A a few quick shots of my new minis

[Zinkala]

I've had a 3d printer for a few months. A little over a month ago I stumbled across some 6mm WW1 British infantry by Small Armies on Thingiverse. I tried printing them and they almost turned out. I tweaked them a bit until my fdm printer could handled them and then went nuts. I used them as the base for my WW2 Canadians along with a lot of things from M_Bergman. I've wanted to do this since the last century. So nearly every spare minute has been focused on making all the options for the 1st Canadian Army and 12 SS Division. I've found a lot of stls, modded a lot of stls to make them print at this scale and designed a couple things on my own. Had  a lot of trial and error learning to use a few programs and the 3D printer. Still working some bugs out with both but pretty happy with the overall result. Most of the infantry is nothing to brag about but a lot of the rest look pretty nice even with my high speed, slap some paint on jobs.



Buidlings are not entirely successful 3D prints the rest is scratch built by me. Next is the Canadian reserves sitting out the next battle.



A portion of the germans preparing for the next attack.



Me and my 17 year old son have played a game nearly every day this last week because he had no school and work is light for me. Starting to get a Handle on BKCIV but there's a lot of rules and modifiers to remember. Feeling a bit sad for the Canadians as my record with them is 5 losses, 1 win and a tie.

[fred.]

With width tags added to the images

Buidlings are not entirely successful 3D prints the rest is scratch built by me. Next is the Canadian reserves sitting out the next battle.



A portion of the germans preparing for the next attack.



Me and my 17 year old son have played a game nearly every day this last week because he had no school and work is light for me. Starting to get a Handle on BKCIV but there's a lot of rules and modifiers to remember. Feeling a bit sad for the Canadians as my record with them is 5 losses, 1 win and a tie.

[Aksu]

Very nice! Are you printing 6mm figs or vehicles? For my gaming stuff I've been printing 20mm vehicles and buildings and (simple) 1:3000 ships, and for my model railroad stuff 1:160 (10mm) buildings etc. with my FDM printer. Printing even smaller figures sounds like tempting challenge Was it difficult to tweak your printer?
Cheers,
Aksu

[Zinkala]

With width tags added to the images

Thanks. I'll get it all figured out eventually.

Very nice! Are you printing 6mm figs or vehicles? For my gaming stuff I've been printing 20mm vehicles and buildings and (simple) 1:3000 ships, and for my model railroad stuff 1:160 (10mm) buildings etc. with my FDM printer. Printing even smaller figures sounds like tempting challenge Was it difficult to tweak your printer?
Cheers,
Aksu

I'm printing everything. I have a Creality CR-6 and it worked pretty good right out of the box. But 6mm people are right on the edge of what it can do. Sometimes they turn out good, sometimes not so much. I'm using Cura settings from Fat DRagon Games when I print minis. Most of the adjusting I did was with the stls. When printing the houses and some other terrain I'm using the Cura low quality settings for a 0.4mm nozzle. It's way faster but I'm still having trouble getting it set so it's not under extruding. I've only done a couple handfuls of houses, pillboxes and gun emplacements so haven't got it working perfect yet. Now that I'm slowing down on the minis I can try to get the terrain settings better.

The biggest thing was learning how thick the minis needed to be to print. I enlarged the infantry a bit so they are closer to 8mm tall. Here's a cloe up shot of a company HQ stand.



Like I said they're not the best but they work. A lot of the British/Canadian infantry I just took the mini stl from SmallArmies and cut and pasted them onto the thin bases I wanted. But I also modified them to make gun crew and support weapons of all types. This is a CMP radio truck from M_Bergman plus some British officers and table from SmallArmies on a 30mm round base that I use for a battalion HQ.




For some reason I love that grouping of officers and table so have a few HQs for both the Canadians and Germans using it. It has flock and sand on it now but still the same crude paint job. Looks fine on the table and at arms length.

For germans I had to do a bit more work. I found some 1/100 stls of infantry by Erik Szymanski. They had a few standing and crouching poses and detached arms with some different weapons options. I had to shorten and thicken the models, redo weapons to make them thick enough to print and redid the arms because they were pretty bad anatomically. I'm not very good at 3D sculpting but I am getting better at modifying other people's work. A bit blurry but I particularly like how my mmg team turned out. They print perfect unlike the riflemen who often have issues with their guns.



