I've tried to start specific logs here for various armies, games, & other projects in the past, but my ADD-riddled brain won't let me stick to any one thing for very long, so here instead is just a 'whatever hobby stuff happens to have grabbed my attention lately' log.
Most recently that's been 3d printing using an FDM printer. These have traditionally not been preferred for miniatures stuff due to lower detail sharpness, more visible layer lines, and more difficult to remove support materials than resin printing. But resin printing has its own hassles - most notably toxic liquids and hazardous fumes leading to serious risk of poisoning, chemical burns and allergic reactions, and requiring hasslesome post-processing. In my small apartment with a room mate resin printing simply isn't an option. FDM isn't entirely free from hazards - it does melt the plastic filaments to deposit material on the print and in the process inevitably releases microplastic particles into the air, but it's a much lesser risk easily managed with a bit of ventilation and a decent HEPA filter. And FDM printers have come a long way in recent years in terms of cost, east of use, and print quality.
I went with a Bambu Labs A1, and it is a very nice product in terms of those big 3 factors - cost, ease of use, and print quality. It's performed well above my expectations so far. HOWEVER, I'm hesitant to recommend it to others. Bambu Labs has adopted a sort of Apple-style walled garden / closed ecosystem model that limit how you use your own machine, there are network & IP security concerns with Bambu printers - especially if you use their otherwise very convenient cloud functionality, Bambu labs has benefited tremendously from open source software developed by the 3d printing community while keeping their own software proprietary, the printers tend to be pretty reliable BUT if you do have problems their customer support isn't very good, and there's now a patent dispute with Stratasys which might potentially threaten the ability for Bambu to operate in EU and US markets. And since their printers are walled garden situations if that does happen it's not clear whether printers already purchased will even continue to work. Again, I'm very happy with my A1 so far, but any one of these issues probably would have affected my purchasing choice I had thought to extend my research to the company making the product instead of trying to find the 'best entry level FDM printer' - Which nearly everyone I could find agreed the A1 is, and again my experiences do bare that out so far, but still.
In terms of print quality for miniatures, I'm actually super impressed with the A1. These three are support-free mini files from Teirale on Printables, printed using a 0.2mm nozzle with 0.06mm layer height 'high quality' default settings. The detail is a little soft in the faces and hands, and the weapons are a bit chonky, but those are the case with the files as well, the A1 can actually handle detail a bit finer than this, which is imo perfectly sufficient for D&D minis, or line troopers in a rank & flank game.
Unfortunately, while the print quality is good enough for models with more elaborate poses, finer details, and thinner parts, FDM supports are less reliable and more difficult to remove than resin supports, making something like this skeletal horse from Lost Kingdom unworkable. Really frustrating since, again, the print quality is there imo. I could try chopping the file into more parts to make it easier to support, or fiddling with the support presets, or applying them manually, or I could get the multi-filament-spool peripheral which would let me print the supports in a different, easier-to-remove material (at the cost of wasting a bunch of filament of both types in the process of switching back and forth)... but no. This isn't what I got this printer for, so it doesn't bother me that I can't make it work for this. My shame pile of unpainted minis is mountainous already. I'm happy enough that it can handle less delicate, support-free minis, that's already a bonus imo. What I really got this thing for was terrain.
While I have tons of minis for my armies already, what I don't have much of is terrain, and GW's offerings for Age of Sigmar are pretty limited and outside of super-specifically-themed Warcry stuff has somehow actually been getting worse over time. The motivation to finally pick up a 3d printer came from this terrain set from 3DHexes, who does support-free stls for variously themed terrain sets on kickstarter. I've wanted something functionally equivalent to the GW studio ossiarch walls & gates ever since the bonereapers were first revealed, and this set seemed to be a solid implementation of the concept without trying to be a direct copy.
Initial prints turned out very nicely, but ran into a bit of an issue with scale. The default scale of these walls is HUGE, which makes for an impressive impact on the table, but is maybe a bit unweildy for actual gameplay. They're certainly a fair bit larger than the studio obr walls I was looking to imitate. Worse, the un-crenellated parapet walls are too tall for mortek guard to see over - which to be clear is a problem with the weirdly tiny scale of mortek guard - they're smaller even than regular skeletons - and not a problem with these terrain files. Shown in these pics is an original wall on the right, along with two attempts to resolve the scale issue. On the left is the wall printed at 80% scale. The morteks see over the side just fine, it's closer to my impression of the scale of the studio models, but it does lose a lot of its impressive presence. In the missle is a 100% scale wall, but with the wall topper file modified to raise the floor a few milimeters to let the morteks see over the side. Both solutions work, imo, and I'll probably print at both scales eventually, but I was having trouble deciding which to print at first, so I went back to look at some classic warhammer terrain for comparison...
