Wednesday Workbench 31 May 2023 (aka 27 Days Later)

 Oh dear. It seems that I dropped away from posting for much longer than I should have done. Sorry about that.

I haven't picked up a paint brush since finishing that pair of Fatties, as I've been doing a lot of test printing for Kathy Millatt's kickstarter campaign. I've also been doing a lot of design work for the Peach Trees terrain. I think I've now got the atrium walkways as good as I can get them now - I just need to adjust the positioning of the OpenLock clip holes and make some minor changes to the corner pillars. I've also test-printed enough sections to do three levels of one side:

I noticed that without the apartments behind them, the walkways sagged a bit so I quickly designed some support columns to hold them for these photos. As it is 1m (40 inches, actually) wide I found that the only space where I could actually take the photos was on my kitchen floor, so the lighting isn't as good as it could be.

A lot of research (and trial and error) has gone into these - finding images online, realising that there aren't as many showing what I need as I'd like and then capturing screen-shots from the film to get more images.

For the atrium corner sections, I think I might make sense to do them as 8" x 8" tiles (8" x 9" for the ones where the parapet sticks out beyond the pillar).

The next stage of this project will be to design the apartments, shops and other bits that are needed. The first stage of that will be to create the repeated elements like wall lights, entry-phones and such.

Kickstarter: Modular Landing Pads

 The Kickstarter campaign that I have been doing test-prints for launched a few hours ago:

There's a link in the picture above or just click here: linky-link 

Some of you may know Kathy Millatt from her YouTube channel or from her time as a judge on The Great Model Railway Challenge. She's also a SciFi geek and has recently started playing tabletop games (Star Wars Legion).

She's been working on the designs for these modular landing platforms over the past few months and, boy, are there a lot of options in the package.

I've spent the last two weeks (almost) test-printing the SciFi Ring from the Galactic Set:

The ring has two levels which can be used separately (the upper ring needs basing sections for that though), or together for a taller structure. There are 14* different lower sections and 12* different upper pieces. And that's just for one of the four landing pads in the Galactic Set and before any Stretch Goals are added.

In the photos above you can see what I have printed so far - 14 lower sections and 4 upper sections. You need 12 per level to make a basic ring - I'm printing extras to show off all the options, but that means making a sort of figure-of-eight shape.

There are three pledge levels:

Core Modular Set (allowing you to build landing pads in a range of sizes and shapes) - £32

Galactic Set (SciFi Ring, Desert Ring and a Sky City one either full or flat) - £32

All-In (both sets) - £50 (or £45 if you get in early)

Considering how much you get in each set, I'd say that it is incredibly good value. Of course, once you have the files you will need to print them...

* actually slightly more - for the lower ring there are two different tops for the towers and a variant of the buttress piece which requires supports for printing; for the upper ring there are two different tower tops.

AHPC XIII - 9th Submission

 

My 9th entry in this year's Challenge was this crate, which I had painted up in the style of Piet Mondrian for the "Arthouse" studio. The crate itself is a 3D print scaled up to 200% of the original size - it measures 2" x 42 x 2". As it counts as terrain, it only scored 1.5 points - fortunately the 20 bonus points for the studio made up for that.

Full post here

This entry also meant that I had completed the four Blue Zone studios I needed to enter the Director's Chair studio, where Curt will set me some fiendish task...

Finished: Walkways for Judge Dredd

 

After, errmmm, a few weeks the walkways are finally finished. Putting the three extra sets together for a few photos was fiddly enough, so I didn't do another arrangement with the original set added in.

I included a few figures to show the scale...

There are a couple of bits from the three sets missing from the photos as there wasn't space to include them in the arrangement:

That's two upper stairs and one long railing. With different arrangements they will get used.

With the terrain finally finished, I will be switching back to painting figures once I've given my airbrushes a good clean - they've seen a lot of use over the past few weeks.

Paint Table Saturday 28 May 2022

 

The last board for the walkways and it's almost finished. I just have the red railings and some touching up of the steps to go - they will be done tomorrow, so there might be a post of everything set-up.

Here's a quick photo of  everything that has been finished:

On the 3D printer front, I'm almost there on the fine-tuning. There's one more set of tests that I need to do, and a few more that would be useful to do but which aren't urgent. Here is a photo of all the bit's I've printed during the process so far:

As you can see, lots of cubes and little boats (I tried them and found that they were just as useful as the full size ones, but printed a whole lot quicker!). The set of nine cubes and nine little boats were done today to compare different print speeds.

Wednesday Workbench 25 May 2022

 

I'm very nearly done with the airbrushing stage - just two boards left to do the red on. I might have got them finished today if I'd remembered that the grey I'd used before was a mix (3 parts Wolf Grey: 1 part Sombre Grey) before I'd done all of the bits with Sombre Grey.

I have been doing some more 3D printing since Saturday:

Airborne Jeep

This was re-scaled from 1:100. This was the third attempt, using standard supports. Those turned out to be a nightmare to remove. I'm going to have to play around with those to see if I can get a decent print.

28mm Air Rafts

I ended up with two of these. Having printed one, I had a silly idea of printing an extra middle section to make it a four-seater:

I'd forgotten about the trim though, so I just printed extra front and rear sections to make up a second.

For the past two days I've been running calibration tests to fine tune the printer. I'm very nearly done with that. 

Paint Table Saturday 21 May 2022

 

Well, that's the black priming done. I started dry-fitting the bits ahead of doing the zenithal priming, but soon realised that my idea of painting everything un-assembled wasn't going to work. As a result I have been gluing the stairs and railings this evening.

I've solved the problem I was having - it seems I'd set my Z-offset too low, so the first layers were getting squished. Yesterday I reprinted the 1:270 Scout Courier; I also printed a 30 Ton Gig and some flight stands.

I did some more printing today. I had received a couple of 28mm ship crew figures as freebies and decided to try rescaling them down to 1:100 and 1:270. 

The 1:270 scale figures are a bit spindly and fragile - I think I'll need to rescale the X and Y axes less so that they end up a little chunkier.

I also printed the 1:270 scale 200 Ton Free Trader:

The ships are from a Traveller RPG Kickstarter I backed last year. I've got a lot more to print over the coming months, including some 28mm ones (with interiors). I'll start with some smaller prints first until I get used to the printer.

Wednesday Workbench 18 May 2022

 

As you can see, I've made a start on priming the walkways. Once everything has had an initial black layer, I will dry-fit the various bits and do the zenithal priming. I'll probably reach that stage on Saturday.

As you know, I've been rather distracted of late. That should all be over now, at least until the next distraction comes along, thanks to the arrival today of this:

Just a teaser for today; I should have a full post about it tomorrow.

Finished: Mega City One Buildings (and some other bits)

 

I finished painting these last night, but waited until today for photography so that I could make use of the lovely daylight that was forecast. Luckily, the forecast was good!

That's enough of the scene-setting, onto some glamour shots!

Pre-Fab Beta

Pre-Fab Alpha

The extra complete ground floor:

The extra ground floor with doors from Blotz:

Extra cantilever and two bridges:

Large Crates

Street Lamps

Five new ones:

Four originals, now with acrylic lamps:

Original and new, side-by-side:

Having been a little disappointed by how the OSL effect turned out on the originals, I decided to try applying it after airbrushing a thin layer of white. I think it turned out much better.

Tomorrow I will start priming the extra walkways. Having learnt my lesson, I'll be doing them as sub-assemblies.