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Finally got some prints going.

10mm Space Marines were first off. The infantry is scaled 10mm to the eyes, and the Rhino is scaled assuming normal 40k is 32mm scale (so scaling factor of 1/3.2 = 31.25% of a regular 40k model).

Xiphon in the back is to give an idea of scale, it's a regular Aeronautica Imperialis model.

Dunno if I'll continue with this, I feel like maybe I went to small, haha. I do tend to prefer 15mm as a scale, but the reason for going 10mm was to use regular HH rules but converting inches to centimetres, and also being small enough to use Aeronautica Imperialis models alongside them. Not sure how well that idea turned out.





The infantry turned out nicer than the Rhino, not sure why the sides have lines and are a bit wonky... though to be fair with the naked eye I barely notice it, it's only zoomed in with the camera I became aware of it. It might be fine after a coat of primer.

These are the original STLs...

The infantry looks great!. I think the Rhino looks fine. Tanks with some lines on the armour look fine, even if drybrushing brings out a bit of texture. Real vehicles have a bit of texture to the surfaces usually anyway.

The Xiphon is noticably small when placed directly next to the infantry, but as soon as you stick it on a stand, it will look fine I think.

I think I'll paint these up and see how they look and then decide whether to stick with 10mm or upsize to 15mm

Those look great, honestly.

I personally prefer 15mm myself, and the good thing about it is you can leave everything as-is, play 40k, and have it look better on the table than regular 40k.

Yeah, I guess to be able to play 40k or HH it's important to be able to see what weapon people are carrying. It doesn't really matter for Epic, nor is it too important for reduced-scale WHFB where a whole regiment will be armed the same. But 40k it matters what each individual is carrying.

Maybe 10mm is too small for that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Hmmm, tried to print off a few more Rhinos and had a fail. Any idea what might have caused this? The back row seemed to have printed fine, but the front row failed. The base layers all stuck to the build plate, but at some point after that it started to fail. I had re-levelled the build plate immediately before this (because I accidentally shifted the mount while removing the previous set of models) but if the base layers stuck surely that wouldn't be an out-of-level issue? The models are stuck to the build plate extremely well and hard to remove. The one on the front left of the image had support issues but still managed to print pretty much fine except for the front right portion of its track. Could it be caused by over exposed base layers? I'm running a 30s exposure which I'm sure is overkill (never bothered to tune it, I think that might be the default).

I also noticed the side of the tanks are sticky (vertical surfaces) after cleaning it in the wash and cure station. Nothing else is sticky, just the sides. Under exposure maybe? I actually bumped the exposure up from 1.2s to 1.4s for these ones compared to the ones in my original post.




Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ok, so this is what was left on the FEP....



So it seems there's no outline of the raft on the FEP, only an outline of the Rhino. So I guess the raft printed and pulled away from the FEP, then somewhere along the way the supports failed and/or the raft delaminated. It's interesting that this is after I increased the exposure... not really sure what's going on.

The junk on the FEP pulled off pretty easily, didn't even have to scrape them off, just grabbed the half printed tank and pulled and it popped right off.

My supports are "light" so that they break away easily after printing, and they worked on the other models, but maybe there needs to be more of them? Or maybe add a few heavy supports to take some of the load of lifting the model and only use the light ones for supporting the fine details and just cut the heavy ones away with some clippers?

It's a bit weird though, because the supports at the rear of the tank (the ones that would print first) didn't even complete, like it didn't even get to the point of printing the tank at the rear, but the supports at the front go all the way to where the tank should be, so did the rear supports fail in the middle of their creation perhaps? It almost looks like the rear supports either didn't print or got stuck to the FEP and then by the time the tank was printing, the supports were no longer close enough to the FEP to catch them.

Here's some painted pics... my hand definitely isn't as steady as it was 25 years ago when I was painting Epic 40k



As a scale comparison, here's a Saurus (unfortunately didn't have any regular Space Marines sitting on my desk).



