Pick up your power axes and crank the viking metal as you explore the frozen halls of this fusion between science-fiction and high fantasy.
Full description and file set available on the main product page.
I have been diving heavily into table top war gaming lately and I decided I would lend my modeling experience to create a highly modular terrain set that strikes the balance between artistic detail, extreme modularity, playability, and ease of printing/painting/assembly.
This Build Guide will list the following:
Required/Optional materials to complete the project
Written instructions on on the design philosophy to assist you build whatever structure you can imagine
Recommendations for Print Settings/Orientations for certain pieces
Paint Guide (will list all the materials I used for my own personal paint scheme and snow effects)
Personal build photos and building examples
Any additional questions you have concerning the building of this model can be sent directly to me via the contact page on my website
Build Requirements
Any 3D Printer with build volume as small as 150^3mm
The largest piece in the set are the cross beams of the rooftops, or the roof itself. These pieces have a length of 165x20x120mm and 149x78.5x101mm respectively (width,depth, height). If you can orient those pieces in such a way to fit in your volume, then every piece in the set should fit.
For all the structural elements, I designed them to be optimized for FDM printing. Additionally, because of the modularity of the set, it is designed to be comprised of many smaller pieces, so I found that even with all the buildings I printed I was able to use scrap filaments from rolls that were mostly empty and ended up buying no additional filament for this project
Resin printing is not required for this set but I used it for batch printing lots of the small scenery bits that you see in my finished build
The bulkhead doors swivel on hinges that utilize 2 mm pins. I use the easy to cut 2mm Brass Rods. You may also be able to just insert a small length of standard 1.75mm filament.
5x2mm magnets were used for the pillars/roof tops. Magnets are not totally required, wall panels tend to fit snug between floor panels and you can also choose to just stack floors. Roof panels also fit securely between the cross beams without the magnets.
Design Philosophy/Build Tips
The set is designed around the use of pillars and panels. The pillars serve as junction points to slide in panels to create your main building profiles. Each type of pillar accommodates up to four junctions and thus up to four separate wall panels. Each pillar also includes magnetic inserts to allow multiple floor buildings to more easily align.
All base panels, ruined panels, and armoured fence panels fit inside the full sized, base pillars while only ruined panels and fence panels fit inside the ruined pillars. The Fence Post junctions are only meant to accommodate the Armored Fence pieces but may support some of the ruined wall panels as well.
A full wall panel has 5-6 flat open spaces per side for you to insert any greebles or scenery bits that you desire. On each side of the panel, is a small rail that allows it to slide onto the pillars.
At the top of each wall panel are wolf themed cross beams. These crossbeams are not just decorative. They serve as anchor points for the floor panels to grab onto, to ensure that the roof panels are secure but removable, even in cases of ruins and over hangs. Additionally there are window shudders and bulkhead doors that can be inserted into the open window and door way holes in the full Wall and Doorway Panels.
As mentioned, wall panels were meant to be decorated with whatever scenery you would like! To help get you started, a number of scenery items have been modeled and added to the set. Later on in the guide
One additional note about the bulk head door, it will accomodate pins up to 2mm in diameter in order to pivot smoothly inside the doorway panel. I cut my pins to 18mm in length such that I can still grip them with pliers in order to remove them.
For the scenery pieces included in the set, I have also included small printable templates to help you ensure that everything is aligned properly. The template for the overhead vents and ducts are especially important as they will ensure that each piece does not get in the way of the floor panels.
Speaking of floor panels, lets take a look at some of the other types of panels. As mentioned each of the floor panels has some braces on the underside face that securely slide onto either side of one of the wolf cross beams. Because the Floors sit on top of the Wolf Beams that means the Floor sticks up slightly into the next story of the building. This allows for the next floor's wall panels to sit in between these floor panels. This interlocking of wall and floor also helps keeps the buildings rigid and aligned and makes the use of magnets optional.
Additionally, I have the Armoured Fence pieces shown on this graphic since I didn't have room to place them anywhere else, but as mentioned, they fit inside any of the pillar types.
Roof tops work by creating a frame on which the Roof sits. Roof Cross Beams are connected via the Side Beams. The Side Beams contain optional magnetic inserts but the roof itself will hold itself in place by sitting on top of the side beams and snuggly in between the Cross Beams. If you wish to have a longer roof top, you can use extensions to string together several roof tops.
Inbetween the Roof Cross Beams you can insert Roof Windows to fully enclose the roof/attic space. Diverse Roof ruins exist to allow for more visibility coming ouf of the top floor. For max visibility you could also consider using an Armoured Fence enclosed roof top.
General Printing Tips
This set was designed to minimize the need for supports and thus a majority of pieces can be printed support free if the following tips are followed. This was assuming a 3d printer capable of printing on at least a 70 degree overhang angle. I set my stock Ender 3 at an overhang angle of 72 degrees for this project and it worked out fine.
The pieces are not pre-oriented so you will have to adjust them to ensure they are in an orientation more optimally for printing.
All pieces have had their tolerances thuroughly tested to ensure pieces easily slide together by hand while still providing a secure and firm fit.
