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Tagged: 3D-printing, Historics
This topic contains 16 replies, has 6 voices, and was last updated by nogbadthebad 5 years, 3 months ago.
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May 29, 2019 at 10:34 pm #1396461
Hi everyone,
Check out my 3D printed historics. I designed over 300 models to the same scale, which allows me to recreate pretty much all of the biggest battles in history. It took about a year and a half of design and trial runs to get everything working right. These are just a few of my figures:
You can see more of what I’ve been up to at my blog:
https://forwardmarchminiatures.blogspot.com
Or at my website: http://www.forwardmarchstudios.com
May 30, 2019 at 6:46 am #1396525Hi Zach
Nice to see you here. You design some wonderful figures and buildings for a very underated scale
May 30, 2019 at 7:15 am #1396526What a wonderful post! Beautiful work.
It would be amazing to have you active here as @torros rightly says the scale could do with more representation.
What are you printing the models on? (I would imagine some kind of dlp or laser resin printer to keep the small details?)
May 30, 2019 at 8:03 am #1396529@warzan I’ve been following forward march studios for a while and love the design. If I had a3D printer I would be all over this as Zach sells the STL files
May 30, 2019 at 9:07 am #1396534It would be the buildings and painting them I would love the most. What scale ratio do you use for buildings?
May 30, 2019 at 9:42 am #1396554May 30, 2019 at 10:03 am #1396562Thanks! I’ll be around, haha. A few months ago I was actually hoping to get the guys (and girls?) on here to maybe review my line at some point, but I’m really busy outside of the wargame world at the moment and I don’t know if I could arrange for any painted samples to arrive. Of course, I could have a bunch 3D printed in England and have them shipped locally. But I don’t know how much they’d want to paint up a bunch of 2mm figures, haha.
As regards printers, I designed them all for SLS but now FDM (ABS or PLA plastic filament) printers are so cheap and have improved so much that I just use those. I sell these figures in a library of .stl files that a purchaser buys the license to. They can then print as many as they like, or print them and sell them to other license holders (but not to the general public). They can also paint them and sell them, make and sell molds or casts from the molds, or whatever, as long as the buyer is a license holder. It’s a new sort of business model that has been working out ok; I’m definitely not going to get rich from it, haha. But I think in the future something like this might become the standard, especially as the price of 3D printers comes down and the quality of prints go up.
@torros
Thanks, glad you like them! Where did you hear about the range, if you don’t mind my asking?Getting people to try out3D printing is the hard part, haha. Most people think you need your own printer; this is not true! I don’t own a printer; never have. I use online hubs to print everything, including my experimental runs. This forced me to create models that work with generally available 3D printers, and not just my own printer. This required quite a lot of R&D- it cost me a few grand to create the range as it exists today. It got pretty addictive, frankly, but I think the final result has been pretty cool. More and more people are checking it out, too.
I ran a quote awhile back on an online hub (www.treatstock.com) for 40,000 of my tactically deployed Napoleonic infantry figures. They wanted only $100 ($112 in the UK after conversion from pounds). The figures in question are deployed in the correct historical formation, at the correct distances. I designed the range so that wargamers could use them for games, or museums could use them for exact 1:1 scale dioramas of particular battles. You could use my figures to re-create Waterloo, for instance, and show with great accuracy exactly how many men were in each formation. On the other hand, 2mm allows you to play a game like Black Powder on a small table-top. It’s a versatile scale. I decided to create a 2mm range because it was sort of a neglected scale, but I knew that there was a lot of latent interest in it. I also saw how you could use 3D printing and fairly simple models to create impressive large-scale diorama-style games.
The buildings are my favorite part too. I normally use 500-600 on a 6′ square table. They’re all at the exact same scale as the figures are. Everything is designed to work together as a whole. That includes both height-wise and the footprint of the buildings. It’s “2mm” scale, which is roughly 1/1200, but is really its own beast (I treat each 2mm tall figure as being 5’4″ tall, which was the average height of a French male at that time). That scale applies for everything, as you can see here:
I have a how-to which explains how I use the buildings when setting up the table, located here: https://forwardmarchstudios.com/hcreate-3d-maps-for-games
Well, I better get to bed here. Glad you guys like the figs!
May 30, 2019 at 10:49 am #1396623May 30, 2019 at 5:55 pm #1396824Give them a try! If you want to see if you like them before buying (the Library is $15 USD), you can try out the free test files:
May 30, 2019 at 6:19 pm #1396825Thanks for that. Just need find someone or something service to print them out. No idea how much it should cost or who does this in the UK. Might just ask on the Facebook group
May 30, 2019 at 7:05 pm #1396826@torros The only thing I can think of is the FabLab in Belfast. Not even sure you can just go in there to get something printed.
May 30, 2019 at 7:10 pm #1396827May 31, 2019 at 12:10 am #1396871They look freak’n amazing. Can they be scaled up to 3mm? I have a bunch of OO 3mm naps (somewhere in the lead pile) and so would be very interested in smiling at a friend if they could be made to fit in.
May 31, 2019 at 12:20 am #1396873Yes, absolutely they can be scaled up. Just print them at 150% and they’ll be at exactly 3mm scale. I have tens of thousands of O8 figures and the buildings look great with them. There are some 3mm figures in the Library, which are identifiable by the word”Epic” in the title. Here are some painted examples of those.
The bases are not longer as thick as what you see in this picture, but the figs are the same. French infantry in the middle, French lancers on the left, and French dragoons on the right. These were printed in SLS, but customers have done them in FDM and they came out looking great. I would order a test run of the lancers though; the free-standing lances can push the limits on an FDM printer. An SLS handles them just fine.
May 31, 2019 at 6:26 am #1396900Amazing work and photos, @forwardmarchstudios – I have checked out your site and am particularly interested to see what your and your team eventually come up with for Gettysburg. Here in the States “Napoleonic” often translates loosely as “ACW.” 😀
Just curious, have you guys ever thought about American Revolution? The small size of the battles might make good “introductory” games for your black powder, formation-based system.
I was a little sad, though … I saw your epic battle map and guessed “Austerlitz” for some reason. Then I saw it was Leipzig. Great battle, the one that really “defeated” Napoleon, instead of the more famous Waterloo.
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