The joy of 3d printing!

 At Christmas my wife gave me a Creality 3 Pro filament printer.  I loved it so much that I purchased an Anycubic Photon a couple of months ago.  I have been fiddling a lot with them this summer and have been very pleased with what I am getting.

I printed my first few sci-fi buildings because I needed an alleyway for a Star Wars RPG battle.  I printed some sci-fi dumpsters, and some crates for cover.  

Here is a selection of buildings.  The first one is from 

The following buildings are from Corvus Games Terrain Link to Corvus Games(I think they actually made the prior building also, but not sure about that)

This is from their MidRim City range.  They are fairly inexpensive.  You can buy a small set of STLs for about the price of an individual building from many makers.  I have scaled them down to 15mm.  

They are created in stories, but they don't have floors on them, so you either have to make some kind of floor, or glue the stories together as I have done.

From my resin printer I have done some micro armor.  I have micro armor Star Wars and historicals.  Here is a GHQ Abrams tank next to a printed one for comparison.  The printed one is on the left.  The quality is amazing!  The sculpting from GHQ is a tad bit more detailed, but for micro armor, both look amazing!

More 15mm Star Wars

In some of my previous posts, I have shown some 6mm Star Wars stuff.  Well, the Stormtroopers looked so good that I thought they might look good even at a larger scale, so I asked Wakes Emporium if they would scale some up to 15mm, and sure enough, he did that for me.  The end result is quite good!

Here are a few painted up.  My painting skill isn't perfect, but I think these came out pretty well.

I have been using Ground Zero Games 15mm Stargrunt figs for my rebels.  They have some that make good proxies for Rebel Fleet Troops. 
https://shop.groundzerogames.co.uk/15mm-stargrunt/infantry/islamic-federation-if.html

The Stormtroopers are found here...
Wakes Emporium on Shapeways

The Good...
There are a ton of varieties of the Stormtroopers.  The details are quite good, and the weapons as well as uniforms are easy to make out.  There are standard troopers as well as officers and heavy weapons.  One that I would like to see, but isn't there yet is a tripod mounted heavy blaster.

The figs run at about 17mm in height.  The Ground Zero figs are about 1mm taller, and are just a tad beefier.  Up close you can see that, but when they are at a slight distance (as in a firefight!), it is hard to notice the difference.

The Bad...
The price!  Shapeways is somewhat expensive to buy from.  I use these for Star Wars Miniatures Battles, so you need 3-10 squads of them, and it starts to add up after a bit.

I would also like to see other figs added in.  It would be great to have some Imperial Officers as well as scout troopers.  As far as the sculpting goes, I can't find any negatives about them!

3D Printed Star Wars Ships

I got a new 3D printer for Christmas and am having a lot of fun with it.  The one I have is the Ender3 Pro, and it was just under $200.00 new.  You have to assemble it and then do some calibration.  The first few prints I did were ok, but not great.  I am still working on figuring it out, but slowly getting better!

Here are some of my prints that I have gotten done.  I am working on a Rebel Fleet at approximately 1/10,000 scale.  I am using a slightly sliding scale.  The smallest ships will come in at 1/5,000 scale in order to print and be seen ok.

This is a group shot of the ones I have printed up now.  You can see the banding on the Mon Cal ships, but I am starting to print at a lower line height which seems to be making a major impact on the lines at the cost of a lot more time!

Below are closeups of the ships.  I have one Separatist ship which I think the Rebellion would have found and used early in the war.  Probably as some of their first capitol ships.

More Star Wars ships from Utar's Ships

I have recently acquired a few more ships for my Star Wars line.  I had the good fortune of finding Utar Ships and buying a few from him.  He is a hobbyist and made some ships for his games and he has made them available to others to buy.  He was pleasant and easy to deal with, and I would recommend buying from him!

On to the ships...

He has originally created ships for the WOTC game, and so many of his ships vary in scale as do the
WOTC ships.  Recently though, he has started doing a line of 1:4222 ships, which I thought might work with my fighters.  I wanted some shuttles and small freighters so I thought I would give it a shot.

