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DawnGuards Army - Digital STL & Physical Miniatures In the distant future, the human world is in unthinkable danger. Many armies fight on the side of humanity, but only DawnGuards are well known by their unwavering determination, sincere faith and the most deadly weapons.

I've just finished this one, it's a pc friend is using in our dnd campaign. He bought the stl file from hero forge and then had it 3d printed. Originaly he wanted a darker palette, but during the painting I just hade to make some colors pop. In the end he really liked it :D There's also a WIP thread here

Custom Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild inspired Paint scheme on elf warrior. The model is a 3D printed model and was brought to me by a customer She requested a Legend of Zelda inspired paint scheme based on a photo she provided of her character from the game. I really enjoyed doing this and translating the original art on to the model and I cant wait for a customer to bring me another challenge like this again. As allways if you liked this I post more pictures like this on my FB Page. Facebook.com/TabletopGlory

This topic (here) reminded me that I actually bought five orc figures to print on my 3D printer from Dragon Lock, so I figured I might as well make a WIP out of me painting one of them. I picked the one I though looked the best, and would print the best. The printer I've got is a Dremel PLA printer, and I've been using the default software that came with the machine. They've since partnered with Auto Desk's Print Studio to add the ability to do supports, repairs and that sort of thing. Aside: I've been playing around with it while writing this post, and found a rather unusual thing happened. Print Studio had an "optimize rotation" button, which, being shiny and candy-like, I pressed. It put the orc snout down, and touching the bed in several spots. That's... an interesting idea of how to print it. Might do that just to compare. It might actually print better. The settings I used for it are below. It's a pretty basic printer, and I've done some dungeon terrain from their Kickstarter back at some point. I've also printed up large stuff, and attempted a CAV scale wooden pallet (yeah, that was too small). .10 mm layers .25 mm first layer 3 shells 35% infile, lines 80mm/s with 100 mm/s travel speed 220°C Fan on, 45°overhang So using the values above, here's the first picture. It's printed out in black. If one looks at the ax handle, at the top knob you'll see a little curly que. That's what happens when the printer doesn't have any supports across a location. By default (as shown in the settings), it's looking for a next layer that's no more than 45° angled to the next one. Well, that doesn't work very well with sudden horizontal surfaces such as the bottom of the torso portion of the figure. There's a lot of curly bits under the "kilt" (English failure for me noggin'), but I could always paint those as decorative tassels, really thick hair, etc. All told, it used less than 1.5m of PLA, which using the price I pay, comes out to about 30 cents for the material. That's really affordable for building up masses of mobs for a group to plow through. But let's get painting, and I'll start documenting some insights into this figure. Now it's really easy to see what we're up against. This is just automotive filling grey primer. And there's a lot that it didn't fill. But, it's a mook, and cheap, so let's not worry about winning any awards with it. (I've got a resin printer Kickstarter I've back, OLO, so it may do this at a better resolution; we'll see). There's that big curly string at the bottom of the base. That's a vine tendril maybe. The handle of the ax... that's... uh, very worn and aged wood. Yeah. The snout is... uh... lots of hair. Yeah. That's the ticket. Okay, so it's going to be pretty obviously a 3D printed figure. Meh. Mook. Cheap. Skip it. Let's start a base coat. I'm using Olive Drab, and going over the areas that are skin... and places that I think are skin. Here's where some insight comes in on how we can make this look better. Thought #1: There's no way a wash is going to work on this. It'll just exacerbate the layering. Not much to do there but avoid washes. If I'm going to want to do shadows, it's going to be by the brush. Thought #2: Forget painting sculpted details. Anything I can do to add detail however, will probably help hide the layering. Fancy patterns to simulate fabric (which might be really well looking, as I've got half the "weave" already built in), or insignia, or other such clutter will be useful in hiding the layers. Now, in the, (ouch) four hours I've been writing this post, I hit upon using the support features of Print Studio. Here's what it looks like if I print it in the same position. I believe all the yellow areas are locations where it's unsupported, and will frizz on me. Eh. Let's see what happens. And since it's pretty easy and cheap, let's do that strange optimized rotation, with supports. It looks like this: That's... interesting. But for science! I proceed!

