40K Friday - The Practical Side of 3D Printing

 

He's upset about being resized

I know the dream of 3D printing is "I can print all the miniatures I want for almost free" with a side order of "any time I want them" and to a point this is true. It's more true with a resin printer than a filament printer in many ways but I am happy starting out with the melted plastic option. One of the reasons I feel that way is because I already have too damn many miniatures - what I need is more time to play them. Barring a terrible physics accident that alters the flow of time (and hopefully grants some cool superpowers) one of the areas a 3D printer can help with is the supplementary stuff that you will use -with- all of those miniatures that you already have.

One of the big ones is Terrain with a capital T. I have a lot of plastic ruined buildings - because that's kind of a 40K thing. I do not have as much Fantasy/Medieval type terrain - because those fights tend to happen more in open fields like the historical fights of the medieval era did. I don't have a lot of building type terrain that isn't "blasted Imperial gothic architecture" because that's what GW sells and what GW used to show in White Dwarf and what 3rd party makers think everyone wants based on what's in all the GW photos and artwork.  I don't have a lot of WW2-appropriate terrain. As it turns out a lot of terrain is perfectly amenable to FDM printers as the occasional layer line doesn't really get in the way or ruin the look compared to how it would impact an elf face for example. 

I have some spaceship corridors. I bought two sets of the stuff GW put out a couple of years ago for that whole Boarding Action thing they did with Kill Team and for 40K. It's cool. I can see using it for all kinds of things. I'd like more but I'm not buying another one of those sets. As it turns out there are a lot of people making those kinds of things and putting the STLs out online at very reasonable prices. 

People and companies run kickstarters for big sets of terrain and the costs there are pretty affordable with those as well. You can acquire models for an entire table's worth of whatever you like and make extras of the parts you really like at almost no additional cost once you own the files. It's great. It can work for RPGs too - if you thought the Dwarven Forge stuff was cool, well, you should see what's out there now that you can print yourself.

MiniWargaming did a Kickstarter recently for this set of interesting stuff.
"The Ruins of Drakenfell"

The other side of supplementary materials here include my personal nemesis: Base Expanders. These have been a pain for a very long time. The main culprit here is once again Games Workshop. The triggering incident is when they decide that a certain army, most of whom have been on 25mm round bases for decades, really look better on 32mm round bases. So all of the new units now come on 32's, the sure-to-be-coming-upscaled-new-versions-of-old-units will come on 32's, and random strangers whether at a store or at a con assume that all of your fully painted armies should be on 32mm bases the day after this is noticed - because they don't actually announce something like this. They just start putting new bases in all of the boxes and let people discover it on their own. 

Yeah, it's a sore spot.

You could say "but if you play with friends they probably won't care. Sure. But if I go outside the friend circle it's tricky and I also do not like to see one marine army on 25s and then my other marine army on 32s. Or mixing in Ork boyz on various differently-sized bases - that's not a good look.

Guess the main two armies this has happened to? Guess which are two armies I have tons of? Bonus if you can guess which are two of my oldest armies and thus more likely to be on 25mm bases?

Somewhere around 2017 GW started shipping new marine boxes with 32s in them. I noticed it with the new Blood Angel sets first but I don't know for sure they were the first offenders overall. Then in 2018 we got the new Primaris Marines and we all saw why they really went to 32mm bases - bigger figures need bigger bases!

Somewhat later -  it might have been earlier but I noticed it later - they decided to do this with Orks as well. Now I have a lot of marines across multiple armies but I have 120 2nd edition Goff Ork boyz in just one Ork force - so you can imagine I was not pleased to see this change. People also get a lot twitchier about orks being on smaller bases than they do marines as it means you can pack more of them into melee where they are a lot more dangerous than a tac marine.

So what does one do when one's old classic 40K figures are deemed to be on too small of a base? Well I did write a post about this a few years ago that has pictures of the base expander options I had found at that time. I have used all of those at some point but some of those were very unsatisfying as I dug into them more. The silver half-ring things gave me a lot of trouble trying to line them up straight and level. The wooden rings were definitely the cheapest and I was planning to use them on my Orks but ... I hate the way they look once they are on. The cup-style are the best looking and the least trouble in my experience but were also the most expensive. Not stupidly expensive, but when you're buying them 100 at a time you start to think about how much you are spending on stuff for your miniatures that is not actually a miniature. I had a bunch of orks, a bunch of loyalist marines, and a bunch of chaos marines that all needed this treatment. In my head, at least.

I've been trying to finish up the Goff boy updates this year and then I acquired a 3D printer ... and one night while putting the new shoes on the boyz it occurred to me that I had bought 3D printed versions on eBay - maybe I could just print them myself! As it turns out I could! You can too! I poked around various sites and found several styles of the things including some that looked pretty much like the ones I had been using. 

The tan-ish ones are the expanders I purchased a year or two back (sprayed with Zandri Dust). The black ones (and the white one) I printed myself this week. I stuck one of my Evil Sunz boyz in one to do a test fit and then printed the rest. This will save me some money, even more time, and just makes things a lot easier going forward as I don't have to worry about  buying more of them, shipping them here, or keeping some on hand for future acquisitions of old miniatures - if I need some I can print some. Case closed.

There are other practical benefits. You can print custom bases too, not just expanders! You can print objective markers and banners and nifty score-keeping things and a bunch of other stuff that you might have a use for in a particular game. Spell or area effect templates and other measuring devices seem to be a popular option. 

