Into the desert

It's been a productive week on the 3d printing front with some designing of my own items mixed in with printing offerings from other people. Everything has been printed on these settings apart from the mini-dunes which used a 0.12 layer height.

Nozzle: 0.4mm
Layer Height: 0.20mm Standard pre-set
Material: Bambu Matt PLA
Supports: Auto Tree with outer Brim except buildings which had inner brim.

As we play more V for Victory I've been trying to work out the correct amount of terrain for the game and it became obvious that we really needed something to fill in the slot for low/soft cover that a hedge provides. A search around on the internet came up with a set of files that looked about right. I did need to resize the dunes down to something that looked more like minor drifts of sand rather than towering dunes but that was the work of a few moments in Bambu Lab Studio. I didn't have the ready for the last game we played but they are now ready for the next one.

Continuing with the VfV theme I also knocked up a card & token holder to go by the side of the table, this will save having piles of tokens next to the table. I used the negative space technique from the last blog to make this but having now made some progress with Fusion and the Inset function I would do it differently if it had to be done again.

With the new Halo: Flashpoint bundles on the way I also picked up a card tidier design to keep all the cards and tokens in one place. Mantic Games are selling a version of this but it's much cheaper to get a free design and print it off myself.

Lastly for this week I picked up Fusion 360 again and watched a tutorial in order to start making some progress on designing some buildings. I'm basing these around a 3" cube system so I can use the Deadzone rules as the basis for an infantry skirmish game. I had planned to dive straight into Stalingrad but will be making a diversion via Tobruk (with any luck). I want to create some template designs which can then be modified into individual buildings so after watching a video on the basics of Fusion 360 I was able to create a box and lid. This is a 3" * 6" and I will make up a 3*3 and 6*6 template as well before I start the detailing.

I found some reference photos of Tobruk on the Australian War Memorial site which looks like a real treasure trove of information for any conflict the Australian Army took part in.

Here's a cut down version of the design I printed out to check the parts all fit, there is some warping on the corners which I need to look into. Initial investigations suggest adding a Brim around the print will stop that.

Merging and Negative Space

Having been off for the last week that has meant the printer has been working over time to add things onto my 'to be painted' pile. 

I decided to print up some terrain to use in HALO and Deadzone and wanted to modify the set I'd already printed off for Stu.

First of all I looked at the roofs to add a hole in for ladders to be attached on the inside of the building. This was very simply achieved by add a 30mm negative space cube to the roof model, a bit more tricky was adding the mounting point and I had to get my ruler out to measure the correct size and then work out the placement relative to the hole. Much to my surprise I got the dimension correct on the first try (even though I forgot to measure how wide the ladder was) and I printed a couple off.

I used the same technique to open some closed doors up and add windows to enclosed buildings.

I then realised that you could add a 'positive' cube and put a negative on inside to create a window sill / enclosure, making them look a bit more interesting.

The last thing I modified where the barriers for the roof tops by merging them together into L shapes for ground scatter. I now realise I could have gone a step further and used the Mesh Boolean 'Union' option to join all the individual items into one object, though this often throws up errors that cannot always be resolved in Bambu Lab studio

I've also knocked up something totally from scratch to use the cardboard spools that the filament comes wrapped around. I've got a few of these now so wanted something to use them up and hit on the idea of a simple kit that could be added to the spool to male an oil tank.

It's not very complicated but does the job and looks good enough with some paint on.

Everything here has been printed with:

Nozzle: 0.4mm

Layer Height: 0.20mm Standard pre-set

Material: Bambu Matt PLA

Supports: Auto Tree with outer Brim except buildings which had inner brim.

Home of the Future 2

Printing efforts this week have been focused on roofs, barriers, walkways and ladders to go along with the building walls produced in the previous weeks.

With the buildings I printed being blue I've gone with red for the roofs, walkways, and ladders to add some interest to the buildings and then grey for the barrels so they can be painted up a variety of colours.

I look forwards to seeing how they all look once they've been painted up.

Home of the Future

This week I've been rather under the weather so I've not been able to do any painting. However, having the printing as a side hobby has at least allowed me to feel like I'm getting something done.

The something in this case is some terrain for Stu over at Cirencester Wargames for a new game he's looking to get into, Five Parsecs from Home. This will be a project for solo gaming once he escapes from the daily drudgery of work next year.

All the bits are from the same terrain pack I purchased and I will probably end up printing some more out for myself at some point. 

So far I've printed out all the buildings and now I need to sort out the roofs and other accompanying parts. It's probably another couple of week worth of printing unless I take a brave pill and start printing over night / whilst I'm at work.

Making Tracks

 Most of this week the printer has been busy churning out road sections for the desert war. I now have more than enough to provide some options for the normal table size of 48" square.

I also have the sandbag emplacements I had printing out at 0.08mm layer height and they look really good, almost as good as the resin versions I already had. Once I have the painted up I suspect you won't be able to tell the difference.

The Road to Success

One week into owning my 3D printer I've realised how much I still have to learn but I did manage to design and print my very first object.

In fairness it's not much but it did give me my first taste of design in Fusion 360 and you have to start somewhere :-) 

What we have is a 6" radius scoring zone for Firefight, Kings of War uses a 12" radius scoring zone so I'd need to print that out as inner and outer sections for it to fit on my print bed. In any event this is my first published design, unfortunately no downloads yet.

Other than that I've mostly been printing off road sections this week. Again I've picked up a lesson in that even though all the files come from the same pack they aren't actually all on the same level. A good lesson to learn in checking the number of layers involved in making a print. 

Most of them are of a very similar height so as I'm adding more sections I'll keep to the ones that are close in height and leave the others out of the production cycle.

Speaking of layers, today I've cranked up the detail to the smallest layer height and got some extra sandbag emplacements on the go. I will be interested to see how these compare to the resin ones I've already had printed.