Battle Bus Creation

So, I’m still on the 3D printer kick right now. I figure I have been printing pretty much nonstop for the past couple weeks. Mostly Gaslands and Shadows of Brimstone stuff. And you know, I’ve learned some stuff.

But I also realize that I have reached a point where I am willing to just start the thing up and let it go. I don’t even need to be there as it’s doing stuff. I know, crazy, right? But that’s the thing of it. This is something that when you are certain of what is going on you can let the machine do the work. I have had passable success with a number of the terrain pieces I have worked on recently.

Granted I am not building my own STL files yet. That is a work in progress. I plan to look into designing printable objects soonish. But for now I want to go through some of the stuff I was unwilling to spend the money on, but am now happy to print out because the cost of me doing it is a fraction of what I could have spent otherwise. Yep, I tend to be cheap. Or better, I like to think of it as gaming on a budget.

But really what happens in all of that, I end up with a ton of stuff I need to paint now. Currently, I am at the point of having most of the new stuff primed. After that it is just left on the list of projects I need to get to.

But you know, it’s something to note that I have been speaking of terrain. See, where I am right now, this is the easy thing to print. Some of the pieces take a bit of time so I can set those up for over night printing and check on them the following morning. And it gets some stuff out of the way. Mind you, I am getting closer to a point where I really want to build buildings and such for games. I have some ideas that I will explore but I am not fully committed to any of it just yet.

See, right now, the real learning curve is in the miniatures used in games. There are so many files available right now, as well as ones I can pay for to create armies of minis. These do not print out the same as terrain. And to another point there will be people that will tell you that printing minis on an FDM printer isn’t viable. These are the resin printer purists.

I know better. And I have seen better. There are a number of people that have learned the ways of making minis on my style of printer. I know it can be done. So I played around with it earlier this week. I found a print that wouldn’t need supports so I set it up and let the printer work its magic. It didn’t turn out so well.

It was supposed to be a skeleton holding an axe. The axe looked decent. But that was about it. One of the things I noticed was the figure was actually too small. It printed out about 3 or 4 millimeters shorter than I would have liked. Doesn’t matter how ugly the print is if it doesn’t work for what you need.

I went in to Cura and reset the settings I had tinkered with (I mean, me messing with stuff could have been the reason it didn’t work). And this time I worked on resizing the figure to make it closer to what I use on the game table. In the end, the size fix worked. But that was the only thing that had gone right. The figure was just as disfigured as the first time. But it was taller. At least I had a bit of a victory in there.

It’s a set back but not a world shaking one. You gotta love our technology today. I’ve been spending time watching YouTube videos to learn from the mistakes of others. I’m getting some decent information and on the way to being better prepared for my next attempt. It won’t be right away. I have some other stuff that I know I don’t have to fiddle too much with to get out of the way.

But it’s coming. I figure within the next few weeks I might actually get a decent enough figure print that I can feel like I learned something. It will take a bit of experimenting but I figure it will be worth it in the end. And I’ve been collecting STLs that I want to play with along the way too.

Of course, the next bit coming up is going to be figuring out CAD software so I can start creating my own STL files. At that point I might be designing my own cities for gaming. Yeah, that will be some fun times.

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