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A while ago I made this cool medieval looking tower for wargaming and rpg's and posted it on thingiverse.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3866923

Because of the nice reactions I got from it, I decided to start a slightly larger profect. I thought it would be cool to make a full proper castle





So this is the basic lay out I'm starting off with.
The biggest thing missing so far is a keep. I was told, without a keep you can't really call it a castle, because without it being someones residence, it would be a fortress.
So yeah, that needs to be addressed.
For now I'm starting with a single tower first, to see how it shapes up.



The second part is being printed at the moment, hopefully when I wake up tomorrow there will be a pleasant surprise

Akoffeman,

Good luck building the castle...and the GW Mighty Fortress never had a Keep either.

Cheers,

CB

 Captain Brown wrote:
Akoffeman,

Good luck building the castle...and the GW Mighty Fortress never had a Keep either.

Cheers,

CB

Thanks Captain,

Yeah, that's probably the reason why they called it a Fortress, instead of a Castle.
I really would like it to turn out to be a proper Castle, but for now let's focus on the Towers and Walls first, hopefully we'll get to the Keep sometime in the near future.

Here's the progress so far, managed to finish the first Tower and started painting already.
The Knight is there for scale purpose only.





Hopefully get some more painting done tomorrow, and do some sculpting tomorrow evening.

To be fair, that initial tower looks pretty residence/keep like to me. Something like that, possibly a bit larger or with an extra level or two to show "important" at one corner, and I'd totally run with it being a castle. Love to see where this goes!

Great start, love seeing what people can make with a 3D printer! I’d say your first tower with a roof could quite easily be the keep of your castle.

Will you do ruined sections for siege type games where the walls get taken out by some trebuchets or similar?

Thanks Vejut and Gobert,

We'll get to the keep shortly and I have some ideas on spicing up the tower by adding smaller towers and maybe rooftops, we'll see.

About some damaged walls and towers, we'll probably add them because that would be really cool, although I'd like to finish the normal castle first
Do you know of any games that have rules for destroying buildings?

Managed to finish sculpting the wall and battlements last Sunday, but only got to printing them yesterday. Hopefully get to paint some of it tonight, they are primed and drying as we speak.


Also visited a ruined late 10th century castle which was restored in the 13th century, but later salvaged by nearby living farmers. Still nice to see their methods they don't really differ that much from the way we build now.

So yeah, it's been two weeks, but finally managed to squeeze in some hobby time
Managed to paint the lower part of the tower and the battlements of the wall. It's fstarting to look like a proper stone building now, if I may say so myself.



Also finished sculpting the gatehouse and had a first go of printing it last Saturday.. didn't exactly go as planned..



So I installed a bigger fan to help cooling



So this actually helped. Although the print didn't come out as well as I hoped. I used a new filament, which as I found out needs some different print settings.
The print suffered from some serious under extrusion which made me break the print whilst removing it from the build plate :( Nothing we can't fix hopefully



Next up is fixing the gatehouse, printing the battlements for the gatehouse, and printing the gates themselves.

This weekend I printed the Battlements for the Gatehouse and fixed the Gatehouse itself
Also primed them both so they'll need to dry a bit.

Next up some more painting and printing some more Towers

It's shaping up really well. I'm excited to see it finished.

 Flapjack wrote:
It's shaping up really well. I'm excited to see it finished.

Thanks for the support Flapjack, I'll keep you posted.



Been doing some more printing this week, one more tower finished and another wall in the making.

I've convinced the Mrs to allow me to print more often and unsupervised. Somehow she thought it'd be dangerous, but after these results I think the machine is well enough tuned, that we don't need to worry that much in leaving her unattended for a few hours each day.
For a complete Castle we need 10 Towers, 8-12 Wall sections a Gatehouse and a Keep. Probably a Don Jon as well ( a really big tower)
This will take about another 400 hours to print, so about 8 weeks with the speed we have now. And about 20-30 hours of painting , but I can do that in the meantime. Hopefully the project will be done by March

Onto some more printing and painting.

Looking good, kinda wish I could justify a 3D printer when I see stuff like this! Paint job is looking nice too. It almost looks lols your painting the stones individually, that’s some good dedication if true!

That's very impressive so far! And an impressive amount of work to go, it''ll look great completed i am sure

gobert wrote:
Looking good, kinda wish I could justify a 3D printer when I see stuff like this! Paint job is looking nice too. It almost looks lols your painting the stones individually, that’s some good dedication if true!

Thanks Gobert. Well I'm not painting every single stone of coarse, that would be crazy, only about 80-90% of em

amazingturtles wrote:
That's very impressive so far! And an impressive amount of work to go, it''ll look great completed i am sure

Thanks Turtles, very much appreciated. We do what we can.