In particular the old Warhammer Fortress, which I wanted as a kid but never had the funds to purchase, or the gumption to scratch build. With some corner pieces to loop the wall back around on itself, the 3DHexes bone walls can make a very similar fortress layout, and printed at 80% they're very close to the scale of the Warhammer Fortress's lower walls. Of course, a lot of the physical presence of the warhammer fortress came not from its walls, but from its corner towers, and the 3DHexes terrain doesn't have corner towers, just corner walls. It has one cylindrical tower that I could smush walls into, but that tower has a weird 3-way symetry that wouldn't line up with square walls, and a hexagonal castle at any scale would be way too big.
But with a little bit of effort (a lot honestly, due to not knowing what I was doing) I was able to cobble together this makeshift tower out of the various 3DHexes print files, plus a free door & trap door I found online. It's built to fit with the 80% scale wall prints, using parts at 100% scale, including a raised floor for the tower top to let the morteks peek over. It's far from perfect - there are a few noticeable seams where different parts fit together to file down or otherwise obscure in a final print, the worst being an unsightly line of partially overlapping rivets part way up. Again though, while I wasn't able to fix it in the file, it shouldn't be too hard to clean those up after printing. With this I should be able to reproduce something very similar to the old Warhammer Fortress I wanted but never had.
I'm currently printing the topper, using the 0.2 nozzle's 0.06 layer preset. This will take nearly three times as long as the 0.08 preset on the 0.4 nozzle that I used for the previous wall prints, which I already thought looked plenty good, so probably not worth the extra time for larger terrain pieces. But I figured I'd try it this once just to be able to make the comparison.
As for the tower itself... I don't know. I think it looks alright (owing entirely to the quality of the files I was working with), but the wall corner pieces it's mainly built out of are the plainest part of this terrain set, and making them into this big tower calls more attention towards their relatively generic stone & beaten metal plates, and away from the cooler bone-mold sections of the walls themselves. So I might want to see if I can add ~some~ sort of interesting detail to this piece somehow before printing it. Maybe overlapping some bone designs from the wall files, or maybe carving out some channels in the metal plates to stack some skulls or other bones in or something? I don't know. If I haven't figured out something by the time this print's done tomorrow afternoon then I'll just start printing more walls at 80% now that I'm confident that's the scale I want to start with.
Most recently that's been 3d printing using an FDM printer. These have traditionally not been preferred for miniatures stuff due to lower detail sharpness, more visible layer lines, and more difficult to remove support materials than resin printing. But resin printing has its own hassles - most notably toxic liquids and hazardous fumes leading to serious risk of poisoning, chemical burns and allergic reactions, and requiring hasslesome post-processing. In my small apartment with a room mate resin printing simply isn't an option. FDM isn't entirely free from hazards - it does melt the plastic filaments to deposit material on the print and in the process inevitably releases microplastic particles into the air, but it's a much lesser risk easily managed with a bit of ventilation and a decent HEPA filter. And FDM printers have come a long way in recent years in terms of cost, east of use, and print quality.
I went with a Bambu Labs A1, and it is a very nice product in terms of those big 3 factors - cost, ease of use, and print quality. It's performed well above my expectations so far. HOWEVER, I'm hesitant to recommend it to others. Bambu Labs has adopted a sort of Apple-style walled garden / closed ecosystem model that limit how you use your own machine, there are network & IP security concerns with Bambu printers - especially if you use their otherwise very convenient cloud functionality, Bambu labs has benefited tremendously from open source software developed by the 3d printing community while keeping their own software proprietary, the printers tend to be pretty reliable BUT if you do have problems their customer support isn't very good, and there's now a patent dispute with Stratasys which might potentially threaten the ability for Bambu to operate in EU and US markets. And since their printers are walled garden situations if that does happen it's not clear whether printers already purchased will even continue to work. Again, I'm very happy with my A1 so far, but any one of these issues probably would have affected my purchasing choice I had thought to extend my research to the company making the product instead of trying to find the 'best entry level FDM printer' - Which nearly everyone I could find agreed the A1 is, and again my experiences do bare that out so far, but still.
In terms of print quality for miniatures, I'm actually super impressed with the A1. These three are support-free mini files from Teirale on Printables, printed using a 0.2mm nozzle with 0.06mm layer height 'high quality' default settings. The detail is a little soft in the faces and hands, and the weapons are a bit chonky, but those are the case with the files as well, the A1 can actually handle detail a bit finer than this, which is imo perfectly sufficient for D&D minis, or line troopers in a rank & flank game.
