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.

15mm Troop Transport

My latest 15mm Star Wars Item.  I printed a troop transport, and am very happy with the results. 

I had a slight issue with the print at the end and it left a gap in one of the upper layers, but it is hard to see.  It is near the front of the vehicle.

Still, I like it and love being able to do some of my own items.

Completed Turbolaser Turrets

I have painted up the turbolaser turrets that I printed.  I kept a simple paint scheme and did a quick job, but they came out ok.  You can see the print lines a bit, but they aren't too pronounced.  You can see them in the photo better than in life size, because these are zoomed in.

I am quite happy with the results and will be doing more printing soon!  I have included some of my 6mm stormtroopers so you can see the scale.  The side door is a little small, so these could probably be scaled up a bit, but then the guns would be bigger than I want.

Venture into 3d Print for 6mm

For Christmas, my wonderful wife gave me a new 3d Printer.  The one I have is the Ender 3 Pro printer.  We bought it directly from Creality because they had a great Christmas sale. Creality website.  It comes unassembled and the assembly is pretty straight forward, but it does take a little time.  The only challenging part was leveling the printing tray.  It takes a little while, and makes a big difference because if it isn't leveled correctly then the print tends to not stay on the bed. 

I had a few not great prints at the beginning, and finally found out that I didn't have the belt tight enough, so I tightened that and started getting better results. 

With the standard .4mm print head I was able to get these following items.  They are 6mm scale turbolaser turrets.  The pictures are pretty zoomed in so that you can see the print lines, but in person they are quite small.

These haven't been primed or painted yet.  They are from Thingverse.  Link

It comes in 3 parts, the base, the turret and the guns.

New 6mm Star Wars Stormtroopers

 I have just recently picked up some Storm Knights from Wakes Emporium on Shapeways link

Here is my quick review of the figures...

The pros.

The quality of these figures are amazing.  They have all of the details you would expect to find on Imperial Stormtroopers.  The helmet is spot on in design.  The level of detail is amazing.  You can see the "mouth" crack and the eye holes on the helmet.  You can tell what kind of weapon they are carrying. 

It's hard to get closeup pictures to see the details, but here is the best I could do.

The first phot shows some of the pictures with a simple wash.  The second photo shows my poor painting skills, but does a good job of showing how you can pick up the details (if you have the skills)

The other thing that is amazing is the number of variants of the figures.  There are riflemen and light repeating blasters, and even some missile weapons.  Several figs have the shoulder pauldron that marks the officers.  For the light repeating blasters there are 4 or 5 variants, and at least 3 for the missile guys.  For the riflemen and officers it is hard to tell because some of the variants are subtle differences from the others.  I would have never expected to see all f these variants, and it is a wonderful addition to the line!

Now for the cons.

The printed resin is good and does a great job of showing the details of the figures, but at this scale there is occasionally a little graininess.  You have to look close to find it though!  Most will never see it unless you paint with magnifying glasses.  The other downside of the resin printing is that the figs are just a little fragile.  However, I don't know that they are any more fragile than metal 6mm figs.  (I have broken a few of those also).  I have broken two of the figures.  Unfortunately the  officer in the picture above is now KIA.  I broke his weapon off when I was trying to reposition him on the stand.  The glue had partly dried and I tried to remove him, and then "snap".  Another one I broke off of the base when removing him from the sprue.

Conclusion.

These are amazing figures and are a pleasure to paint, and I would highly recommend them to anyone wanting to do Star Wars in 6mm!

Here are some more pics.

With my Darkest Star Rebel Proxies

With my old Rebel and Stormtrooper Proxies

People wander if they work with X-Wing miniatures, and they are a perfect match!

My First finished platoon!