The dude looking down his gunsight is sitting atop a metal washer, idea being using a (weak) magnetic sheet for transporting them. I think they're too small to stick magnets under individual models.

Awesome stuff.

That image is a rocking start to a Godzilla style scenario

How many tiny marines are needed to take down the flipping giant dinosaur monster?

Looking awesome! They are so cwute ^^

I think I'm going to have to give up the 3D printing until I get a shed. The resin is too much for me, I moved the setup into a different room in the house which seemed to be fine when everything was working okay, but when I have a failure and need to clean out the vat I end up spending too much time around the resin. So I really need a shed with a proper exhaust system.

Unless I can figure out why I'm having fails all the time, that's the main problem, it's only when I have to do major clean-up due to a failure that resin exposure is a problem, and at the moment I'm having some sort of fail basically every print.

I did a scale comparison print, and also tested out the shoulder pad icons. The icon I think was too finely detailed, particularly the fine crevices, maybe I'm exposing for too long and causing the crevices to fill over, or maybe I was just expecting too much, but I basically have the outline of the fist and the detail in between has been lost.

Dude on the left is the same 10mm scale just with the icon added, dude on the right is 15mm scale. I don't know if this is equivalent to Albertorius' 15mm, I'm scaling as if it's 15mm to the eye of a Marine not standing up perfectly straight (which is roughly the same as 40k's "32mm" Space Marines, so a smidge less than half scale 40k).

In the same print I tried to do 13mm scale, as I think that'd be a nice compromise between the 10mm and 15mm... 13mm may sound weird but it's 1/2.5 of regular 40k scale, since 1 inch = 2.54cm, a 1/2.5 scale would allow playing 40k or HH just using centimetres instead of inches, and I was thinking of building a gaming board that is 0.5 x 1m to go with it.

Unfortunately the 13mm strip of dudes was the one that failed in this print I don't really understand why, as both the 10mm and 15mm models came out perfectly fine and the 13mm dudes were literally the exact same models just scaled (they were even supported before being scaled so I dunno why the middle size would fail!).

Shame to hear about the failures and the nastiness of the resin. Hopefully a shed will help with that.

As to the failures, it might be good to do a mainteinance round on the printer, regrease the rail and all that. Even if it does not help specifically with the fails, it'll be good for it.

Yeah it's a bit annoying.

I bought some PTFE lube so maybe later this week I'll give it another go and if it works that'll be good.

Another one might be sculpting out of greenstuff a pouring spout for the resin vat, as part of the problem is "clean up" involves pouring the resin out of the vat and so far every time I've done that I've spilled some resin which I have to clean up which increases my exposure time.

It might be a bed-level issue, as it seems one side of the bed prints fine, the other side doesn't, maybe I'm levelling wrong but I've watched a few tutorials and not sure what would be wrong.

Other issues could be temperature or bed flatness perhaps.

Hmmm, I was playing around with the printer today (not actually printing anything) and noticed that the locking screw on the build plate's ball joint doesn't really work properly.

If I tighten it, it locks the Z in place, it stops it rotating left to right, BUT, it takes very little force to rock the plate front to back. That might explain why some of my prints have had wedged shaped rafts, maybe the build plate was tilting as it pulled the cured resin off the FEP, causing the next layer to form as a wedge instead of an even thickness.

Maybe that's why I'm getting so many failed prints?

Unfortunately I have no idea how to fix it. According to google, older Photons occasionally had a similar issue, but the assembly was different on those so I dunno if it can be fixed the same way. I don't even have the right hex wrenches to open the assembly, I guess I'll take it down to the hardware store and try to buy the correct sized wrenches and see if I can tighten it up. Otherwise just buy another plate I guess.

Those are all adorable but I'd go either Epic, AT or 15mm, no sense in inventing your own scale.

Re: cleaning the fep, you don't have to keep pouring resin out. Most machines have a vat clean function or you can set up a print that does the same thing: expose the whole screen for a bit (like 30s) to create a film of resin that you can just peel off and it will pull all the pancakes with it. And if you stick a leftover support raft in one corner, you can pull the resin film up by it without scraping the fep.

