To 3D Print or Not to 3D Print Part III

After a few successful prints I was thoroughly enthralled by the process and may have gone a little crazy for the first few weeks and months.  I printed hundreds of different items and blew through my first bottle of resin quickly.  I bought another and the printer consumed it in what seemed like a blink of an eye.   

In the process of buying a 3^rd bottle my wonderful wife asked me what I had printed so far.  And that’s when it struck me, I was printing a lot but wasn’t ending up with many useful items.  I had gotten caught up in the novelty of it all and wasn’t printing with any rhyme or reason.  So, I took a step back to catch my breath and thoughts.

Printing gone wild!

Now my printing craze is very like my many miniature buying crazes that I occasionally get into.  I just buy because its cool but I really don’t have a plan for it.  I was doing the same thing with printing.  I decided to get focused with the whole process.

Using free files is great but it can be a mixed bag as to what you get.  While beggars can’t be choosers you do want to get something that you can utilize.  Some files aren’t great on details or their scale is off or your trying to rescale them to fit.  Having run into this on a few items I decided take a look at files that were for sale.  My first stop was Myminifactory:

https://www.myminifactory.com/ 

It is a great pay site that has hundreds of creators on it.  They even have a few free files to sample.  I’ve spent hours searching on the site and have barely scratched the surface of what is available. 

I ‘ve always wanted to finish my Chaos Dwarf army but just didn’t have the cash to complete my collection.  The Marauder Miniatures Chaos Dwarves are going for a ridiculous amount of money these days so getting more of them wasn’t really an option.  While looking through models I stumbled upon Warp Miniatures on Myminfactory.

https://www.myminifactory.com/users/WarpMiniatures#/

They have some great dark dwarves.  I felt confident enough in my printing abilities to spend money on some files and grabbed their Dark Dwarf Army collection.  I’ll get into that project in more detail in another post, for now suffice it to say that I really enjoyed them.  They were well worth the money.

To 3D Print or Not to 3D Print Part II

The first post was just a warm up, here are a few more details from my experience for your education and enjoyment.

Once your printer is ready you need to find some files to print.  I wont go into details on the different file types, again there are much better sources than me on this topic.  There are a few great sites for free files and there are a couple to purchase files.  Here are a few free sites:

Cults 3d   https://cults3d.com/

Thingiverse  https://www.thingiverse.com/

Hmmm, what to print?  I always kicked myself for not buying any of the Citadel Dalek and Cybermen boxed sets that were produced back in the day so I was very chuffed that I found several free files online for the Daleks.  I grabbed a couple and set about getting them printed.

Some basics here.  Once you have a file, an STL in my case, you have to have software to get it printed.  With my Halot 1 I also received their in-house built printing software Halot Box.  It is very basic with minimal manipulation options.  Most of the time it is sufficient but the big seller is it’s ease of use.  There is also generic software called Chitubox with both a free version and an upgraded purchase version.  It is also easy to use and has a few more manipulation functions that the Creality product doesn’t have like a mirror object option.  I defaulted to the Halot Box just because I know it will work with the printer. 

For those that want even more power there is Blender which is a very powerful digital image tool.  To be honest it is a little too advanced for me given the amount of time I want to invest in learning the software.  I’m sure that if I dedicated the time, I would be an amazing tool. 

Once I got the file opened in Halot Box I was able to get it ready to print. 

 First step is to get it supported.  Given the resin printing process, you occasionally must put in additional objects to support the print and ensure that it actually prints. 

Again if you do a search, you can get some very in-depth information on this whole process.  There was a bit of a learning curve, but it wasn’t horrible.

Once it is supported and you are ready to print, you then have to “slice” the file.  Essentially cutting in into hundreds of layers that the printer then stacks on top of each other during the printing process.  Here is the model at the middle of the sliced pieces.

Then you send the sliced file over to the printer, in my case I slap it on a thumb drive and physically transfer it.

For what is considered a low-end, entry-level resin printer I was blown away with the results.  The details were great, I’m looking forward to putting some paint on them.  Some insights from my printing, the biggest drawback for my printer is time.  Depending on size it can take hours to get things printed. 

There are clearly faster printers out there so depending on how much you want to spend you can impact this time sink.  Mine was less than $200 so I wasn’t expecting much.

To 3D Print or Not to 3D Print Part I

Should I buy a 3d printer?  I have asked myself this question dozens of times, usually after I saw some amazing project on the web.  I debated this internally for quite some time.  My biggest hurdle was would I use it enough to justify the investment?  I struggled with this for a very long time, to the point that my amazing wife got tired of my relentless debating and bought me one for my birthday a couple of years ago.  I truly don’t deserve her!  I thought I would relate my experiences so far. 