I ordered a small group of ships.  I ordered the bulk freighter, which if you ever played X-Wing video games, you will be familiar with, GR-75 Medium Transport, Gama Class Assault Transport, and Shuttle, Lamda Class Shuttle, and I meant to order the Delta Class DX-9 Stormtrooper Transport, but I got something that I am not quite sure what it is.  I'll have to find out because I like it.

General Impression.

The sculpting quality is very good.  I am not sure if they were 3D print models or hand made, but either way, I found them very well done.  The level of detail isn't quite as high as Odyssey Slipways, but it is as good or better than most other manufacturers that I have seen.  I am very pleased with the quality of the designs.  Utar offers ships that are cleaned of release agents and have flash removed.  I ordered the ones that didn't have this done in order to save a few dollars.  I fond them to be very clean overall.  They had only a minor amount of flash and each one had the casing sprue.  The plastic is relatively soft and easy to clean.  Most ships had the sprue on the bottom, so that it wasn't an issue anyway.  The only ship I had any problem with was the Lamda Shuttle.

This is after cleaning the flash.  If you look closely, you can see the line near the back of the wing.  I don't think you will notice once it's painted.

You can see the flash at the bottom.

This is the bottom.  Sprues can be seen on the end at the right, and the top left corner.

Sprues on the bottom of the wings

Sprue on the nose

The big question though is do they fit with my fleet?

Here are some comparison pictures.  The ships that they are pictured with are my Odyssey Slipways Nebulon B Frigate, and my Hallmark Star Destroyer, and then finally X-Wings from Studio Bergstrom.  

The Rebel Transport made famous in Empire Strikes Back

I will use these for my Rebel Assault Shuttles

These Assault Shuttles were from the WEG Star Wars RPG

I blew up many of these in X-Wing video game!

Now, for the actual sizes of the ships.

This guy was hard to stand up for a picture!

In Conclusion

I will be ordering more ships from Utar, and I hope that he continues to increase his production!  With the soon to be released Star Wars Armada from Fantasy Flight Games, I can see a big future for ships from the Extended Universe being used.

Star Wars fleet WIP

I have been slowly building up my Star Wars fleet, so wanted to take a moment to give some comments on the ships that I am using in case someone else wanted to do the same.

Imperial Star Destroyer.

The Imperial Star Destroyer that I am using is the Hallmark ornament.  I have 3 of these guys.

This ship is huge when compared to the rest of my ships, which I think is perfect, because Star Destroyers are huge!  It measures 13cm long which would scale to 1300 meters, and the ship should be about 1600 meters.

Mon Calmari Cruisers.

I have 2 different cruisers.  Both are from the old WOTC Star Wars line.  Now oop, but readily available on Ebay and other location.

MC80a - Winged variant

This measures 11cm long and 5cm across at the widest point.  At 1:10,000 that scales to about 1100 meters, which is fairly close.  The details are ok and it looks good with the Star Destroyer.  It is smaller, which it should be.

Viscount 

This model is huge.  It measures 17cm, so about 1700 meters at scale.  Wookipedia says that the Viscount should be 17,000 meters.  About the same size as a super star destroyer.

Odyssey Slipways ships

Odyssey Slipways (link) ships are well detailed multipart kits.  They can be a bit challenging to assemble because they have some tiny parts.  Overall, though they are well detailed.

Interdictor Star Destroyer.

This ship measures 5.5cm so 550 meters

Rebel Assault Frigate.

My favorite ship of the star wars universe!

Measures 7cm or 700meters

Nebulon B Frigate

Measures just below 4cm or 400 meters

Nebulon B2

This ship looks like a shark flying through space!

I love the look of this ship!  Measures 4cm or 400 meters

Bulk Cruiser

This is a relatively new release, and a great looking ship.  It measures 6cm or 600 meters.

Lancer Frigate

The lancer measures 2.5cm or 250 meters

Halmark Blockade Runner

This ship comes with the Star Destroyer.  It is actually too big for the scale, but it looks better with the fighters than the ones that do scale.  It measures 2.5cm or 250 meters  I also have the Odyssey Slipways one, but it looks too small beside the fighters, so I am not sure I will use it.

This fighter has seen a few too many battles!

Very small!

Fighters

These are all produced by Studio Bergstrom (link).  Obiously they don't scale to 1:10,000.  At that scale an a-wing would have to be 1mm, which would be a dot!

The whole group.