Akoffeman wrote:
...Well I'm not painting every single stone of coarse, that would be crazy, only about 80-90% of em

That’s 10-20% less crazy I suppose

Did some more printing last week, only one more tower and the gates themselves this week, and we are exactly on schedule



Now that the printing is going better and better, the painting has to get done as well, otherwise the mountain of stuff to be painted will just pile up..
Got to do one wall segment yesterday, hopefully get to paint the gatehouse next week.

It is shaping up to be an impressive structure. Maybe slightly overdone "on the pretty side", but then a lot of them castles were refurbished to taste after cannons made thin walls obsolete. I particularly like Your round turrets, quite distinctly Spanish.

Very nice mix of stone colors, BTW, eye-candy or eye-caramel.

Wirecat wrote:
It is shaping up to be an impressive structure. Maybe slightly overdone "on the pretty side", but then a lot of them castles were refurbished to taste after cannons made thin walls obsolete. I particularly like Your round turrets, quite distinctly Spanish.

Very nice mix of stone colors, BTW, eye-candy or eye-caramel.

Thanks Wirecat. You're probably right on the 'pretty' side, I like to think of this castle as to be built in peaceful times. But after it's finished I'll probably add ruined walls and towers as well, which have been shot up in battle.

We made some progress the last two weeks, even in between all December preparations and chaos


Finished designing and sculpting the doors. There's three flavors of towers with doorways, the first having only one door, the second having two doors, each on opposite sides. The third I still have to make, which has two doors on a 90 degree angle.


Front end of the structure complete! Only the gate itself to be printed, but as far as the structure goes, its done. Onto the sides and work our way back


Primed the two corner towers, so we have some painting to do the next few days.

Enough stuff to do, let's see if we can print and paint the complete left and right side this month.
This means printing and painting 2 more towers and 8 wall segments.

Always nice to hit a milestone. Looking pretty good so far, definitely getting your moneys worth on that printer!

Vejut wrote:
Always nice to hit a milestone. Looking pretty good so far, definitely getting your moneys worth on that printer!

Thanks Vejut. Yeah that machine is working 50 hours a week And probably will be making a little over time during the holidays


Finished sculpting the battlements of the left walls


And printed the first piece


This is this weeks harvest, now I'm out of fillament, so I have wait for the next batch..


Progress so far.
Will be painting some more tonight

She’s coming together really nicely! I’ve got to confess to not knowing much about the logistics of 3D printing, how much filament have you used on the castle so far? I’m assuming you’ve made the pieces hollow to keep the cost down?

Akoffeman wrote:

Neat, I like the design! And it goes from a model to a print quite nicely. Does it require a lot of cleanup afterwards?

Yeah, materials tend to run out from time to time - more reason to switch the side of a hobby. Take care before the holidays!

 gobert wrote:
She’s coming together really nicely! I’ve got to confess to not knowing much about the logistics of 3D printing, how much filament have you used on the castle so far? I’m assuming you’ve made the pieces hollow to keep the cost down?

I think I used up about 1,2 maybe 1,3 kg of filament right now.
Yes the pieces are hollow themselves, but that's mainly to speed up the printing. I use an infill of 10% with a wall thickness of 1,2mm. So the program which slices up the actual print file will make the pieces hollow as well. I hope this is clear, if not I can come back and illustrate the process.

Wirecat wrote: Neat, I like the design! And it goes from a model to a print quite nicely. Does it require a lot of cleanup afterwards?

Yeah, materials tend to run out from time to time - more reason to switch the side of a hobby. Take care before the holidays!

Thanks Wirecat. The prints hardly need any cleanup at all. I haven't used any supports until now, the only part which needed some cleaning was the gatehouse, beaus I printed it with a brim on the bottom so it would stick to the printing bed. Other then that there's some occasional filament residue which needs to be removed.

Its been two weeks since I've last posted, but haven't sat still


Pretty much all Battlements are printed for the left and right Walls
Also started printing the Walls themselves, but they take a little longer than anticipated


This is what they look like in between the Towers


Also started a little side project, which is an instant Dungeon for dnd and such. So far I've got a 1 a 2 and a 3 inch Wall, and some Pillars for junctions.
The walls all connect with OpenLOCK clips, so they can be set up in any fashion you like.
Don't know what to do with it yet, but it was fun little project nonetheless


Also started to block out the Castle Keep. It's beginning to take form, hopefully I'll manage to finish the designs soon, so I can start to print those as well.

Still behind on painting though. Takes about an hour per piece to paint. Just have to set my mind up to it and get it over with any time soon.
Plenty left to do, first resolution for next year: finish the Castle (painted and everything) by March.

Have a nice new year's eve, hope to see you next year!

So it's been a while since I've last posted, but haven't sat still.
The castle is nearing completion, allthough I still have a lot of painting left to do.







Hopefully get to print the last pieces in the coming few weeks and finish painting before March..

Wow, looks great! I love that you made it so modular, looks like you can get quite the unique layout if you wanted to!