, they've been painted pretty much entirely by means of washes and dry-brushing over some zenithal priming.

At this standard of painting, they will suit my needs fine. I'm hopeful of having a table-covering mass of urban ruins within the relatively near future.

I have been tossing up whether or not to mount the individual pieces on some sort of base. They are sturdy enough as is to take some fairly careless handling, so they don't actually need basing. So any basing would be more for aesthetics, rather than for structural stability.

Having some debris scattered inside the ruinous shells is appealing, as without it I suspect they'll look more like obstacles on a paintball range than an actual town that has had the shit knocked out of it. The trick will be to make it look enough of a mess without compromising the ability to move troops around inside.

Later.....

I added an internal base to a complete building assembly, and as I suspected it does look much better.

It does add considerably to the preparation time, but it doesn't need to be done at the same time as the painting of the shell. I can do the basing progressively as I have the time.

The Heartbreak of Change

Experimental Chaos Blob Thingy

Blender 2.8 is peeping over the horizon, and I've been playing with its Sculpt mode in an Alpha daily release.

I can see that, if I can get used to it, the UI could be an improvement. However, many of the keyboard shortcuts I've come to know no longer work, and finding stuff that used to be right there on the tool-bar is proving to be rather a trial.

The new render engine, EeVee, looks like it will be amazingly useful, but again things have changed enough that when it comes to basic lighting and rendering I'm completely lost now. I couldn't even figure out how to grab and move a light; I had to transform it using the tool-bar. I couldn't figure out how to light and render my Thingy at all, and ended up just taking a screen-grab of it. On the plus side, it's a much better screen grab than I would have got before. I think.

More fiddling with it, and
another screen-grab

I don't think I'll persist with it until it's actually in Release Candidate status. Things are changing around enough that time spent relearning how to operate the program will most likely be largely wasted until things are set in stone. Once it is released though, then all the multitude of YouTube mavens can set to work teaching us Ignorant Ones how the New and Shiny is better than the Old and Busted.