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Hello all,

Maybe the biggest 3D print I have done yet in resin, a Scythed Hierodule. Printed on an Anycubic Photon at .04 layer thickness.



I'm not a Tyranid player, but I liked the model, so I printed it. Resin is relatively cheap.



I did a color scheme patterned off poison tree frogs, which is a totally original idea that has never before been done with Tyranids.



I don't think I am going to get into Tyranids much, although I DO have a winged hive tyrant or something I got for free in a trade.



The paints were a mixture of lots of stuff. I tried priming it white and doing GWS Contrast in yellow, but I wasn't super happy with how it came out by default.



I did wind up still using watered down contrast as a wash. For that, I think it worked out quite well.




The file came with 2 different head options. I did them both and figured one of them would come out better. I would up not really being able to land on one being better than the other, so I magnetized them and kept them both. Here are both heads, one of which is a more traditional Tyranid style.



The model is hollow, so it's not very heavy. I chose not to do a base, but kind of wish I had because I could have done the arms a little more "dynamically". Without a base though, I think it would fall over and break.



I guess I used up roughly 250ML of resin to print it. So, it would have cost about $10USD or thereabouts to print - I can usually get my preferred resin $40USD for a liter.



I didn't measure him but I would guess he's about 7 inches (177mm) from teeth to tail tip.



The file is freely available on Thingiverse, if you would like to print your own.

Main file: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3537162

Alternate arms (which I used 2 of): https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3565005

Shooty arms if you want to do a Barbed Hierodule, which I think looks goofy but whatever: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3551295

That thing is sweet! Nice painting too!

Absolutely terrific model, not a big fan of the colours though...

Oh, forgot to mention - the model on Thingiverse doesn't have all those little cyst things and bumps on the shell. I did those with drops of superglue and greenstuff. Here are some work in progress pics from when I was doing it:




I do not know what purpose the cysts serve. I imagine a Tyranid person can answer that.

Miniature craters! Really is a fantastic piece of work.

Great work! Thats a solid hunk of resin

That is just impressive. Nice crisp barnacles too, and paint job.

 Stevefamine wrote:
Great work! Thats a solid hunk of resin

Hollow chunk of resin.

Did you sand down the ridges, or is this surface straight off the printer?

This is straight off the printer. There are no visible ridges to sand down - this was printed in resin at 0.04 (the printer can do 0.01, but I don't think the quality is noticeably better and it takes much, much longer for no gain).

I think you are thinking of plastic extrusion printing (FDM), which leaves visible lines since the best they can do is 0.1 and 0.2 or 0.4 is more common - a FDM print at 0.4 is 10 times thicker than the lines I printed the resin at. I do plastic printing too. The tradeoff for resin is it is much more expensive and the bed is so small you're limited with how big the final print can be, whereas with plastic it is much cheaper and you have much larger surface area to work with (quite a bit larger TBH), but you get visible layer lines.

The cleanup with resin is support material, which leaves little bumps that need to be removed from the underside. Intelligent positioning, correct exposure time, and proper post-print means this shouldn't take more than a few minutes - soaking the part in hot water makes the supports generally peel right off cleanly.

I really like this! Great job to the designer and printer! Keep up the good work. I wish I had a capable machine to do stuff like this.

Great work! All around well done sir