Modelling bits for 3d printing

[marell le fou]

Are you selling some stuff yet ? Is there somewhere we can see casting or at least drawings of everything you made so far ?

[Malika]

I am collaborating with Fox Box for the BFG looking ships. A few of the small escorts will be given away as a prize for this year's Gothicomp.

The ships are still in progress, but I'm still running into some obstacles:
1) Casting them is apparently not as easy as I thought, meaning I'd have to tweak the design here and there to make it easier to remove the ship from the mould.
2) Printing: Shapeways' FXD and wax are not the solutions I hoped them to me, meaning I'd still have to go to a more high end service to print the models. Only I'm a bit worried then if they'll do the cleaning correctly or if I'd have to design a whole support system to make the models printable. It's a tricky one still...
3) Costs: whilst I know I'm not gonna get filthy rich of my designs, they should at least be able to cover production costs. The problem with BFG scaled models is that they're very much a niche product, meaning that if it costs me at least €80 to print a ship, and also a bunch of money to cover the casting costs, I'd need to sell quite a bunch of them do I want to break even.

[Malika]

Been a while since I've last posted, but been working a lot on the robots. First up, some progress on the hounds.



I still need to figure out how to get the legs to work nicely, but I feel I'm slowly getting on the right path...

And here two variant bodies:



The humanoid robots have also had a major overhaul, one big change is that I've removed the spikes. I imagined these robots to be scrapped together from industrial components and felt the spikes make them a bit too 'punk' which didn't feel right here. I might have to look at the hounds' spikes soon as well...










And here an assortment of drones that still need more work:

[Malika]

Took these out of the archive. Don't really know what to do with them though...

[Malika]

Just thought of dropping this here...

[Geep]

I assume they'd fit well with Epic? Probably great as planetary defence vehicles, or ork vehicles (with some conversion to orkify them). People on Taccoms my want to see these?

[Malika]

Already posted them on Tactical Command. John from Vanguard Games[url] has expressed some interest, lets see how that'll go!

In the meantime, an update on the light cannon turret...aaaaaand, 6mm scrap bots!

[Malika]

Been working on the tank's hull some more...

[Malika]

Continued working on some 6mm scaled tanks:


More pics and such over here.

[Geep]

I like them. Wouldn't a more forward placed turret make more sense though? So the back houses the engine, troops, or whatever (they appear to have the space to be small transports).

[Malika]

Don't have access to my pics at the moment so I'll have to do this through link:

Working on a new hull

Tank next to a 6mm human

Flame weaponry

As good as ready

New turret variants

Oh yeah, and the tank (with 4 different turrets and two dozer blades) has been shipped off to Vanguard Miniatures.

[Malika]

Update on the siege tanks.

The plan is to have the 'standard kit' include an anti-bunker cannon and the tank-hunting laser weapon. After that it would be the 'quad pack' (quad HMG's, quad multiple laser, quad mortars and the variant of the tank hunting laser weapon).

[Malika]

Been doing some more work on the tanks!

[Malika]

Went back at the 'nostalgia sprue', I think it has become the 'oddities sprue', meaning it'll include turrets that could used to create proxies for the Chimerax (quad autocannons), Chimedon (light battle cannon), Chimerro (missile launchers), APDS-6a 'Defenders' (laser destroyer, which I made as a quad lascannon), and the Samaritan (medical transport).

Let me introduce the latter two variants:

The Defender was produced as a stop gap design to hunt down enemy armour. Later on this weapon was placed on the Siege Tank hull which could handle the weapon better. I'm not that happy about the design of the weapon yet. In one hand the Laser Destroyer kinda feels like a quad lascannon, but I think I prefer the Imperial Guard version better, it also sets it more apart from the quad autocannon. So I guess it'll be tweaked fundamentally in the coming days.

The medical transport was just something I felt was a nice touch, perhaps the tank could be an objective or something.

So yeah, the sprue will contain the three nostalgia turrets (which had official rules), with the two other variants added as a bonus.

[Malika]

Continued working on the siege tanks. The kit will basically include the hull, two types of dozer blades, and two weapons: an tank-hunting heavy laser cannon, and a shell firing bunker buster.

First up: the tank hunter:




Whilst the bunker buster cannon still needs to be designed, I got distracted. I like the idea that the hull could also be used as a basis for other tanks. Thus the missile launcher was born. Keep in mind that the current missile launcher will be totally redesigned. I just used this one to give you an idea what a back mounted weapon will look like. I've also added a heavy machine gun like weapon to the front, it can (optionally) be replaced for a heavy flamethrower.