Custom 3D Miniatures: Major & Minor Industrial Complexes, Recruitment Center, Airbase, and Naval Base

[Quirky Turtle]

Awesome, I’m looking for a way to create 3d versions of the air & navalbase together with @Tjoek. These are definitely along the lines of what we were thinking as well.

For the recruitment center, what about using a 3d model of an army tent? Something like

[vodot]

@Quirky-Turtle said in Custom Major & Minor Industrial Complexes, Airbase, and Naval Base (3D Models):

Awesome, I’m looking for a way to create 3d versions of the air & navalbase together with @Tjoek. These are definitely along the lines of what we were thinking as well.

For the recruitment center, what about using a 3d model of an army tent? Something like

yeah, that’s what I was thinking, a collection of rectangular low lying buildings. I was going to add an old watch tower just to make them easier to see and physically move around on the table.

[vodot]

Recruitment Center complete!

Recruitment Center (Thingiverse Link)

[vodot]

size comparison on the ICs (the middle is OOB):

[vodot]

Airfield!
Airfield (Thingiverse Link)

[vodot]

Shipyard!
Shipyard (Thingiverse Link)

[Midnight_Reaper]

You’ve got some really great pieces here. Thanks for taking feedback and turning it into awesome pieces. You rock!

-Midnight_Reaper

[vodot]

@Midnight_Reaper said in Custom 3D Miniatures: Major & Minor Industrial Complexes, Recruitment Center, Airbase, and Naval Base:

You’ve got some really great pieces here. Thanks for taking feedback and turning it into awesome pieces. You rock!

-Midnight_Reaper

Thanks!

Here’s everything so far:

[Midnight_Reaper]

@vodot

You have an impressive set of factories and markers. All you need to complete the set is a flat Recruitment Center, to go with the flat Naval Base and Air Base markers… :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

-Midnight_Reaper

[vodot]

Recruitment Center token :) Thingiverse Link

[robert t]

A question on recruitment centres. Are people house ruling them into all A&A games?

If so, what cost do you put them at and how may infantry can you place in one?

Thanks and the models look great.

[djensen]

@robert-t They cost 10 IPCs and can produce infantry up to the IPC value. If you place one on an 3 IPC territory, you can buy and place 3 infantry there.

Personally, I’m not house ruling them in, yet. But they can be purchased if you play AAZ 1942 putting a chip under an existing IPC to indicate recruitment center isn’t, IMHO, the best option.

[Midnight_Reaper]

@robert-t said in Custom 3D Miniatures: Major & Minor Industrial Complexes, Recruitment Center, Airbase, and Naval Base:

A question on recruitment centres. Are people house ruling them into all A&A games?

If so, what cost do you put them at and how may infantry can you place in one?

Thanks and the models look great.

Try these rules for house ruling Recruitment Centers into your other A&A games.

Standard rules for Recruitment Centers:
Recruitment Centers are a new type of IC, that came in with A&A&Zombies. Recruitment Centers cost 10 IPCs and you can place only infantry there, as many infantry as the value of the territory. Other than that, they act just the same as normal ICs - build, damage, repair, built in AAA, all the same. You can upgrade from a Recruitment Center to an IC for the cost of 8 IPCs. Only undamaged Recruitment Centers can upgrade (repair cost can be paid at the same time as upgrade costs).

The above rules work with games that only have one type of IC. For the 1940s games (Europe, Pacific, and Global 1940), I would do this:

Recruitment Center:
Has same rules as minor factory, except cost is 10 IPCs and you can place up to 3 infantry, and only infantry units. Can upgrade to a full minor factory for the cost of 5 IPCs. Only undamaged Recruitment Centers can upgrade (repair cost can be paid at the same time as upgrade costs).

That should about cover it.

-Midnight_Reaper

[robert t]

Thanks for the replies.

They look like they could add a new wrinkle in the A&A games. Definitely India and China would benefit from using them.

[Midnight_Reaper]

@vdot

So, you’ve done up all of these cool new sculpts, and linked them in ThingVerse. Could you tell us, the uneducated, how to move from looking at these pieces to getting them printed out and shipped to us.

I think they’re great, but looking at them is all I can do, as I don’t know how to proceed from there.

Thanks in advance!

-Midnight_Reaper

[vodot]

@Midnight_Reaper said in Custom 3D Miniatures: Major & Minor Industrial Complexes, Recruitment Center, Airbase, and Naval Base:

@vdot

So, you’ve done up all of these cool new sculpts, and linked them in ThingVerse. Could you tell us, the uneducated, how to move from looking at these pieces to getting them printed out and shipped to us.

I think they’re great, but looking at them is all I can do, as I don’t know how to proceed from there.

Thanks in advance!

-Midnight_Reaper

Well, the next step for me is testing. I expected to have parts in hand faster than this (I submitted my prints to the internal queue days ago, normally faster turnaround than this). If they come out ok, I’ll try batching them up on Shapeways. That will make them available for anyone to pay to have them printed and shipped out to them. I’ve never used Shapeways before, so there is a bit of a learning curve for me too, like what qtys are the most cost-effective and how to link parts together to cut costs, etc. I would love to print these off on the company machines and sell them at cost for you guys, but that is basically the one thing we are NOT allowed to use the printers for :p

What quantities would people be interested in printing, so I know how many to batch up? Shapeways doesn’t strike me as terribly affordable, but definitions of affordable vary… I’ll be looking at Ebard’s Shapeways shop for inspiration and reference :)

For those of you with a 3D printer, you’re good to go- These designs aren’t all completely desktop-3D-printer friendly (some of them are), but with support material even the unwieldy should come out just fine. I tried to keep the smallest details at 1MM, so resolution should not be a problem. Do let me know if any of you try it and have issues.

[vodot]

I’ve got a desktop 3D printer in my cube here at work, so while I wait for the (apparently backlogged) jobs on the fancy printers I’m printing a test run of the miniature-style pieces. Will post results. I expect the ICs to look great, and the others to look… terrible or completely malformed. Those watch towers are not designed for a single-extrusion printer at all.

[vodot]

Update: Well, in some ways these turned out better than I expected, but in most ways, much worse: the desktop 3D printer in my pod has a ton of jitter so that even the bits that should have been a piece of cake (like the ICs) came out pretty terrible; each layer has some arbitrary XY shift on the order of 0.1-0.2mm which is a ton at this scale. On the plus side, however, very little support ended up being needed to build the tricky bits- even the watchtowers stood up alright. If you’ve got a 3D printer that normally gives you pretty good results, I say give these a try and see what happens.

I’ll post again once the shapeways-representative prints come off the company printer :)

[vodot]

I made these without seeing the two threads below; I’m obviously not the first foray into amateur/custom 3D-printed minis! Anyone looking at these should check out these two older threads as well:
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/28327/custom-facilities-project
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/30693/air-base-naval-bases-hbg-shapeways

[djensen]

@vodot

Yeah, Combat Miniatures is a bronze sponsor of the site, everybody should check out @Johnson73 's great work.