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

[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.

[vodot]

For anyone who hasn’t seen m_bergman’s incredible (and free!) collection on thingiverse yet, please go check it out- Hundreds of accurate 3D models in 1:200 scale, including armor, trucks, and misc. combat vehicles from 1940-present day.

Pack 1: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:232248
Pack 2: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:310476
Pack 3: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:539511
Pack 4: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1138822

I got sextons, priests, and hummels off the company hardware today. I further shrank these by 30-40% to get closer to 1:300 scale:

[vodot]

@djensen any chance we get a sticky for 3D models, free and otherwise? These collections need curation…

[djensen]

Yeah, start a topic, let me or Panther, or any other moderator know which topic to sticky and we’ll do it.

[Tjoek]

@vodot these look amazing! I can only dream of this quality print work. (Or go the shapeways route offcourse)

[vodot]

Yeah, Shapeways is so flipping expensive! 0.o

RE: the SPAs and Tanks, I could not believe it when I saw m_bergman’s collection. I’m a little embarrassed I haven’t already printed off all of his work, since I have no excuse… except for the fact that I need to at least occasionally be productive at my job.

[vodot]

Finally got my test prints off the company printer! Pic below. The IC is the same size as the OOB IC, for size comparison.

I also shrank the self-propelled artillery pieces by a further ~20%, so I should be down to about 1:350 scale now, which should look better on the board given how tiny the OOB Mech Infantry are. I’ll post comparison pics of OOB pieces with the new smaller hummels and sextons (priests were omitted from this print, unfortunately) from home tonight. For anyone looking to replicate, grab the 1:200 3D files from m_bergman and shrink by ~45% before printing.

[djensen]

Woah, cool!

[Midnight_Reaper]

@vodot
Those are some seriously cool looking prints. I think you knocked it out of the park with all of these great pieces. Excellent work.

-Midnight_Reaper

[Tjoek]

very nice pieces and briljant printing quality! you leave me very jealous :relaxed:

[vodot]

Have some initial bundled qtys up on Shapeways for order, if anyone wants to try these out and support a starving engineer… :)

Minor ICs x10: https://www.shapeways.com/product/SU3XFL8JB/minor-industrial-complex-x10?optionId=83658202&li=shop-inventory

Minor ICs x20: https://www.shapeways.com/product/FXMTA32SU/minor-industrial-complex-x20?optionId=83658755&li=shop-inventory

Major ICs x10: https://www.shapeways.com/product/WFG68GKNM/major-industrial-complex-x10?optionId=85494390&li=shop-inventory

[djensen]

I really wish Shapeways had an affiliate program. In fairness to our Sponsors I’m not sure how to handle one off projects like this.

Maybe a bunch of Shapeways creators could get together and go in on a Bronze Sponsorship?

[vodot]

@djensen Should I pull these links? I didn’t realize I had to be more than just an individual sponsor.

[djensen]

@vodot I need to discuss with the moderators and the current sponsors. It’s not like you’re starting a store or selling stuff on eBay. Just sharing what you’ve built to be available on Shapeways.