A lot of rank-n-flank games like Warhammer Fantasy and Kings of War use blocks of figures moving around the table. Movement trays are a way to facilitate this and have been in use for many years but before you had to make them out of plastic sheet or wood or something that took at least a little effort. Now you can just print them - do search, pick the correct size, and off you go.

The crowning jewel of this is the "Movement Tray Adapter" which combines the powers of a movement try AND a base expander into one handy option. Behold:

GW brought back old school fantasy in the form of The Old World (yay) but decided to bump all of the bases up a notch (boo) so all the old humans and elves that were on 20mm squares are now on 25s and the orcs and chaos warriors that were on 25s are now on 30s  <sigh> because that's just what they do. But, by using one of these beauties you can keep your figures on their old bases but still have them take up the correct amount of space on the table. It's a triumph of human ingenuity.

Anyway much like base expanders vs. actual miniatures, here's a 40K Friday post that's not really about 40K very much. Sometimes it's not a hobby - it's a lifestyle choice.

 

Adventures in 3D Printing

 

So I finally got one. I've been talking about doing it for years and the wife apparently heard too much and decided to push me off the ledge as a birthday gift. With as much miniature work I do it's a smart move in general but the details ...

My main interest with them is printing a lot of the "extra" stuff like terrain, or custom bases, or different parts to use with "real" miniatures. Being able to print whole figures - indeed whole armies - is certainly a good option to have but it's not the priority.

A couple of weeks I am no expert at any of it but let me share some of the early challenges I have run in to in case anyone else is considering the option.

• If you mainly want to do figures you may be better off with a resin printer. They look more complicated to me involving toxic fumes and some kind of curing process after you print them but they do it without the layer lines you get with the other kind of printer.
• The other kind of printer is a PLA printer which uses stuff that looks like fishing line or weed eater string which it melts and squirts out into a shape layer by layer. The upside is that they seem to be easier to manage and I suspect plastic is more generally applicable for some things than resin but for the tiniest of things like miniature figures you do get some lines that will show. 
• The basic input - besides a spool of plastic string or a bottle of resin - for these things is a 3D model that you have probably seen discussed somewhere as an STL file. There are tons of them out there free and paid and it's pretty easy to find something you might be interested in. I signed up for One Page Rules monthly Patreon a while back in anticipation of doing this someday and they put out a big batch of STL files each month supporting various armies for their games. For a few bucks a month it is -way- cheaper than buying regular miniatures and each set includes some custom bases in various sizes, movement trays, etc. 

Now I knew a little bit already about the types of printers and I knew I would need STL files. I had some of those so once I got the printer hooked up I'm good to go right? Well ...

• The part you don't hear about so much until you wade in is the slicer. This is not a Star Wars NPC - it is the program that you use to translate the STL file into code your printer can use. Now each printer comes with one from the manufacturer and there are several that are not tied to any particular company. These are often a) free and b) generally thought to be better than the in-house slicers. I am sticking with the basic one for now but I can tell you it's a whole new thing to learn. This is a complex piece of software that will let you tweak all kinds of things but learning what all of the different fields and settings and their values mean is an uphill climb.
• At the basic level you open the slicer, import the STL you want to print, hit "slice", and it exports a g-code file somewhere, and then you send that file to your printer and print it. I've done this with some bases now and it works just fine because it's basically a flat square or rectangle or circle with some still flat-ish details on top so it's pretty simple. 
• The pit I fell in to is "Supports". This can be an absolute nightmare and is still blocking me on some models. Supports are those line-y framework-looking things you see on some 3D prints and while they exist for a reason they are a huge pain a lot of the time - at least at this point in my journey. 
• You can often get STLs in "unsupported" or "pre-supported" versions. Pre-supported means you don't need to change anything about the model - like adding supports ... until you do. Which is "sometimes". Depending on the model. Insert eyeroll here.
• Unsupported is for rugged do-it-yourselfers who prefer to add their own supports without the clutter and possible screw-ups of whoever did the pre-supported version. Basically if it has wings or arms outstretched or weapons out it's going to need some kind of supports to print those out and it's really just a question of do you trust the creator of the file or do you want to do it in your own slicer. 
• My determination at this point is that both are a pain in the ass. The promise of clean pre-supported models is great but I've found the reality to be decidedly mixed and they are usually intended for resin models only. The idea of doing it myself is also attractive except that I don't know what I'm doing at this point and end up with more support than actual model sometimes.
• The actual printing on this latest wave of devices is pretty easy. Most of them are network-capable now so you can send files to it directly from a PC in another room and some have a camera so you can watch it print in real time without ever going in there. You can also use a device like an SD card or a USB drive to to manually transfer files. The printers work, the PLA spool just feeds right in ... the physical part works great. The results depend mightily on your model and slicer results and that's the part I am still fighting regularly.

I will press on though. I had a flash of insight while running my D&D (er ToV) game the other night: monsters on demand. There are numerous files out there for all of your typical D&D monsters and while I have a lot of miniatures for that kind of thing there are times, especially when running a published adventure, that I need more of them. The Temple has one room where I need something like 12 gargoyles. Now I have some gargoyle minis but I do not have a dozen of them. But now, knowing the party is nearing said room, I could crank some out in an hour or three and have them ready to go next session - possibly even with a basic paint job. It's a dream worth fighting for ...

 I will post more on this down the road as I figure more out. Once I have some better things to show I will share some of the early disaster prints for comedic value. Onward!