Tuscany Hill Village Terrain Build

A long time ago now, I designed the Town Hall in FreeCAD. I used Cortona’s town hall as the basis and came up with the following.

Having gained some experience of printing resin buildings on the 3d printer, this would be the most challenging yet. Firstly, it’s the largest building that I’ve attempted to print. Secondly, the footprint of each floor doesn’t fit onto the build plate without some offsetting and printing at an angle. The ground floor will also have to be printed in two separate sections, with the stairs separate.

I also reviewed the cad diagram and decided that the front of the stairs looked a bit plain, so I designed a fountain/water trough thing to attach to it. And then printed these out.

Now to print each floor. Each print took around 6 hours to complete and there was, annoyingly, some slight warping. I think this was due to the size and weight of each print and the supports. I probably needed more supports. But overall, it wasn’t too bad and I was able to gently de-warp them with some warm water. It’s not perfect, but good enough.

Here’s all of the floors after printing.

With a little bit of sanding and some gentle cutting in a few select places, I now have my Town Hall. I’m quite chuffed with this.

The really eagle eyed probably spotted that the clock only has one hand. I could claim that the time is 12:03 and the minute hand is covering the hour hand but in truth, I forgot to add the hour hand in the design process. I’ll have to make one out of plasticard and glue it on before painting.

That’s the penultimate building printed out. The last building is the church. I’ve been leaving this until last to get some experience but also to put off what it a very daunting print. I had to design the entire building as a 3d jigsaw as I knew it would be too big to print in one piece. And if I’ve got anything wrong, it will be a very time consuming task to correct it in the cad drawings.  But time to give it a go and see how it turns out……