More 3D-printing adventures (A Billion Suns edition)

After a rather severe setback (and a fortuitous rescue by the store that sold me my 3D-printer) I'm back on track 3D-printing more wargaming 'stuff'. I'm also actually painting some of it. Lets start there. Here's a shot of the first ships I finished. Only a few more to go (and some extra scenery) and I can actually start playing A Billion Suns.

Painting small scale spaceships is an art form unto itself

I bought the files to print these ships from the (modestly named) website Game God Terrain. Here's a link to their A Billion Suns collection (this is the SSA Space Fleet). I really like the design of these, but I did scale them up to 150 percent of the originals. I want a miniature I can really hold onto, and the orignals where just to small for my taste. 

As happy as I am with the first bunch of this fleet, I think I'll add more color to the next set. I'll also try and check if everyone is flying in the same direction next time I take pictures (here's looking at you captain of the vessel on the bottom left).

Seeing as this was my first attempt to paint small scale space ships I learned quite a few things. To start with I stole a hint from somewhere (forgot to take note of the source) that you shouldn't use metallics on this scale and go for grey instead. Aside from that, I used a lot of zenithal spraying of gradations of greys (note to self: do not insert 50 shades joke here, it is getting dated). With the basic 'color' out of the way I freehanded random red stripes on the models, just to make them look slightly more interesting. I used Nato Black for guns and exhausts and blasted a bit of electric blue (with added white) around the engines to give them a 'spacy glow'. With all that finished I went for a gloss coat (Alclad II Aqua Gloss) and then used a Payne's Grey oil wash to get the panel lining in focus. A handy bit of swabbing with a sponge tipped eyeshadow stick (thank you Google for that translation) and the ships were basically ready to go (I added a few dots of light grey and white accents here and there to make bits pop). 

When your models leak resin, you have a serious problem.

With my paining space ships crash course out of the way, I'll shuffle on over to 3D printer lessons. Well let's cross-over first. I still needed to add bases to the models and as my 3D-printer had troubles I couldn't print them. Being impatient made me improvise so I ordered a big back of transparent acrylic lollypop stick from Amazon and cut bits of there. Then I (carefully) drilled 4mm holes in my ships and in a bunch of 32mm bases. At this point I got a nasty surprise. I hollowed these ships out in my 3D-printing software, but never added holes. Its plastered all over the internet that you should do that, so me being me I decided to ignore that sage bit of advice so I could personally find out if it was necessary. It is necessary. The above two ships started leaking uncured resin from the holes I drilled into them. 

These two came out of the Wash&Cure only slightly worse for the wear (I'll call the damage to the paint 'weathering').

Resin, being a poisonous irritant, should not be on game pieces. To make things worse uncured resin sweats through cured resin. So over time the uncured resin leaks out of your miniature onto your paint job. As uncured resin dissolves paint, your work promptly gets eaten by it. "I'm on a joyful road of discovery*," I thought on finding this out (*the actual language used may have been a bit harsher and swearier). As the models where potentially unsalvagable anyway, I decided to drill out the hollow bits and stick them back into my washing station. This gave me a wonderful opportunity to find out if the cleaning liquid I use eats paint. To my joyful surprise it turns out it didn't and the models are fine now. 

After about 16 hours of printing I got a really big ship.

Not quite fine is this humongous battleship I printed. It is was the biggest model I printed on my 3D-printer so far, taking up the entire build plate and almost the entire height of my printer. By printing this model I found out you shouldn't point fine detail towards the build plate on my DLP printer as the engines came out looking awful. I did, however teach myself how to add holes to a model so uncured resin can leak out. So there was that. 

About two weeks later my pretty ship warped into this.

Unfortunately after about two weeks of looking pretty, the model started tearing itself apart anyway. Here's a shot of it before I binned this project. After curing (and getting primed) it suddenly started to crack and over the course of a few days it malformed into this. Now I could paint it up to be a wreck, but I don't know if it'll stop warping at some point (that's what made me decide to go for binning it). I suspect that I either set my cure time for individual layers too low (3.5 seconds) (printer manufacturers like to boast low numbers to exaggerate the print speed) or that the wall size was too thin (2mm). I upped my layer cure time to 7 seconds now and I'll only work with 3mm walls from this point. Here's to hoping that'll do (and also that some of my other models still left don't crack over time (I've had to bin most of my first projects)). 

Let's finish today's misadventures in 3D-printing with my second video ever (I was planning to edit my first video tutorial but I can't convince Blender to stop rendering everything in slow motion). When I started printing I had to wipe excess resin from my printer bed after every print. I figured this was normal unit I had standard misprints in my prints. The above video is me checking my resin reservoir for holes (and finding one). I fixed this temporarily by applying a bit of transparent tape (switching that with a replacement for the reservoir's bottom (FEP) foil later. Unfortunately it turned out the damage was already done. A few weeks later only the lower half of the printer's LCD touchscreen responded to my touch (and interpreted it as me touching the top half of the screen). I returned the printer to the store for a technical analysis and it turned out resin had leaked from the print bed into the printer, destroying the mainboard over time. The machine was a total loss and the damage was outside of warranty. Fortunately for me the store decided to go for lenience and gave me a replacement printer anyway. So a big thank you to 123-3D.nl for that. It would've been a gruesomely expensive lesson otherwise. 

Pro-tip: add cotton ball smoke effects to your Gaslands games for that extra bit of spectacle.

Lets end this story on another positive note with a quick shot of a recent game of Gaslands I played. My law enforcement team won by blowing up the filthy scrags that challenged me to a Death Race. If A Billion Suns is only half as fun as Gaslands and Stargrave (I should put up the story of game two someday soon) it'll still be worth the effort of learning how to make 3D prints to play it.