Unfortunately, while the print quality is good enough for models with more elaborate poses, finer details, and thinner parts, FDM supports are less reliable and more difficult to remove than resin supports, making something like this skeletal horse from Lost Kingdom unworkable. Really frustrating since, again, the print quality is there imo. I could try chopping the file into more parts to make it easier to support, or fiddling with the support presets, or applying them manually, or I could get the multi-filament-spool peripheral which would let me print the supports in a different, easier-to-remove material (at the cost of wasting a bunch of filament of both types in the process of switching back and forth)... but no. This isn't what I got this printer for, so it doesn't bother me that I can't make it work for this. My shame pile of unpainted minis is mountainous already. I'm happy enough that it can handle less delicate, support-free minis, that's already a bonus imo. What I really got this thing for was terrain.
While I have tons of minis for my armies already, what I don't have much of is terrain, and GW's offerings for Age of Sigmar are pretty limited and outside of super-specifically-themed Warcry stuff has somehow actually been getting worse over time. The motivation to finally pick up a 3d printer came from this terrain set from 3DHexes, who does support-free stls for variously themed terrain sets on kickstarter. I've wanted something functionally equivalent to the GW studio ossiarch walls & gates ever since the bonereapers were first revealed, and this set seemed to be a solid implementation of the concept without trying to be a direct copy.
Initial prints turned out very nicely, but ran into a bit of an issue with scale. The default scale of these walls is HUGE, which makes for an impressive impact on the table, but is maybe a bit unweildy for actual gameplay. They're certainly a fair bit larger than the studio obr walls I was looking to imitate. Worse, the un-crenellated parapet walls are too tall for mortek guard to see over - which to be clear is a problem with the weirdly tiny scale of mortek guard - they're smaller even than regular skeletons - and not a problem with these terrain files. Shown in these pics is an original wall on the right, along with two attempts to resolve the scale issue. On the left is the wall printed at 80% scale. The morteks see over the side just fine, it's closer to my impression of the scale of the studio models, but it does lose a lot of its impressive presence. In the missle is a 100% scale wall, but with the wall topper file modified to raise the floor a few milimeters to let the morteks see over the side. Both solutions work, imo, and I'll probably print at both scales eventually, but I was having trouble deciding which to print at first, so I went back to look at some classic warhammer terrain for comparison...
In particular the old Warhammer Fortress, which I wanted as a kid but never had the funds to purchase, or the gumption to scratch build. With some corner pieces to loop the wall back around on itself, the 3DHexes bone walls can make a very similar fortress layout, and printed at 80% they're very close to the scale of the Warhammer Fortress's lower walls. Of course, a lot of the physical presence of the warhammer fortress came not from its walls, but from its corner towers, and the 3DHexes terrain doesn't have corner towers, just corner walls. It has one cylindrical tower that I could smush walls into, but that tower has a weird 3-way symetry that wouldn't line up with square walls, and a hexagonal castle at any scale would be way too big.
But with a little bit of effort (a lot honestly, due to not knowing what I was doing) I was able to cobble together this makeshift tower out of the various 3DHexes print files, plus a free door & trap door I found online. It's built to fit with the 80% scale wall prints, using parts at 100% scale, including a raised floor for the tower top to let the morteks peek over. It's far from perfect - there are a few noticeable seams where different parts fit together to file down or otherwise obscure in a final print, the worst being an unsightly line of partially overlapping rivets part way up. Again though, while I wasn't able to fix it in the file, it shouldn't be too hard to clean those up after printing. With this I should be able to reproduce something very similar to the old Warhammer Fortress I wanted but never had.
I'm currently printing the topper, using the 0.2 nozzle's 0.06 layer preset. This will take nearly three times as long as the 0.08 preset on the 0.4 nozzle that I used for the previous wall prints, which I already thought looked plenty good, so probably not worth the extra time for larger terrain pieces. But I figured I'd try it this once just to be able to make the comparison.
As for the tower itself... I don't know. I think it looks alright (owing entirely to the quality of the files I was working with), but the wall corner pieces it's mainly built out of are the plainest part of this terrain set, and making them into this big tower calls more attention towards their relatively generic stone & beaten metal plates, and away from the cooler bone-mold sections of the walls themselves. So I might want to see if I can add ~some~ sort of interesting detail to this piece somehow before printing it. Maybe overlapping some bone designs from the wall files, or maybe carving out some channels in the metal plates to stack some skulls or other bones in or something? I don't know. If I haven't figured out something by the time this print's done tomorrow afternoon then I'll just start printing more walls at 80% now that I'm confident that's the scale I want to start with.
