Masters of the Universe

I’ve really taken to 3d printing. While I couldn’t get my Up!Mini to work properly, I never really had much interest. Since building my own Prusa i3 clone (Tronxy X3) and getting some half-decent prints off it, it’s hardly been left alone!

By giving myself just an hour each evening (ok, sometimes it does drift on a little longer, but rarely by much) I’ve managed to get quite a bit of painting done. All those little touches you tend to spend hours putting right have to wait, when you’re working to a tight deadline.

Then when you come back the next, you tend to think “hey, that’s ok” and move onto the next one. This is how I’ve managed to print and prime Castle Greenskull, a wind raider, a talon fighter (I had to Google the names) a Roton AND finish He-Man, Mer-Man, Beast-man, Man-at-Arms and Skeletor.

I finally got my little Up!Mini 3d printer churning out PLA parts consistently enough to leave it running for 6-7 hours at a time. Which meant I could realisitically have a go at printing my own Castle Blueskull (I don’t have the bright green PLA that Jon uses at Eagle Labs).

Over the course of this weekend, I also figured out how to do simple boolean operations on models in Blender. This means that I can add voids to existing 3d models, prior to printing.

… which means I can create little “pockets” into which I can stuff all kinds of electronic wizardry, to make things a little more interesting to look at on the tabletop.

Here’s the bottom section of the doorway to Castle Grayskull, with a servo bundled inside, and the horn/arm connected. By adding a void to the side of the 3d printed gate model, I was able to create a little recess for this arm to fit in, once the two parts were assembled.

The end result?

A motorised, electronic drawbridge and a castle that has slowly turned from green to blue….

The end result is quite nice though!

I need to finish the turrets, then cover the whole thing in filler and sand it back, to get rid of the printing ridges (and the big slice in the skull, where my printer slipped and put a big step into the top half of the skull!)

A quick update showing miniature painting progress (since 3d printing takes hours and hours for even the most basic of prints, there’s plenty time to get the brushes out inbetween removing objects from the print bed).

Man-at-Arms is almost finished – just need to think of a way of adding some interest to the club he’s holding. And while I had the orange palette out, I thought I’d splash a bit onto Beast-man.

It turns out that printing with PLA is about a hundred times easier than printing with ABS (and to date, fingers crossed, I’ve managed a couple of things and still no nozzle blocking, like I was getting with ABS).

So after printing a few sci-fi greebles successfully, I figured it was time to try Castle Grayskull….

I loaded up the Grayskull stl files (from Thingiverse – https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2840544) hit print and waited excitedly….

When I returned to the printer, I was disappointed to see that it had gone all “Spinal Tap Stonehenge” on me and instead of printing the door at 55mm high (I just eyeballed it and thought this would be a good size to work from) it tried to print it 5.5mm high!

More problems ensued (the heated bed stopped heating after 15 mins, so the large raft came loose and the entire model warped) so I emailed the files over to Jon at the Eagle Lab in Brighton (if you’re ever anywhere near Brighton, pop it – it’s an amazing version of a pro-end makerspace).

Jon’s Ultimaker 2+ churned out flawless model after model with little or no intervention; just slice the stl, load the gcode, hit print and wait. Each piece had a massive 8-10 hour print time so it took a few days in total to produce these pieces:

After a couple of days, I had a reasonably sized Castle Gray/Greenskull.

Sure, there are plenty more parts needed to make it a complete castle; I figured that the turrets could be made from 32mm and 40mm pipe (the print time on each turret is 12+ hours) and textured with polyfilla.

The entire model needs coating in filler and then sanding back, to help reduce the few areas where banding is obvious (around the eyes and nose and on a few of the vertical sections).

But all in all, I’m quite pleased with the result.

Impressed enough to think that maybe there is something in this 3d printed terrain lark after all…..

After a whole day at this, I’m sick of the smell of acetone.

I’m sick of removing and unclogging my print nozzles (the only way I know how to do this is to remove them, soak in acetone, pick out little bits of moulten ABS).

I remember now why my 3D printer has sat on a shelf for nearly two years, untouched and unloved. 3D printing is hard…..

It all started with a discussion on the BoW forums about going Back to the 80s (https://www.beastsofwar.com/forums/topic/hobby-weekender-01-03-back-to-the-80s/)

A few clicks later and I had a full set of Masters of the Universe characters in 32mm ordered from Quest Miniatures on Etsy. The He-Man miniature in the set actually didn’t look brilliant, but RNEStudio had a great looking Blood Bowl mini, obviously “inspired” by the muscle-man himself.

I was resigned to the fact that the mini was always going to be a “proxy” for the main man, as there was no disguising that big spiky shoulder pad (my modelling skills are nowhere near good enough to consider cutting it off and re-creating the missing shoulder).

I was pleasantly surprised when the model arrived, to find that the shoulder pad is entirely optional! So, coupled with a sword, instead of a hand holding a football, the miniature actually looks like Eternia’s favourite hero-in-fur-shorts.

I often spend far too long on miniature painting, with little improvement over a simple block-and-ink paintjob that normally takes a couple of hours. This one took just over three hours, to get to a reasonable standard.

Sure, GW Duncan would go mad at some areas (around the feet and sword) where I lost patience with the whole two-thin-coats approach and just slurped the paint on straight from the pot, but I needed to see I was getting near to completion.

I reckon another hour or so and my first MOTU miniature should be complete. Hopefully the others will arrive before too much longer….