If you have a printer, then it doesnt really matter. Also it matches Dropezone Commander at least, so there is a ready supply of retail stuff at that scale. Ive been using it for Horizon Wars as it really lets you focus on vehicles while using decent ranges.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Those are all adorable but I'd go either Epic, AT or 15mm, no sense in inventing your own scale.

I might do an Epic army separately. This is more of a "reduced scale 40k" army, and going down to Epic scale the models are kind of too small to easily see what they're equipped with. For Epic it doesn't really matter what an individual model is armed with, it only matters what type of unit it is. I'm not sure my print quality is good enough for Epic scale, will have to give it a go, I feel like all I'm going to see is print lines, lol.

15mm might make more sense, but I don't know anyone else playing reduced scale 40k so I'm going to be printing 2 armies either way.

My thought was to treat it almost like a board game, I'll build both sides, it'll be playable on a smaller board, then if I find anyone else who might be interested, take it from there.

Re: cleaning the fep, you don't have to keep pouring resin out. Most machines have a vat clean function or you can set up a print that does the same thing: expose the whole screen for a bit (like 30s) to create a film of resin that you can just peel off and it will pull all the pancakes with it. And if you stick a leftover support raft in one corner, you can pull the resin film up by it without scraping the fep.

I'll have to look into that, thanks.

 Flinty wrote:
If you have a printer, then it doesnt really matter. Also it matches Dropezone Commander at least, so there is a ready supply of retail stuff at that scale. Ive been using it for Horizon Wars as it really lets you focus on vehicles while using decent ranges.

Is Dropzone Commander still a thing? I haven't seen it at any local stores in a long time.

I wonder how their 10mm compares to mine, my 10mm is measured to the eyes of a Space Marine in a combat stance and would be like calling the new Beakie Marines 32mm scale who are 32mm to the eyes in their combat stances.

Might have to see if I can get my hands on some DZC models.

New stuff keeps coming up on their N&R thread, and they release new rules versions so it’s still a live game.

When you get down to 10mm, then the individual model scales can get a bit mutable anyway. It’s like 15mm scale is pretty chibi to get the important details of a model across clearly at distance.

For a scale comparison, I dug out some of my mid 90's epic, lol. Those dudes were truly tiny. My printed Marine is 10mm to the eye and 11mm total, the old Epic model is 5mm to the eye and roughly 6mm total (his head was tucked a long way down, lol).



This is kind of what I never liked about Epic. Vehicles look good, but infantry is so small you can barely see it.

Still not printing much, only doing it on days with good weather when I can do clean up outside after dark to minimise my exposure to the resin.

But, I thought I'd try out some schemes. I'll go with Thousand Sons, but I also need a 2nd army so I have something to play against. Printed 60 Thousand Sons with some "converted" squad leaders and embossed emblems (the test one in the photo below was free handed).

The Imperial Fist on the left was painted with Army Painter Zealot Yellow (it is an orange-ish yellow, but doesn't look quite that orange in real life), the other one was done with GW's new Imperial Fist Yellow and followed up with a Seraphim Sepia wash. The White Scar was done with a mixed up warm-grey wash followed by a white drybrush, the Thousand Son was done with Tamiya Clear Red rattle can over Tamiya Silver rattle can and recess wash using AP Dark Tone wash.

Honestly, they all look lovely. The pic makes the Army Painter yellow one a tad too orange for IFs, but it still looks very nice.

Got around to painting a squad of Thousand Sons. This is in my "metric" 40k scale, so 40k scale converted from inches to centimetres, meaning the models are ~13mm scale. I think they'd look fine next to 10mm humans though. I think they came out alright, the picture shows up a bunch of stuff I didn't even notice in real life (like the fact I need to touch up their base rims and I missed some eyes, lol).

The squad leader is "converted" from a 6mm Cabal set I found on Cults, I made my own head with the crest and gem thingo, remade the bug on his chest to look better at the bigger scale, swapped one of his swords for a bolt pistol and call him a squad leader with BP + Achea Force Sword.

