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Not at the moment. AA wasn't enabled when I got my Mono on release. It needed a firmware upgrade to enable AA, and based on my limited googling of the issue, its apparently really hard to set up properly.

My results have been "good enough" so far so I haven't dug into that mound yet.

That's fine, as it's not needed if using a low micron setting for crisp details. I usually set it super low as default and really only turn it up when doing big pieces and have the layers at .06 or more.

I think AA lacks a good standard test print to measure performance of layerline removal against fine detail loss. So there's a lot of myths about it

It doesn't help that everyone increases AA power by increasing the AA value except chitubox who lower the AA amount the higher you set its AA value too..

 Overread wrote:
I think AA lacks a good standard test print to measure performance of layerline removal against fine detail loss. So there's a lot of myths about it

It doesn't help that everyone increases AA power by increasing the AA value except chitubox who lower the AA amount the higher you set its AA value too..

Yes! That is super confusing when I switch from Cura to Chitubox when slicing for my two printers. It is a total fallacy that some manufacturers claim the AA lets their printers print better, when while it does decrease the layer lines to smooth, it totally starts to blur the fine details. That's why I will only increase the setting for AA when doing a high layer, low detail large print. If you are doing a mini spend the extra hour it might take to print and keep your layer level low and the AA off to keep those details crisp.

Finally painted up some Raygun Raptors. Cheated a bit by using transparent bases to cut painting time down a notch.

Quite fun to paint. Layer lines are a bit more obvious in some of them than others, butniverall I think it’s worked out ok.

Great work, loving the colors. Gives me '90s action figure / cartoon vibes.

Well that’s the shuttle printed. Took about 48 hours in all at 100micron layer height. I think it’s come out pretty nicely. The landing gear failed due to loss of adhesion to the bed, so I’ll reprint with supports and hopefully that will deal with it.





It’s got some nice internal detailing with a partition door between a small cargo bay and 4 seats up front



I’ll see how well a layer of primer evens out the layer lines, but I think a bit of light sanding will be needed to really smooth down the Main flight surfaces.

Primed the shuttle. Then sanded it, then primed again using filler primer, then sanded again, then snapped one of the landing gear, then undercoated... Overly processed it now and losing interest in painting it :( Just need to get the gumption up to get the airbrush out again and it will be fine though.

Anyway, the excitement now rests with the following motley crews.

First up, the Night Watch (Print Minis excellent and amazingly modular Night Market Police). Printed at 20 micron layers, and I hadn't quite sorted my support requirements, so these are formed from the remains of various failed bits and pieces. Even then I think they are nicely atmospheric, and a great combination of organic and bionic parts, all of which are interchangable. The crouching guy is very much declaring a lack of understanding about what exactly the flippedy flip is going on up in this hizouse

Speaking of interchangeable, they are even paired up with a couple of Papsikels heads, and a set of legs from the second crew down the page













Printed them at 95% size as they are natively scaled more to 32mm. I didn't want to go much smaller, as the bits would end up being a bit slender. The big bot thing is already unfeasible snappable I think and probably won't last long on the table

Compared here with a handy Van Saar and Reiver. Maybe a touch tall compared to GW fare, but not too far our as a baseline, or modded human.





And then onto the ladies. I got these from the recent printing Humble Bundle, and they are Albino Raven's excellent modular female soldiers. Again, a random selection of the available bits that I smooshed together with limited thought. The details are excellent, but a bit fiddly to get perfect, so there are a few minor mis-prints that I'm just not bothered enough to reject. Cover it all in olive drab and sand camo, and it'll all fade away. Again, printed at 20 micron layer heights, and I got a good success rate after a second round of support trials.

The helmets in particular I find particularly awesome, in a modern tacticool way I tried to print some delta-style light helmet heads, but there was something wrong with the supports so they all failed.













And a pair with some more sci-fi style heads courtesy of Keta-minis' recent kickstarter:




And a scaling shot against GW stuff. These were printed at 90%, and still are super-tall giraffe ladies compared to standard GW fare. However, at arms length, it will be hard to tell really, and if they are ever used it will be for something like Stargrave where a bit of scale difference really doesn't matter given the whole galaxy of available differences in the human norm

Yaaay, my kickstarters are starting to deliver.

