Ouze wrote:So, I want to talk a bit about where I am getting the models from. There are 4 sources for STL models of Battlemechs.
1.) Model your own. I actually am OK at making mechs in Rhino, but I can't make them look exactly right, only similar. I'm not going with this option because I can't do it well.
2.) Extract the models from the game Mechwarrior Online and do various stuff to make them print ready. The developers of the game have explicitly said they are good with this for personal use. I haven't been able to make this work well - extracting is not that hard, fixing is quite a bit harder.
3.) Download the models from Thingiverse. These are almost always Option 2, but fixed by someone more competent than I. Maybe.
4.) Buy the models from a commercial site that sells STLs. There are a lot of these. The one I buy them from is Gambody. A good mech STL will run about $26 there. I tend to be able to get a discount because they give you coupon codes if you post prints to their facebook group, which I do, so lets say $17. These models are also very highly detailed, much more than the free options tend to be.
Thingiverse:
Gambody:
Sometimes the Thingiverse ones are good enough - for example, I didn't buy the Mad Dog \ Vulture. For actually playing Battletech I think ALL the Thingiverse ones are good enough, they're going to look amazing at 2" tall. But I want much larger, so I want detail.
The first 3 options are free, but you kind of get what you pay for. The models that are done by the commercial sites, like gambody, are reviewed by an editior for common model errors and fixed. My Mad Dog\Vulture had missing faces I had to make and print a fix kit for. That won't happen with the commercial sites. Additionally, they have detailed instructions for how to position the model for optimal printing, and they update the models upon request to make them easier to print. For example, when I posted that the teeth were very difficult to print well for my Godzilla, a few weeks later they updated the model to cut the head up a little differently so the teeth could be printed better. This isn't a love letter to Gambody, some of their models have very bizarre poses and I question the site's legality. I imagine it will just disappear one day. But I'm not pulling that string too much, I have no idea what the royalty situation is and it's not really my business.
I have a fair bit of disposable income now, and I don't really buy much Warhams anymore, so I don't mind spending cash on files. However, I can't buy what they don't sell, and as far as I can tell, there are no commercially available models of my favorite mechs - no Uziel, or Stalker, or Cataphract, or Jagermech, or Marauder IIc. Bummer.
So, I found a Stalker on Thingiverse. I was kind of able to make it work.
Here are some of the challenges I faced:
1.) The model is all one piece. This poses quite a few problems, "being too big to fit on the bed" being the most obvious - but it's also hard to position supports when it's one giant-ass brick of resin. I tried chopping the model up in Meshmixer, with mixed results. I was able to split the body, and the side pods no problem. The feet have some kind of error I absolutely cannot figure out or fix and my only option was printing the legs as one piece. I've never printed legs this big before, and it led to some problems. I'll get back to those, but the takeaway here is the only way I could get the feet to print is by printing the entire bottom half of the model in a single piece.
2.) Errors in the model. In addition to the problem with the feet, there were some parts of the model that were just plain missing - missing faces. These are geometry problems, not "bad print" problems.
This is what they look like when they print:
3.) Complications from printing the legs in one piece.
Kind of a smorgasbord of errors here. First, there are some spots where either I could not place supports because of slicer restrictions, or there were bad faces in the model where the supports didn't render. There is a spot where the calf warped because even with enormous supports in the area, it was just too much weight. I learned from the king crab and made sure that even though the model was hollowed, the walls were thick - 2.5mm - but still, asking a lot of one little spot. Finally one error on the right leg where I honest am not sure what happened. Either I didn't support a chunk and it misprinted, or it's a model error.
Ultimately though, none of these are serious issues, that is what greenstuff is for and these are trivial fixes. A bigger issue is the lack of detail - there is just a lot of bling not present. No handles or vents or hatches or rungs, just lots of big, flat areas. I'm going to try to model up some detailing bits and bling it up a bit.
I'm going to let it sit for about a week anyway to make sure any uncured resin is
really purged from the insides of the model - those big holes you see are intentional, they're drain holes. I patch them with Greenstuff before priming. I'm not sure I've yet shown a model where the holes were visible, but every larger model I've printed in resin has these drain holes.
Anyway, it's going to sit for a week as I mentioned because I had a model once get ruined early on. I didn't rinse the insides as well as I should have, and when I left it out, it bled some resin from inside all over some details below the drain (and then being light sensitive, the uncured resin hardened in the daylight). Now my hollowed models sit for a while atop a shop towel in a dark area. Any resin bleed is easily washed away with alcohol, as long as it isn't allowed to cure. I also try some other tricks, like doing a post-print wash in a ultrasonic cleaner full of 99% isopropyl alchohol, blasting the insides with a syringe full of IPA, etc, but ultimately there are a lot of nooks and crannies up in there sometimes.
Boss Salvage wrote:One thing that I might have missed: What scale are you printing at? 25mm maybe? GeeDub scout marine is of course weird because of especially bulbous heroic scale.
My dude, I have absolutely no idea what scale these are. I have had a hard time finding scaling data for Battletech in general. Tons of info out there on weight, but exact heights are very hard.
I found this art online and I have been eyeballing heights based off of it since the beginning, using my Raven as a baseline.
Are those scales right? Shrug, I have no idea. I'm just trying to keep them more or less consistent with each other, and aside from the KGC, I think i have mostly done OK. The KGC I think was a math error when I was converting the size in came in to the size I want - I am quite bad at math.