I'm surprised how well the shoulder pads came out, they're regular 40k pads scaled down but the little rivet heads still came out (though admittedly they're a touch too small for me to bother carefully painting each individual rivet, lol).




I kind of want to try some Epic scale (8mm) figures now, not sure if it's worth trying to print the shoulder emblems at 8mm scale, even at 13mm scale they were quite tricky to paint even though it's an embossed detail so I'm literally just trying to paint within the lines, lol. My hands are not as steady or my eyes as sharp as they were in the 90's when I originally got into Epic.

Dunno if I'll continue with this, I feel like maybe I went to small, haha. I do tend to prefer 15mm as a scale, but the reason for going 10mm was to use regular HH rules but converting inches to centimetres, and also being small enough to use Aeronautica Imperialis models alongside them. Not sure how well that idea turned out.

Our groups use 6-8mm epic scale minis with Aeronautica/titanicus minis to play epic using the index 8th ed rules with only the 3 starting strats for everybody with ranges halved. it really speeds up play and lets us do huge games of 7-10K points in a couple hours......and being able to use all the big shiny FW models in micros scale for a fraction of the price.

I do not see why it would not work for 10-15mm.

 aphyon wrote:

Dunno if I'll continue with this, I feel like maybe I went to small, haha. I do tend to prefer 15mm as a scale, but the reason for going 10mm was to use regular HH rules but converting inches to centimetres, and also being small enough to use Aeronautica Imperialis models alongside them. Not sure how well that idea turned out.

Our groups use 6-8mm epic scale minis with Aeronautica/titanicus minis to play epic using the index 8th ed rules with only the 3 starting strats for everybody with ranges halved. it really speeds up play and lets us do huge games of 7-10K points in a couple hours......and being able to use all the big shiny FW models in micros scale for a fraction of the price.

I do not see why it would not work for 10-15mm.

Nice, part of the reason I went away from Epic scale to play 40k was 40k you kind of need to see what models are equipped with, and at 6-8mm scale I figured telling the difference between a bolter and meltagun would be an issue.

Do you have any problems with that?

Also figured maybe the models would by too small and fiddly to move around individually.

I would like to do an Epic scale army for actually playing Epic though. I bought the late 90's Epic boxed set, so there's some nostalgia there around moving entire detachments across a table.

No problems at all actually. index 8th is so streamlined and even at 6-8mm you can still temm what the weapons are. as far as movement becase it is epic scale the minis are all on movement trays and we just track wounds with small dice markers.

if you go over to the epic scale topic here

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/60/791159.page

you can see the pics. if you look at the elysians you can quite clearly see which guardsman has a missile launcher, plasma gun and the sarg with a power fist.

Okay, I think I'll try and print some Epic stuff (with the idea of playing Epic more so than 40k).

At Epic scale, do you reckon it's worth putting shoulder pad emblems on? I feel like they'll be a nightmare to paint, I already struggled with the TSons emblem on models that were about 60% larger, lol. Maybe instead of a proper emblem, I just put a circle there that can be painted the colour of the legion's emblem and not worry about doing a detailed version of the emblem?

 aphyon wrote:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/60/791159.page

you can see the pics. if you look at the elysians you can quite clearly see which guardsman has a missile launcher, plasma gun and the sarg with a power fist.

If I blow them up big on my computer monitor I can see, but I feel like at 3 to 4 feet away in real life I'd struggle to tell the plasma gun from the lasgun. A missile launcher definitely looks different, but again I feel like a Heavy Bolter would look very similar to a Lascannon and a Lascannon VERY similar to an Autocannon.

Maybe I just have bad eyes

I absoloutely think it's not worth it to add shoulder emblems. Vehicles, yes, but shoulder pads is a lot more work than it's worth.

what printer are you using?

sandor1988 wrote:
what printer are you using?

