This topic contains 16 replies, has 6 voices, and was last updated by 
-
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
Thanks! 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!
Yes, 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.
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
