Wet Paint: 3D Printed Jagdpanther

 

This big cat already featured in an earlier game in a slightly more embryonic state (let's say it came straight off the factory floor). It's a 3D printed Jagdpanther, printed on an FDM printer. Because of the nature of FDM printing, you do see the individual layers this model is built up off, and they are even more pronounced by the drybrushing finish on the model. For mid to late war German vehicles, this is something I can live with, as it gives a finish somewhat reminiscent of the zimmerit anti-magnetic coating usually applied in that era.

So I got a resin 3D printer too

Before a few weeks ago I had two 3D printers, both of the FDM type. I mostly print terrain items on them but have recently used the printers to test print some figures (the dwarves in this post). This did not turn out particularly well, as I needed to replace most of the weapons with plastic ones from my bits box because they broke off by just looking at them.

The general consensus on 3D printing for actual miniatures is to use a resin printer (i.e. an SLA one). So, when an ad popped up for a discounted Anycubic Photon S printer, I decided to take the plunge and expand my 3D printing factory with this printer.

Without further ado, because that's what most readers will be interested in, here's the first results out of it:

 

There's two versions of Ferdy Hogglefoot, my character for a possible Adventures in Middle Earth RPG campaign, and a print of one of the same dwarves that featured in the earlier post. The left most figure is printed in a new resin I just bought (a water washable one, to avoid having to dick around with various alcohols), the other two are printed in the standard resin that comes with the printer. The leftmost figure is generated on Heroforge, the central one is one I bought of a designer on MyMiniFactory and the dwarf is from a free pack by Kyoushuneko Miniatures. And yes, the leftmost figure appears to be overexposed (evidenced by the 'mushy' level of detail) - I'm still dialing in settings for the new resin :)

So, what are my first impressions of printing with a resin printer?

• They're less fiddly than an FDM printer. My experience is that prints either fail completely or succeed, and the number of slicer settings you have to tweak to get from failing to successful print is mercifully less than on an FDM printer
• They are messier than an FDM printer. Getting the excess resin of the figures (whether with alcohol or water) and draining the resin tank is just messy.
• The resin is a lot less toxic than I had thought before reading the internet. Yes, it smells, and yes, they give you gloves, but the resin bottles do not have a single hazard icon (the flammable or toxic icons) nor any P-sentence (like 'Dangerous if ingested') so they are a lot more benign than I thought. I'm not going to be drinking the resin, but I don't need to be paranoid about handling it
• The results are sturdier than an FDM printed figure. This depends a bit on your settings and orientation when printing using an FDM printer, but the axe hafts of the dwarf are a lot stronger than his FDM printed cousin (though probably not as strong as said cousin's plastic weapons)

I look forward to printing a lot more figures on (although 'in' is a more appropriate preposition) this printer. Or at least, spending a lot more money on STL Kickstarters and Patreons :D .

Dwarven unit from 3D printed miniatures

 I have been in possession of a 3D printer -- well, two to be honest -- for a couple of years now, and have used them to print terrain and vehicles, of which you can see some in action in our Crisis 2019 game.

So far, I have not printed any miniatures. Both my printers are FDM, or filament, printers and they are considered less suitable for miniatures because their resolution is too low. You can consider the theoretical limit to resolution for detail on these to be 0.1mm. In practice you can only count on 0.2 or even 0.3 mm, depending on how much you want to fiddle with your printer and slicer settings. For miniatures, that is scratching the bottom of the barrel detail-wise. The holy grail of 3D printing for miniatures are resin printers, but I have not made the plunge to buy one of those yet, for various reasons, mostly to do with resin handling & curing.

Nevertheless, I decided it was time to print some miniatures. I got some dwarven models from various sources and printed the next unit for my dwarven army on the highest resolution and settings possible on my printer.

Allow me to introduce the raw version of the Forge Guard of the Watch of the Seventh Deep:

As you can see, it was not an unqualified success - the black material is the filament I used for the print, the grey are plastic bits I had to use to replace broken parts or incomplete prints. About half of the figures lost part of themselves.

For those of you familiar with FDM 3D printing, anything that is overhanging by more than 40 degrees or so needs to be supported during the print, or the printer is printing in 'thin air'. These supports take the form of light, but still solid, pillars of filament that reach up from the build plate (the flat plate the 3D printer prints on) to the object being printed. In the case of these dwarves, the objects that needed supporting are the axes. If you zoom in on the photo and look in the back, you can see a model with its axe still supported.

To get the finished model, these supports need to be removed. And that's where the problem is - removing them from the very thin axe hafts more often than not results in said axes breaking off of the model. To a certain point, you can work around this issue by printing the models on an angle (rotating them so the axes lie directly on top of the build plate) but then the problem still remains that the axe hafts are very thin and vulnerable. An FDM 3D printed model just does not have the strength (especially in the orientation I printed them in) for that. Again, you can fiddle with the orientation so that the layers of the print are along the haft and not across it as I printed them, but that will still not be as strong as necessary.

So on about half of the models, I lost the axes while cleaning away the supports and they needed to be replaced by various axes & shields from my bits box. The majority of the replacement axes (and sometimes entire arms and hands) came from Orc sprues from Mantic Games, who used to do (and maybe still do) a grab bag sale at the end of the year where you can buy a bunch of random sprues for next to no money. I can highly recommend this for your bits box.

The conclusion? While I am happy with the detail and the lack of visible printing layers (although we'll see about that again after painting them), I doubt I'll be printing any miniatures like this again. Vehicles and buildings are fine, but for miniatures let's wait for a resin printer.

3D printed walls

Just over a year ago, I bought a 3D printer (a Dreammaker Overlord Pro, through its Kickstarter), and while it's a bit of a temperamental beast requiring the occasional bit of virtual handholding and massaging, it has been useful in the odd hobby project. Time to include the wargaming hobby in this.

Printable Scenery is a company that sells STL files for various bits of wargames scenery, from walls to houses and a few things in between. STL files are the model files which describe the subject in 3D and can be used to actual print the subject on a 3D printer. I bought the walls and fences products - both come as a selection of STL files which you can use to print your own walls as many times as you want.

Without further ado, the photos below are of my first test prints as they came out of the printer (I used black PLA) and painted:

While the grain on the raw printed wall is quite visible (I used 0.2mm layer thickness), once painted with a quick layer of black gesso and then dry brushed with various greys, they look fine.

I think I'm going to print a lot more :).