First up are a couple of things from the Fool's Hope campaign.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiborbattletank/outpost-40-fools-hope?ref=user_menu

A nice little colony industrial set with a power station, workshop thingy and a couple of generic utility vehicles that should work nicely in Ash Wastes (if I ever play such a thing).

It also comes with a nice colony flak defence turret that looks nice and meaty. Currently getting the weapons for both printed up in resin on the Mono to get a nicer finish. Happy with the finish of the main bits using filament, but weapons and barrels never come out quite right for me using FDM. There is another slightly larger truck thingy in this set as well, that I need to sort out as well to get a proper wastes motor pool going, alongside my old Rhino based transporter and multi-legged utility vehicles.

Hit the vehicle with a quick rattle can zenithal prime. Trying to decide if I go blue, grey or yellow for this one







Scales nicely with my Stargrave models, and should be fine with my Van Saar crew as well.

Lining up a few fast-print buildings as well from here

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digitaltaxidermy/fast-terrain?ref=user_menu

If you want really fast terrain prints, look up stuff that can be printed in spiralise/vase/VMT mode. There's not a massive amount out there specifically made for it, but some things that have fairly simple geomerty can be edited a bit to work with it (the Make Solid tool in Meshmixer is a good start) and while you trade off some detail, the print is super-fast as it's just one continuous wall, no retractions or infill. Not massive sturdy, but cheap and ludicrously quick way to fill out a board.

I've done a few edits to assorted Thingiverse building files to get them printing in this mode, let me know if you want them.

Thanks Para, but that would only add to my massive pile of shame I picked up the set largely because of the design rather than the print efficiency.

Finished prepping the main bits of the Fools Hope set that I was keen to get done. The flak emplacement, and the two vehicles with a range of turrets and secondary weapons.

It all printed really nicely at 0.1mm layer height I think. The only problem was that my support settings at that height are a tad too well attached. It took a good couple of hours to hack the supports away, and even then I have basically left the underside of the larger truck as a disaster zone

If I avoid dry brushing and stuck to some airbrush undercoats and sponging then the layers should’t be too obvious. The truck has a removable rear unit and the guy who did the Kickstarter is in the process of doing a trailer, so that should be a nice extra. Alternatively I’m sure I can bodge the Watcorp trailers In There easily enough.

Now to try and crowbar enough time into my evening activity time to get the airbrush singing

No further on the outpost stuff, but I e been printing some of Digital Taxidermy’s fast terrain. Very much does what it says on the tin

Starting with a couple of standard hab units, one with interior walls and one without. The floor is a bit springy if it’s put as a second floor, but pla is pretty robust so should be able to stack easily and safely. Having the interior walls will help support as well. The roof is a we bit thicker so that much more stiff.

The buildings print in about 10hours each, and the roof in 2 to 5 depending on whether you want barriers or not. Detailing is simple but effective. Very happy with this set. It also has walkways and greeblies, but not sure how much of that I’ll go for.

Currently printing another couple of roof variants, then it’s on to Watcorp’s wasteland cargo train

That's looking great! Kinda dig the floor lattice.

Yeah, for gaming it’s really handy as you can’t lose models under solid flooring. You can always assume you can’t fire through it.

There are some stairs that go with the set as well.

First transport car for the Watcorp ash wastes transporter. Nice solid print, and goes together smoothly.

Printed at 0.1 layer height for a bit more refinement. Took most of a day, but I’m not really in a hurry.

It fits a munitorum container oerfectly, as advertised. Unfortunately it’s a hair too narrow for a set of hard foam containers I also have, but that’s no matter. I have enough containers for a couple of cars, and can use the hard foam ones and scenery.

My only niggle is the wheel pins you can see in the final pic. You need to feed these through the suspension assemblies, and I think I’ll need to use pliers as my fingers are too big to fit.

Waiting for a new spool today to get the hauler printed with.

Hauler printed and now primed. Goes together really nicely.

Wow, the lattice-style floor is a super cool idea and technique not only for the aesthetic, but for the reason you mention - well done!!