Now I’m no Luddite but I’ve also never dealt with anything like this before.  I have a Creality Halot 1 which is a lower end entry level type of resin printer.  I think that they have a higher resolution one out now that is less than what I spent on the Halot 1.  Assembly and preparation was a piece of cake, there was very little for me to do.  I followed the directions and did the adjustments and got it ready to fire up.  I got some resin along with the gift, so I poured it in and found a file to print.  I thought I was ready but after the first of many failed prints I realized I needed to educate myself.

I wont go into a lot of detail because there are much better sources than me for information on 3d printing.  A quick google search will get you plenty.  Everything I looked at was very helpful.  The most important thing that I picked up was you need to dial in your printer to your resin by adjusting exposure times.  I used TableFlip Foundry’s cones of calibration here

 https://www.tableflipfoundry.com/download/the-cones-of-calibration

This is version 3 of the test print and it has great supporting documentation, better than their version 2 that I used initially to do my tuning.  I had roughly a 75% fail rate initially.  Once I got the printer in tune with my resin my fail rate dropped to about 1% of the time and I honestly think that the recent failures are related to my film wearing out or poor support structures.

Getting set up and educated wasn’t difficult at all and I would suggest that anyone who is interested should give it a try.  It has been loads of fun. More details of my journey coming.

It Has Been Awhile!

Well it has been quite awhile since I have made a post so a flurry of WIP update posts will happen shortly.  The lack of posts is a direct result of a Shambling Mound infestation of our house, otherwise know as Luna.

She is a mobile pile of fur that has taken quite a bit more attention than I ever remember a puppy taking.  Needless to say she has cut into my hobby time for the last year plus.  Now that she is settling into the family I'm getting the chance to grab a few minutes here and there to get some painting done.  Here are a few WIP updates with more to come.

3rd ed. Skeleton commands are done, first group is a full 3rd edition set and the other is 3/4 Nightmare legion with the champion from the 3ed range.

Playing around with new contrast paints on the Rogue Trader era Eldar.  I've now tried straight white, some variations on apex prep, some pre and post inking, as well as metallics as the base color to see what comes out the best.  I haven't landed on a technique as of yet.

And lastly, a quick update on the old FA series of repaints that I've been playing around with.  My teenage work up top and current on the bottom.  The photos don't do them justice.

I would say that its an upgrade from their 40+ year old paint job.  These guys are ready for basing.  Some before and after shots of the FTS repaints that I'm working on are soon to follow.

Off with the Old: Iron Claw update

 Wrapped up the Iron Claw catapult, much better in my humble opinion.  I'm calling it done, maybe a 50mm base at some time.

Speaking of the undead...

As I was filling up the new display cabinet I noticed that most of my skeleton units didn't have command units.  I was already working on some with the FTS project so I decided to dig out some old 3rd ed lead skeleton command units to paint up.  I had always planned to add these at a later date so now seem as good a time as any.  Here are a few progress shots of the first unit.  These are from one of the old command blisters.

This group is a hodgepodge of figures, 3 are from the Nightmare Legion boxed set and the 4th leader figure is from the old command sets, same pose as the one above just slightly different armor.

These are just a few miscellaneous figures I intend to use a unit champions, critical figures in WHFB 3rd undead units.

I need to go back and do some apex painting on these, several were in various states of paint so reworking them has been a pain.

Off with the Old and On with the New: Fantasy Adventures

Yet another of my repaint projects in the works.  This one is from the pre-slota base era with some Fantasy Adventures.  These two lads are FA-24 Anti Paladin and FA-22 Evil Cleric.  I seem to recall that these may have been Citadel miniatures manufactured and distributed by Ral Partha in the US under their imports brand.  I have a few more in the range that I'm sure will meet the same fate as these.  Here they are in my pre-teen paint jobs.

 Not as bad as I would have thought, clearly I have moved from the Testors enables to acrylic paints but no real detail work like shading or highlighting.  Now naked lead, remarkable they came out very clean

Primed up and apex painted.  I'm beginning to like the results that I'm getting using this technique and much thinner paint and ink coats.

 

I haven't decided on color palette yet, on one hand I actually like the red/black/yellow scheme but I might want to try something new.  I'll have to play around with some different looks to figure out how to proceed.  More WIP soon.