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So, one of my long running issues with the current Necrons, which I otherwise love, is the pilots. For every Necron vehicle I have done that has a pilot, I've replaced it in some way.

I have had 2 Night \ Doom Scythes for a long time. I have tried various different ways of enclosing the canopies but I didn't really love any of them. That was before I had a 3D printer though!

I mocked up a canopy in Rhino 3D.




Added some supports in the Slicer.



Post-print:



Cleaned the print up in some 99% isopropyl alcohol:



Post-cured it in UV for 30 minutes:



and blended it in with some greenstuff:



I was pretty happy with how this was going, so I started working on the base. I wanted something to evince the massacre at Sanctuary 101, so I used some rollers from Greenstuff World:



I just used some old sculpey I happened to have so ignore the colors, it's getting painted anyway.

Once it was baked, I broke it up to fit on a flying base:



And blended it in with some sand.


painted it up:



Then I painted up the actual flyer. After procrastinating on it for like 7 years, I wound up finishing it in a few days. Typical.



here it is with some of my Necrons:



I went with leadbelcher for the canopy of the Doom Scythe to contrast with the gold canopy of the Night Shroud bomber.


I regret to say that is only about half of my army, I didn't feel like setting up a billion little dudes for this one picture. Unless we're counting all the stuff I have not yet finished, in which case it's more like... a third.

I have another boxed Night \ Doom Scythe, so I will do the next one next weekend probably. It will look exactly the same so I'll just bump this thread with a picture or two of all the finished flyers.

Looks good, the painting is outstanding.

Your scenery is brilliant too

TBH at this point I think I like doing the scenery more than the models

Your Necron army continues to be a source of inspiration. I don't feel as bad about the scythe that's been sitting in my closet for a few years by comparison now

The mod looks great, I actually like the cockpit you've made a lot better than the one on the Forgeworld model.

Wow, that is so much better! If the regular model came with an option for a closed cockpit, I would be way more likely to start Necrons.

Absolutely inspiring. Thank you.

Now I obviously need to get an airbrush, though...

Outstanding stuff, Ouze! Inspirational.

That looks really nice. How hard is it to use a 3D program like that?

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
That looks really nice. How hard is it to use a 3D program like that?

I'm not sure how to answer that because I already know how to do it, and as such, I'm going to underestimate how difficult it is. It took me about 20 minutes to model the canopy. Here is what I can tell you for sure: I'm doing it wrong

The typical way that you create things in Rhino is by creating control points and creating lines, curves, and so on, and then extruding surfaces that way. It's very flexible, you can move points around and easily do pretty much anything you want.

I don't know how to do it correctly because all I did was download it and screw around with it: what I do is additive and subtractive. I will create a pyramid by making a cube, then making a rectangle longer than the cube, turning it at an angle, copying and pasting it 3 times, turning each one to fit on one side of the cube, and then subtracting solids. It's not at all a smart way to do it (I think you're supposed to make 5 points and then extrude a surface), but I can't make myself learn to actually watch that DVD I got for christmas 3 years ago

As a result I am self-limited to making mostly angular things like mechs and vehicles and stuff, I can never do anything organic. This canopy was basically a really long oval, flattened out, and then with shapes added or subtracted from it. It's 100% the dumbest way to do it.

So, I'm absolutely the wrong person to teach or explain to anyone how to use this application. I just started screwing around in it when it first came out in 1997 or so, trying to make mods for Total Annihilation.

The good news is there is a 90 day free trial available for it here, so you can just screw around in it right now if you want to. Better yet, head over to Youtube, and learn how to do it the right way: Here's a tutorial, but there there are infinite tutorials available for how to learn to use this program, all for free on Youtube. It's such a crazy time to be alive now; you can learn how to do nearly any damn thing for free by watching videos. If you download Rhino and follow through that first tutorial on making a ring, you will literally understand more about the fundamentals of how to use the program than I do.

