I decided to fire the printer up today and printed myself some Ancient galleys on the filament Printer. I did two of the larger ones and two of the smaller ones.
I stuck them next to some 6mm Baccus miniatures to give you an idea of scale. Part of me is now wondering whether or not to give an actual 1:300 scale version and the get some miniatures to go with them. Actually have marines on the decks etc. The one thing that is missing on these is the Corvus. Okay these were only on Roman vessels and for not that long, but they would look cool.
The other thing I did today was to get the castle sprayed. Funnily enough, today one of my Facebook groups shared a YouTube video all about Samurai castles…Samurai Castles
I now have to decide whether to go for black or white walls…
Well I just got the last two off the printer and they have come out fine. There was some stringing between the peaks but to be honest it was to be expected with the increase in temperature. So that is now one of everything printed. The increase to 10% infil on the mountains certainly made a difference to the rigidity of them.
Tonight I was a bit pooped so just sorted out my mountain hexes. By sorting out please read filling in all of the gaps. I kind of forgot that the temperature had fallen a fair bit so I think it caused some lines. I don’t think it was a blockage as the lines really only appeared in certain places.
I used the tried and tested superglue and bicarbonate to add a solid top layer. The one thing I noticed was that I was missing a mountain tile. This is being printed as I type this (along with the volcano). I have bumped the temperature up by 10 degrees to see if that will make any difference, if it doesn’t then I reckon I do have a blockage. Once these two are done then I reckon I have got one of each tile that I intend to use.
On the resin front, it is still sitting idle but I do have a pile of new miniatures from the new Patreon that I need to download and get going with. I thought I might as well wait until my wash and cure device arrived, that way It will be a heck of a lot easier to clean them up, not to mention cure.
The printer has been busy again and I have printed all fifteen road tiles.
Not that you can see them really. This has got a nice selection of roads and some towns and buildings built in.
The set comes with the tiles for villages and town hexes…
Although they are great, I really think they are too large, but the roads set has smaller ones which fit much better scale wise (still very large if the tiles are a few miles across).
These will become my towns and villages on the map. The full tiled versions will become cities I suppose. My plan is to use these for my RPG’s as well as wargames campaign maps. The biggest surprise for me is that each tile tells me which one it is. I was coming up with extremely complicated ways to to record the tile numbers and tonight I noticed this…
Yep village in the woods is tile AR10, the inn is AR11 and the castle on the hill is AR12!
Doh!
I think I have half a dozen mountains to print and then I have one of each tile (that I want). Then I just have to wait for the stretch goals and print some more of these ones that I want.
I decided that tonight I really needed to get some paint put onto something. I thought I would do the walls. I painted the stonework and then when dry I added some wash. When it is all dry I will get it dry brushed and add some other washes to the tiles…
I came extremely close to throwing a can of paint across the shed and printer. I pulled it off the shelf and vigorously shook it. unfortunately the lid hadn’t gone on properly and my fingers became a little grey (actually a lot grey), thankfully I actually had my thumb on the top as I started shaking. if I hadn’t have done that it would have been a rather grey event. when I checked I realised that I hadn’t actually put the lid on properly last time. This was probably due to a build up of paint on the lid. It took me ages to get it all off the lid and inside too.
Tonight I finished off my river collection, the more numerically astute of you will no doubt notice that there are in fact fifteen. This is because the undercoated one has a repeat.
I will need to print a good number of straights and gentle bends, this will allow me to make a nice river system. This evening I have started printing the first six road tiles.
All of these are before the stretch goals are available. This is going to be one mighty map!
A bit of a short one tonight as I am a bit pooped. Hopefully something will happen Paint wise, sadly I got drawn into a) watching the various antics of the slo mo guys and secondly started watching YouTube… never a good idea for productivity.
I have been working on the building project all day today and what with the physical workout and mental workout too I am knackered. So instead of even attempting to paint anything I used the time instead to slice the rest of the Hexon Hills tiles. There are actually 14 river Tiles. I already printed six so tonight I printed a couple (13 and 14) and started printing 7 to 12. Hopefully they will be ready when I get up tomorrow morning.
There are fourteen roads to print out. A few of them have trees so will take a long time to print. I reckon a few more days and I will have all of the ones I want to have. Some of the location tiles don’t interest me at all, so apart from the volcano I haven’t bothered slicing them.
The filament printer has been a bit busy of late, whilst the resin one sits idle. I have pretty much been printing the hex tiles. I am doing one of each, as I said in an earlier post. Once I have got them all done then I will have a useable reference point to work from. As with all of my prints I keep a record in my little grey book. This allows me to work out how long things are going to roughly take.
Now as you can see, I have used a 5% infil. And printed them all at 100% size. Quite a few people are dropping to 75% or lower and some even going beyond 100%. Now some I think I am going to have to bump up the infil a bit, maybe 10 or 15%. So far it is the woods and the mountains that could do with a bit of strengthening.
So I showed the rivers and plains last time, so we have the woods and towns/villages…
And then the mountains…
The built up areas are pretty funky…
So next up will be the rest of the mountains and the roads I think.
I never got anything painted tonight as my friends came over for a barbecue and I have been working on the building project…
It is getting there…
Back to work on Monday, the kids start returning on Thursday, so hopefully things up here keep on heading in the right direction Covid wise. Unfortunately Aberdeen has locked down, and guess where the ferry loads of tourists are coming from? On the up side we can lock down a hell of a lot easier than some places, if you cannot swim all the way then you have to use the ferry or planes… if they stop then we can keep people out 😂. I do however, know some kayaker’s who paddled from the North coast of Scotland to Shetland. They basically island hopped all of the way up and then all of the way back down.
Tonight I decided that my printed Japanese Walls had sat long enough, so I sat down to give them a lick of paint. As I had the paint out anyway I set about the houses too.
These were painted in Artist’s Acrylics, still a fair old bit to go, but. They are definitely beyond thee grey undercoat. I will get washes. On them as well as paint in all of the timbers on the buildings.
I am rather pleased with the way they they have turned out so far.
Bogenwald 