Custom 3D Miniatures: Major & Minor Industrial Complexes, Recruitment Center, Airbase, and Naval Base

I’ve got a desktop 3D printer in my cube here at work, so while I wait for the (apparently backlogged) jobs on the fancy printers I’m printing a test run of the miniature-style pieces. Will post results. I expect the ICs to look great, and the others to look… terrible or completely malformed. Those watch towers are not designed for a single-extrusion printer at all.

Update: Well, in some ways these turned out better than I expected, but in most ways, much worse: the desktop 3D printer in my pod has a ton of jitter so that even the bits that should have been a piece of cake (like the ICs) came out pretty terrible; each layer has some arbitrary XY shift on the order of 0.1-0.2mm which is a ton at this scale. On the plus side, however, very little support ended up being needed to build the tricky bits- even the watchtowers stood up alright. If you’ve got a 3D printer that normally gives you pretty good results, I say give these a try and see what happens.

I’ll post again once the shapeways-representative prints come off the company printer :)

I made these without seeing the two threads below; I’m obviously not the first foray into amateur/custom 3D-printed minis! Anyone looking at these should check out these two older threads as well:
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/28327/custom-facilities-project
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/30693/air-base-naval-bases-hbg-shapeways

For anyone who hasn’t seen m_bergman’s incredible (and free!) collection on thingiverse yet, please go check it out- Hundreds of accurate 3D models in 1:200 scale, including armor, trucks, and misc. combat vehicles from 1940-present day.

Pack 1: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:232248
Pack 2: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:310476
Pack 3: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:539511
Pack 4: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1138822

I got sextons, priests, and hummels off the company hardware today. I further shrank these by 30-40% to get closer to 1:300 scale:

@djensen any chance we get a sticky for 3D models, free and otherwise? These collections need curation…

Yeah, Shapeways is so flipping expensive! 0.o

RE: the SPAs and Tanks, I could not believe it when I saw m_bergman’s collection. I’m a little embarrassed I haven’t already printed off all of his work, since I have no excuse… except for the fact that I need to at least occasionally be productive at my job.

Finally got my test prints off the company printer! Pic below. The IC is the same size as the OOB IC, for size comparison.

I also shrank the self-propelled artillery pieces by a further ~20%, so I should be down to about 1:350 scale now, which should look better on the board given how tiny the OOB Mech Infantry are. I’ll post comparison pics of OOB pieces with the new smaller hummels and sextons (priests were omitted from this print, unfortunately) from home tonight. For anyone looking to replicate, grab the 1:200 3D files from m_bergman and shrink by ~45% before printing.

Have some initial bundled qtys up on Shapeways for order, if anyone wants to try these out and support a starving engineer… :)

Minor ICs x10: https://www.shapeways.com/product/SU3XFL8JB/minor-industrial-complex-x10?optionId=83658202&li=shop-inventory

Minor ICs x20: https://www.shapeways.com/product/FXMTA32SU/minor-industrial-complex-x20?optionId=83658755&li=shop-inventory

Major ICs x10: https://www.shapeways.com/product/WFG68GKNM/major-industrial-complex-x10?optionId=85494390&li=shop-inventory

@djensen Should I pull these links? I didn’t realize I had to be more than just an individual sponsor.

all, I got the airfields batched up into QTY 10 on Shapeways. Here’s everything up so far: