I better write this today as I can't see me doing much on Hogmanay... Not that I intend to drink that much booze tonight, it's just that I hope to spend a nice relaxing day with the wife watching old movies!
Anyway, I've already hinted at the new addition to my modelling tools, but I thought I'd add a bit more detail as this will be playing quite a big role in my model making in 2021...
Santa was very kind to me (a big 'thank you' to all my lovely family who contributed to this present) and a BIG package arrived on my doorstep just after Christmas Day. It was a FLASHFORGE ADVENTURER 3 3D printer...
The above photo shows the newly unboxed printer with some of the protective packing still in place. Believe me when I say that I soon had all that peeled off, unstuck and dispensed with in very short shrift! 😁
I won't go into the details of this printer, it's specs and why I chose it (just yet) but suffice to say that it's aimed at complete 3D printing 'noobs' like myself and, indeed, it was not very long before it knocked out my very first test print...
The end result of this was a cute little 'Bench' boat model - a standard model designed to test your printers set-up (every new 3D printer-er starts by printing this torture-test model)...
Despite it just being a generic test print 'Benchy' is kinda cute in it's own right and I even imagined that - scaled up and modified slightly - it might make a nice little boat for my 50mm peg figures! 😆
Anyway, so begins my adventure into 3D printing with my Adventurer 3 printer!
But before I leave things there you might be asking 'but why 3D printing'? Good question!
There are a lot of ideas I have for new (to me) modelling techniques that I want to try out this year. Different ways of putting my peg soldiers together and how to add different accessories and different kinds of models (like vehicles). The quickest and most convinient way of doing this for me - coming as I do from a plastic model-making background - is for my to prototype these new idea using a plastic printing method like 3D printing.
Using 3D software and this printer I can quickly try out new things and see how they might work without laboriously carving out little pieces of wood (which is quite messy)!
In fact, I can try out a lot of my initial idea in 3D software alone and only once satisfied - in principal - with the design do I need to go to print. So another new 'thing' for me this year will be to design my models using a 3D drawing application like TINKERCAD or BLENDER...
The above picture shows my early attempts to create a 3D version of a peg! Once I have a template for my pegs I can then start to work on 3D versions of the ideas that I have for accessories (This is the drawing of a full-sized dolly peg, but I'll also make a version of my 50mm 'half-sized' pegs as well).
And there we have it, bringing my peg making into the 21st century!
HOWEVER, I should say that I am not abandoning my more traditional wooden peg creations. I still very much enjoy the good old fashioned creative pleasure of making things by hand. The 3D printing - which is in a plastic material - is for very specific projects where traditional crafting is less suitable...
Imagine, for example, having to create a whole army of various but similar figures for a large scale war-game. A more streamlined production line process would be far more practical in this instance. Also, more complex models - like vehicles - would be far quicker to prototype virtually in 3D first in order to create a template for how exactly I would create them in wood.
So, quite aptly for New Year my new 'toy' nicely connects the old and the new!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
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