I was trying to save this all up for a single Show Off thread, but it's been gnawing at me to show everybody what I've got in the works. I can't recall if it was a thread here or something at ReaperCon that got me started thinking about trying to print a paint shaker. Jay's thread on a 3D printed painting mini-station (link here) sort of kicked me into gear that I needed to get on this. Spent a couple of evenings working up the mechanics of this, and got Version 01a of the shaker. It was never bound to be printed like this, since this was just proof of concept. I'm using my company's high powered CAD software (allowable for non-commercial, personal use during non-working hours) rather than the free solid modeler I've got on my home computer since it actually has kinematic simulation (translation: you can move things). This shows that there's a drive gear (the bigger one) spinning the shaker gear (the smaller one), which drives a shaker stick on a peg on the base. It's getting a 1:2 ratio, so every turn of the big gear moves the small one twice. I've also got the limitation of my printer's capacity, which restricts how big I can make these things. It's meant to be hand held and powered. I then decided to try Version 02, to try out a different shaking scheme. There's no pictures of Version 02. Failure it was. Show it, I shall not. Version 03 was the "to the printer" version, and spent last Saturday working it up. Never knew how much my eyes could cross trying to decipher gear design equations. Fudged a lot of it. I'm neither going for high speed or super strength, so I'm crossing my fingers that nothing breaks once it finishes printing. The two images above show it with and without the shaker box cover. I was wracking my mind trying to come up with some way to physically constrain the paint bottle, and as usual, simpler is probably better. Just a sliding cover going over the box. The box is at an angle to the stick (although it is all one piece) because I wasn't going to be able to push the base any further out. It just barely stays in the printable area. I've no idea if this will actually work or not, but I figured I'd at least show the work. I've already got the cover (shown below) and the drive gear handle (should've been taller) printed out in black. The shaker stick/box is printing out now in white, and the two gears will be printed out in red. I've got blue and green I could use to separate the gears better, but don't want to make it look like a clown outfit. Those little strings of plastic are from when the nozzle moved from one side to the other, as the PLA just sort of oozed out. They broke off easily and I'll have to see later if I need to trim them a bit more. This piece is pretty thin, and is 3.5" tall. A bit of a nail biter while it was printing. Didn't know for use it would be able to do something so thin and tall. Actually had trouble getting it off the tape, so I was relieved that it stuck so well. I'm going to change the drive gear a bit, putting some big holes in the main body to drop the amount of plastic that needs to be used. The shaker box uses 13.43m of filament, which calculates out to around $1.73. I suppose that's not too bad, but that gear will be either that or double. Can't let me print something that's sub-optimal, so I've got that little work to do.

I posted another one of Heroforge's custom ordered 3D printed minis the other day, and I just finished another one. This one didn't have the texture issues that the other three I've painted did - the only place I really notice rough texture is on the back side of the shield, which is fine. This particular character is the Paladin in the party I DM for (5th Edition, homebrew campaign). The symbol on his shield represents his deity (goddess of light, sunburst symbol) and the dwarven homeland he's far from (mountains). He recently joined an in-game faction called the Queensguard, so their symbol & colors are painted on his right pauldron.

Alright, I'm putting this up here because I did in fact make the 3D model for this dragon and 3D printed him myself. I used "Sculpt"ris to design him and add in the details. I'd like to see what people think of the idea of using 3D modeling and 3D printing to make and test out masters of miniatures and 'if' this thing even belongs in the 'sculpting' section of the craft corner because it's not made of green stuff and I did not poke it and prod it with scary obscure molding tools. For a little back story on the character himself, this is one of my older characters named "Roal", his main feature that he's the over pampered spoiled dragon prince. A real lazy brat that roars about being 'fierce' and 'mighty' but due to his size and shape he gets no respect. I will probably have to keep on bugging Reaper in making a gluttonous fat dragon monster for my hero's to fight against in order to take his/her hoard, but until then I'll just use my dragon Roal instead. ((I was playing with the idea of having the players do everything they can to prevent the dragon from walking back too far or it's fat torso will get stuck in a narrow part of the cave, permanently sealing it off or not depending on if they let the dragon live. Anyway, leave a comment. I'd like to hear your opinions about this.