You'll have seen from previous posts that I standardised on 60x60mm tiles for all my terrain pieces (Bocage, Marsh, Woods, Built Up Areas) and had tried my hand at scratch building a BUA tile.
As I need more of these (especially for my Operation Perch scenario) I thought this to be the ideal subject for a 1st print.
I created the design in Tinkercad. This is a very easy to use, on line package, that allows you to create things in 3D by combining pre-determined geometric shapes.
As A house is simply a box with a triangular section on top to form the roof, you can see that this wasn't too taxing!
My first attempt in the previous post was at 40x40mm. So I simply enlarged it to 60x60mm for the final print.
Once you're happy with the design, you save it as an .stl file. Then using Curs (the slicing software provided with my printer) you convert this to a .gcode file. This is now broken down into 0.1mm slices to be printed one on top of another.
And here's the finished article printed in PLA plastic. It took around 2.5 hours to complete!
You will notice that the base has warped slightly. This was due to the print not adhering to the base plate. Part of the steep learning curve!
You can see there's a bit of cleaning up to do, but largely I'm quite happy with that as a 1st attempt.
I think I'll glue this to a 60x60mm mdf base to straighten it out, before I paint it up and maybe move a few buildings around before I try and print once more.
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| The finished article |
Filled with enthusiasm, I think its time to print a tank......!
That looks fantastic - nice design job. I've had my printer for two years and haven't ventured into the realms on my own designs yet.
ReplyDeleteThanks Kaptain. The secret is to start with something simple. Tinkercad is very easy to use, quite intuitive. Anything you can build out of basic shapes (say a bunker for example) can easily be created.
ReplyDeleteGive it a go!!