Anycubic Mono SE. In hindsight, I probably wouldn't buy it again. I got it because of the dual Z-axis, the one screw build plate zeroing, metal construction, and because it has filtered fans.

The dual Z-axis, I have no idea if it helps or not, it does feel nice and rigid.

The one screw build plate zeroing is actually a pain in the arse, it needs to be tightened insanely so that it doesn't move, and at least a few of my failures I've traced back to the build plate shifting after I zeroed it.

The metal construction is "meh", there's gaps around the door so it doesn't fully seal and it still feels pretty flimsy to me (maybe less so than a plastic one? I dunno). The door is kind of annoying, you have to do everything through the front whereas other printers have the lid lift fully off so you can access it from any side.

The filtered fans don't seem to do a good job at filtering in the slightest, the room stinks as soon as it starts printing. If anything I think one of the printers without fans and the lid just rests on top would at least keep the fumes inside the printer instead of the poorly filtered fans and gaps in the door spreading the fumes around.

The plastic screw thing that attaches the build plate to the Z-rail broke, maybe I was overtightening it, but it's attached extremely poorly so I'm not surprised it broke (it grips the screw on 2 small flats, not even a hex or a square, just 2 flats). I ended up going to the hardware store and finding a bolt with the same thread pitch and now I just tighten it with a hex key.

That said, I don't think it's a BAD printer, I just wouldn't buy one again knowing what I know now. When I bought it, I think it was maybe $30-ish more than a regular Mono, in hindsight I would have either gone with a regular Mono or paid a bit extra to get either a 4K or a larger printer.

 Albertorius wrote:
I absoloutely think it's not worth it to add shoulder emblems. Vehicles, yes, but shoulder pads is a lot more work than it's worth.

Did some test prints of some Epic Ultrasmurfs and decided to throw your advice out the window Actually I had already added the emblems to the STLs before you posted, so figured I might as well see how they printed. The Ultra symbols are a lot easier to paint than the TSons, the arrows were more tricky than the U symbol and I think for TSons with their more "complex" symbol I probably wouldn't bother trying to paint it at this scale.

The symbols on the tanks I'm going to make smaller, I made them big because I figured I'd need to compensate for them being 8mm scale, but in the end I think they're too big. Will probably drop the arrows on the side of the rhino (looks a bit too much for such a small scale) and shrink the one on the top.

I had a bout of nostalgia when I saw the cover of my old Epic 40k armies book and had to do the old red gun style Ultras, lol. I dunno if I'll continue with that theme, the goal was to do HH era marines and they tend to be more blue-white-black-gold rather than blue-white-red-gold.

I painted a bunch of tanks in one print and most of them failed, I think because I accidentally made the raft thickness the exact height of the burn in layers, so many of the supports didn't form. The bikes were the only ones that printed basically flawlessly and they had a thicker raft and also have chamfers at the bases of the support that might have helped (I can't figure out how to add these in Lychee though, the bikes were presupported the rest manually done). The ones in the pic below had minimal failures and were passable (though still a bit squished looking, and the Spartan's left gun got messed up).

Trying to decide on a base size, so I mocked up a blutac 32mm round base and 25mm square to see how they looked, I'm leaning towards square but maybe bigger than 25mm.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Albertorius wrote:
I absoloutely think it's not worth it to add shoulder emblems. Vehicles, yes, but shoulder pads is a lot more work than it's worth.

Did some test prints of some Epic Ultrasmurfs and decided to throw your advice out the window Actually I had already added the emblems to the STLs before you posted, so figured I might as well see how they printed. The Ultra symbols are a lot easier to paint than the TSons, the arrows were more tricky than the U symbol and I think for TSons with their more "complex" symbol I probably wouldn't bother trying to paint it at this scale.

I mean, as long as it works for ya, it's all right xD. That said, yes, Ultramarines would be much easier than, say, Dark Angels, in that regard.

...although I did paint a full Epic: 40.000 DA army with painted-on shoulderpad emblems. It's not something I'd really like to do again, TBH, not even with the added easiness of having it actually modelled.