New Terrain and 3d Printing

 As my loyal reader will have noticed from the last couple of battle reports, I have added 3D terrain to my Battletech/Alpha Strike games. I bought a Bambu Labs P1S FDM printer earlier this year and have gone wild! Well, maybe not wild, but I have had a lot of fun learning how to print terrain and figures. There have been several elements to this that I outline below. Mainly it is about terrain, but the realisation that I can produce reasonable miniatures and vehicles with an FDM printer has been eye-opening and makes me wish I had the money and space to set up a print farm! It is probably a good thing that I do not.

1. Hills and vegetation

I bought the hills sets for the Battletech mapsheets from Thunderhead Studio, and the vegetation pack. These are for pimping the mapsheets. Adding them to the mapsheets makes you realise just how close the terrain can be on some of them. These files all need painting, although I tried to minimise that by using sandstone filament to print the hills. You can judge for yourself how well it worked out from the photos below that appeared in an earlier battle report.

The hills will come in handy for a variety of scales and periods. I have a vague idea of using them for a Five Leagues from the Borderlands: Deep Below campaign as cavern walls, for example.

2. Cityscape

I also bought the Concordia City stl pack. This is a pack of pre-painted files to print. So, when I print them out, I do not need to do any further work with them, if I use suitable colour filaments. I have been working on building up a large cityscape with these. Part of that appeared in the last post about the Galtor 3025 campaign. However, that was not the full extent of what I have produced so far, and I felt like setting up as much of it as I can, so here are some photos of an approximately 3-mapsheet set-up.

Two overview shots of the full set-up on my 150cm x 90cm (5' x 3') dining table:

Some detail shots:

Map-scale Broadsword dropship in the foreground

How did that 3d-printed 15mm SdKfz 222 get into this shot?

3. Other stuff

In addition to the terrain, which was the main reason for getting the printer, I have been messing around with printing figures and vehicles with varying levels of success. My initial experiments have made me think that FDM figures are not terrible. Any flaws can be covered by a thick layer of paint and they look virtually indistinguishable from metal minis at tabletop distances. This will hopefully let me fill gaps in my armies easily and without incurring customs charges.

My first experiments were 15mm figures which I printed using a 0.4mm nozzle and standard settings on the printer. I have since bought a 0.2mm nozzle which should help with detail when I get it set up, as should tailoring the settings better, now that I am starting to get to grips with them.

Fat Dragon Games 28mm fighter with sword rescaled to match my 15mm collection

He came out surprisingly well. The shield was a bit thin, but a healthy dollop of paint has concealed the issues. The figure is optimised for support-free FDM printing.

Brite Minis 28mm kobold with pickaxe

This is a freebie from Brite Minis, again scaled to 15mm, that is optimised for FDM printing. I plan to print enough to make a unit of engineers for my Oathmark orc army once I get the smaller nozzle dialled in.

3D Breed 15mm viking with metal shield from the bits box

I also tried the free samples from 3D Breed to see what I could get out of those, because they offer vikings and Normans. I think that these really require the smaller nozzle, but it is also one of the earliest prints I made, and I have learnt much since then. Also, this range is not optimised for FDM, so it requires more care to get the figures right.

Dice-Heads Zoontalis 28mm penguin ranger

I've been working on printing some Zoontalis guilds and think I have cracked the code, which is nice. There were a lot of failures in the early prints but I now have penguins, platypuses, cats, allosauruses, and stegosauruses ready to be painted and deployed.

Battletech map-scale dropships waiting to be painted and sent to the front

Battletech Leopard dropship found on Thingiverse

A Union-class dropship dwarfs the humble Leopard. Thunderhead Studio buildings in the background.