Since you're getting in on the ground floor, though, should you even be using Rhino? I don't really know anyone else who does 3D modelling in Rhino3D. So, take what I said about tutorials and so on, but perhaps try it out with Blender instead. It's totally free for any purpose (Rhino is like $600), and you can download and start screwing around with it right now.

I would request anyone else who does 3d modeling with a different platform to share their perspective on it.

Any chance of getting a copy of that digital file? I'd love to add a canopy to my Doom Scythe as well.

Sure. Be aware it's not a drop-in piece, you're going to have to do some a little greenstuff blending to make it fit as I have.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3184411

Greetings, Your Night Shroud Bomber & Doom Scythe look great!

I really like the masked mesh pattern that You put on the tops of the air craft!

The custom 3D-Printed parts are perfect!

You went above and beyond to make Your Necrons special!

Thank You for sharing! :-)

Oh yeah, I forgot the mention. That mesh pattern that looks so good is really easy to do - anyone who owns an airbrush can do it in 10 minutes with minimal effort. I'm using a tacky stencil from Anarchy Models.

The stencils are reusable to some (unknown) degree; so far I've used the same third of a sheet, roughly, for the night shroud and doom scythe, and they're still sticky enough that I think I can reuse them for the next scythe at a minimum. So one sheet should do at least 6 to 9 flyer size models, maybe more - I haven't found yet the point where there isn't enough tack left to use them.

It's another neat little gimmick I've learned for tricking people into thinking I'm a good painter when I am not

The idea that the flyers are constructs rather than vehicles makes the whole Necron force much more appealing. Way to fix what they got wrong.

The canopy adds so much to the model so great job on it! The paintjob is excellent too!

beautiful job man, nicely themed board too. How did you do the quartz crystals?

Depends on which ones you mean.

Small crystals:



The small crystals I do with leftover clear green sprue that comes with Necron stuff, like for the green gauss flayer rods, the stuff that goes with the monolith, etc. I just use a dremel tool at medium speed and a sanding wheel to shape the sprue into pointy ends and glue it to the base. I usually do that somewhere before the final dullcote, so add some gloss coat after the dullcote to bring the shine back up.

Lots of vendors do just sell crystals. Here are some of the (honestly, better looking) crystals you can just buy - these specifically are from Secret Weapon and come in many colors.




The bigger crystals on the table - I didn't make at all, they are a Battlefield In A Box set. Unfortunately I think they are out of print, but doing some googling I did find a few places that still sold it.

thanks man! Wonder if you can get styrene rod with that colouring.. pondering the idea of a 1/72 40k Necron force by taking some Caesar fantasy undead and converting them, but they need that green glow to look right

Great work, I'll be bookmarking it incase I get one of the necron flyers in the future.

Good to see someone else using Rhino as well, Rhino is a fantastic tool (and the price is good considering it doesn't require a paid for subscription like other similar tools). Don't worry about how you made it, control points and curves just make it easier to edit the geometry when you are less happy with a complex shape, the important thing is that it's what you want and is watertight.

Do you have to manually add the supporting struts then or does the software at least partially create them for you?

Nicely painted Necrons too

The slicing software that the printer comes with is what I used to handle supports for printing*. There is technically an one-button click that will automatically generate supports, but I never use it - it does a very poor job pretty much all the time. Lots of weird diagonals that cut through the model, heavy sections with no supports that will delaminate, other such nonsense.

Manually doing supports is very easy though, you just essentially pan the model around in the slicer and click spots to add a support. It does take a little practice to know how to orient the model for printing and where to add supports - too many and cleanup is a pain (and wasted resin), too few and the model will sag are potentially seperate from the plate mid-print.

Once you've printed a few models and have a feel for what needs to be supported and how much - in practice adding the supports takes a few minutes. I doubt I spent more than 5 minutes on even the most complex model adding supports.



*I do use another application, Meshmixer by Autocad, as a piece of middleware to hollow out the models if they are large. It's super super easy to do, just a few clicks.