I can’t take credit. It’s all on Digital Taxidermy

I need to reconfigure my painting space again. The lamp I have has a clamp to attach to the table, but I don't have any convenient table edges. However, I do have a 3D printer!

A simple set of problem solving ensued. What could I create to clamp a lamp to, that wouldn't fall over.

Well the base shape was easy enough to sort using simple shapes, embossing and boolean remove command from 3D Builder:


So how do I stop it falling over? Bring on the random free-weight we happen to have kicking about in the house!


And then clamp the lamp on there:


The 2.5kg weight feels like it hefty enough to stop the lamp going anywhere at pretty much any angle that I might want to get it to. The base is nice and wide and feels pretty stable. I think I'll need some blu-tac in there just to stop the weight shifting as I was a bit generous on the tolerance.

And a group show with the prototype that I messed up the slot width, meaning that the lamp clamp didn't fit... d'oh!


Victory. Now to rejig the actual desk space as its currently covered in random nonsense.



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If I had really been thinking I could have integrated paintbrush/tool storage into the thing

I was just getting up to speed on some random FDM scenery and paint racks and the dreaded nozzle blockage descended :(

Even just received a brand new spool and everything. Now it will be down time for a while until I can get the momentum up to take the thing apart to swap out the nozzle. Oh well, I have a bunch of stuff in the paint queue anyway, and I can always spin up the Photon if I need more

You get used to it, I get a clog about every 2kg of filament when the PTFE tube gets sticky from constant reheating. Snip off half an inch of tube, clear the clog and off we go again.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
You get used to it, I get a clog about every 2kg of filament when the PTFE tube gets sticky from constant reheating. Snip off half an inch of tube, clear the clog and off we go again.

Yes, I have found the last time I replaced my tube to leave and extra inch or so to help when snipping off the end to reinsert into the hot end is a time and life saver.

Its my fist clog! I've run about 30kg of PETG and PLA through this thing without any problems. I don't even know if I have a PTFE tube in here... I think there will be no more Prusa-ing for a while until I get the time to take the print head apart.

 Flinty wrote:
Its my fist clog! I've run about 30kg of PETG and PLA through this thing without any problems. I don't even know if I have a PTFE tube in here... I think there will be no more Prusa-ing for a while until I get the time to take the print head apart.

Depends if your printer is direct drive or uses a bowden tube. Direct drive has the extruder motor and gear right on top of the hotend nozzle and the bowden set up has the extruder off to the side and feeds the filament through a tube to the hotend. I have had both and had to deal with clogs on both from time to time.

It has an extruder motor feeding directly into the heat block thermal break heatsink thingy.
So a direct drive I guess.

The heat block is a disaster zone after various failed prints, so I'm just going to replace it and the nozzle. I've been needing to replace the thermistor for ages, and the grub screw has stripped out, so a wee mid-life refresh seems to be in order.

Me, me, its me. I have a Madcat

My absolutely favourite Mech ever. I've been meaning to print one for ages, and finally bit the bullet and had a go with a free file off MMF.





Its a beauty of a model. Its designed as an action figure basically, with click-in and out joints and articulation. However, while I would love a Madcat action figure, printing it at its intended scale would need an FDM, and it would be all ridgey. So I scaled it down to my horizon Wars 10mm-ish scale and combined some of the smaller bits like toes, feet and arms.

I think it works nicely. Its little friend is a super-heavy printed at the same scale.


And with a raygun raptor and random 28mm scale medic figure.


I'm thinking a white/grey mountain camo scheme.

If you are into Battletech check out Matt Mason on Patreon (also now on tribes and MMF)

https://www.patreon.com/Syllogy

LOTS of battlemechs and he released a MadCat in the last day or two

I played some battletech back in the day, but I don't play much of anything just now due to various life reasons. I almost printed Sylollogy's version of this thing, but it was redone specifically for 6mm scale, so I went for downscaling a more detailed model, rather than upscaling that one. I'm sure it would have worked fine though.

I guess I might see if there is a Bushwhacker to complete my nostalgia from the days of MW2

There are at least 2 variations of Bushwhacker somewhere in his patreon. You might have to hunt around a bit and I think they are in one of 3 collected blocks he did of mechs (either he did a collected download or I sorted them into a collected block, not sure which)