I personally printed a lot of these pieces on a stock Ender 3, so by no means do you need a perfectly smooth print surface, but you will need to ensure that you printers XYZ steps are properly calibrated and you have no Z banding issues. Additionally, if you use Brims to assist with build plate adhesion or if you have elephant footing on your print for any other reason, that should be removed with a hobby knife or filed down as that extra "lip" can also affect how pieces slide together.
If the panels are not sliding easily into the pillars, any one of these issues could be the culprit.
Below is a video that shows how easily the pieces should fit together.
General Print Orientations
Any wall panel that features at least one wolf cross beam should be printed upside down. Some Ruined Panels may require a small amount of supports but full panels should require none provided your bridging settings are dialed in. I printed it both ways during my builds (with and without supports for the door ways and windows) and they both worked out fine.
Conversly, wall panels should be printed with their flat bottom face aligned with the build plate. This also applies to any plate not expressly mentioned in this guide.
None of the pillars require supports of any kind.
All Floor tiles should be printed on their side. This best preserves the print quality of the details and minimizes supports required. For the full floor panel, you may need to add some support blockers to the top struts just to ensure no supports are added by your slicer. They are not needed. The surface underneath the struts with supports may be a little rough and that has been taken into account with the tolerances.
All roof variants can be printed on their side
The roof cross beam only requires supports to support the wolf figure heads. There may be small overhangs within the beam details/carvings. Those don't require supports but if not blocked will still likely generate. I used support blockers to ensure they didn't print.
Lastly, if you want to print the bulkhead door via FDM, then you can print it in this orientation. No supports are required, but ensure build plate adhesion is strong.
For all the Scenery files included, I chose to resin print them. This allowed me to print the large volume of overhead vents that I placed on every panel as well as all the various other random shields/weapons in a relatively short time and preserved all their details.
Paint Guide
I'll do my best to explain the process I took to get to the frozen-over look I achieved on my personal terrain pieces. I will note up top, that if I were to do this over again, I would highly recommend painting the pieces in an assembled or semi-assembled state. I found that the acryllic paint that got painted over the alignment features, messed with the tolerances and made it difficult to slide pieces together until I filed a little of the paint away. You can always take the pieces apart after the paint dries, and if you are like me and are going to cover the whole thing with snow, you probably wont do all that much dissassembly anyway.
I sanded my pieces but it should be noted that you do not need to sand these pieces for them to fit together easily by hand. Additionally, I personally found marginal benefit between the sanded version and prints that were just painted over with acryllic, especially once all the fake snow was added. So view the sanding steps as completely optional.
Starting off with the base paint layers, I primed the raw print with sandable primer and used Abrasive Flap Wheel Sanders to sand any flat faces/edges. This included the space on wall panels for scenery bits and wolf faces, as well as the edges and top face.
Next I used, Abrasive Buffing Polishing Wheels for the more detailed areas where I didn't want to sand away the rivets.
After that, I smoothed that sanding surface over with a layer of acryllic paint, only slightly watered down to help it fill in any nooks and crannies. For the blueish-grey color I ended up choosing, I found that this gray acryllic color worked best for a base coat.
I accidentally forgot to document the color mixing I did for the hue of blueish-grey I ended up with, but I essentially used equal parts of the Neutral Gray 5 I mentioned along side Titanium White. Then, I would put in the tiniest amount of Ultramarine Blue. I did it in batches that were about one big dollop of each gray and white, and again, a very small drop of Blue. You can always add more blue, otherwise you have to over compensate and add a lot more gray and white. After that base blue-grey is complete, I went over a lot of the filagree and details with some metallic gold.
Also at this point I painted my resin printed scenery using regular hobby paint for painting miniatures.
This completed the base look for my buildings. Next, I'll talk about how I painted the snow/ice.
To start off, I give my entire model a wash using Iridescent White. This goes a long way to creating that shimmery, frozen look. I have found that flat white doesn't give the same shimmering effect that snow crystals do.
After that, I like to add my icicles and packs of ice to various overhangs. To do this I put a large glob of hot glue and then quickly pull and connect that string of hot glue to some surface below. This creates a straight hanging line while the glue cools. If you want thicker icicles you can add more glue to these cooled hanging icicles. Once everything is fully cooled/hardened, you can go in and clip these to the length you want your icicles. Now we are ready to cover everything in snow. To create my snow, I put equal parts of Iridescent White and white wood glue or elmers glue. Then I slowly add baking soda until it stops becoming so liquidy. There is a very thin line between liquidy and turning into a dough like substance so add the baking soda in via small amounts. If it gets too thick, you can also add a little bit of water just to help things mix. Notice how I then text the texture of the snow by pressing the brush up against the side of the cup till I get the texture I want. Now thats its time to apply I do that same pressing motion into the model. I do this to apply a thin layer of snow fall/ice over the entirety of the model. Once that is done, I will really load a lot of snow onto the brush and scrape it downwards over ledges to create large mounds of snow fall/snow packs. For much larger snow fall with smoother surfaces I will add in a bit more water so that it is bordering on dripping, then I will apply that to any top surfaces such as the cross beams, roofs, tops of ruins etc.
Personal Builds
Here's a photo dump of all the current builds I have for my glacial/snow terrain board. I had so much fun building this set and the fact that all the pieces are so quick to print means that I can always find time to crank out another building whenever I need another ruin for my games.
If you have any questions, please reach out to me and please send me photos of your builds!!
Yorumlar