With guns and artillery I resized them a little to better match the crew and make sure they were thick enough to print, I've been printing them all as one piece, gun, crew and base. I'm happy with the results but sometimes the supports are a bit tricky to dig out from under the guns. A 21cm Mrs 18 and 25 pounder as examples.




Should show some of Bergman's tanks. The ones scaled for 1/200 work perfectly just by resizing down to 70%. 1/100 scale models I fatten, simplify and resize in Blender. Took weeks and a lot of ugly, nasty prints to come up with a fast method of getting them to work. First a 1/200 Sherman Firefly. The only clean up I'd done was snap off the supports on it's rear.



Some schwimwagens. These things are tiny and I'm amazed they printed so well.



The tiny bit of stringing can be annoying. It's like cobweb on some of the models. I read that a quick pass with a lighter gets rid of it. Don't smoke but went and bought a lighter a few days ago to try. Melted the barrel off an archer spg in a split second. Guess I should only use it on the thick pieces which don't generally get as much stringing as the skinny barrels.

Here's a pic of 2 sdkfz 222s showing my problem when trying to resize 1/100 scale minis. The one on the left was one of my better attempts from a few weeks ago. After a lot of trial and error and reading advice on how to adjust things in Blender I came up with the method that gave me the one on the right. For a 15mm long mini I'm satisfied. There's a lot of 1/100 scale stls out there and it's nice to be able to use them if I want.



My trick for getting the 1/100 vehicles to print is;
import stl into Blender
go to edit mode and unselect the vertices for the holes or plugs for the turrets.
Alt S and 0.3 to beef up the model a bit
M and 0.03 to simplify the model a bit.

After that there may be a bit of extra clean up to bulk up gun barrels or remove tiny details that may cause problems.

Lots more photos in my folder here http://www.mediafire.com/folder/44q5cot7t0bmd/WW2+microarmour and a thread explaining what I was doing on TMP here http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=544436

[Zinkala]

With width tags added to the images

Ok that didn't work. How do I do the width tags? Getting a little past the few photos I said too.

[Leon]

Ok that didn't work. How do I do the width tags? Getting a little past the few photos I said too.

You need a width tag in the first of the image brackets, so it should read something like [img width=700]ImageAddress[/img ] (ignore that last space, I had to put it in otherwise the code isn't visible!

[Zinkala]

Thanks, Leon. Testing.



Looks like I can do it. Pic is a pillbox sized to perfectly to fit my infantry bases.

[Aksu]

Thanks for the breakdown of your process, I need to start experimenting with model manipulation and slicer settings. Very inspiring!
Cheers,
Aksu

[Zinkala]

Thanks for the breakdown of your process, I need to start experimenting with model manipulation and slicer settings. Very inspiring!
Cheers,
Aksu

If you want any of my modified stls I can put them up somewhere for download. Maybe save you some of my headaches. I think the only thing I don't have for canadians is Polsten AA and that covers a lot of what the british had late war. Got a lot of things for germans as well. If you didn't already know this is the place to start. https://www.thingiverse.com/m_bergman/designs He's my hero because without his huge library I would never have started. He doesn't have everything but once you can convert his 1/100 models it's awful close to everything.

[Zinkala]

Still chugging away with this project but have slowed down a lot. I'm almost done printing everything I want for the canadians and 12th SS. At first I wasn;t thinking about doing a D Day scenario but now I'm considering it. I don't think it would take a huge amount of effort to be able to do it. Here's a few pics of the Canadian forces.

An infantry battalion with regimental HQ, FAC, FAO, sniper and a MMG company. Suitable for the 2nd or 3rd Canadian Infantry Division or part of the 10th Brigade of the 4th Canadian Armoured Division.


The Lake Superior Motor Battalion of the 4th Armoured Division. They eventually gave back their US halftracks and switched to C15TA armoured trucks. I have enough armoured trucks and ram kangaroos for them as well.



A battalion of the 2nd Canadian Tank Brigade which supported the 2 Canadian infantry divisions in NWE. I found a file to make them into DD tanks for D DAY but have only test printed one skirt so far.



A selection of most of the recce elements from all parts of the 2nd Canadian Corps.



Artillery support including Priests, a Long Tom, 5.5 inch howitzers, 25 pdrs and 4.2 inch mortars.



Everything that was ready a week or so ago when I took the pictures. Already added a bunch more to the pile.



Today's new additions. A Churchill crocodile, Churchill AVRE and LCA.