Steampunk Grenadiers - Magnetised Bases

 Having completed printing the remainder of the first unit for my 'Invasion Mars, 1899' project I realised I had made a bit of a boo-boo! But, first of all let's have at the progress so far...

So far so good - although I am still working on the arms and weapons - and this is when I had a bit of a 'duh-oh' moment. I like to magnetise war game figures so I can easily move units in unit trays, this entails fitting a small magnet into the base of the figure - guess what I HADN'T done! 😖

I didn't really want to start drilling or carving out holes in the figures' bases so I could insert magnets, this would be quite messy.  SO... Plan B, I decided it would be easier just to glue steel washers to the bottom - then I'll magnetise the unit trays with magnetic sheets.

This is a bit of a fudge but it does have one positive effect - it gives my PLA printed figures a little bit of weight - which I prefer. Every cloud has a silver lining!

NEXT: I finish the construction and painting of my Grenadiers.

Innsmouth Bad Boys - Completed

 These little guys were a bit of an experiment so I'm not 100% happy with them, but they gave me a bit more experience in designing 3D figures. till, they expand my 'Assault on Innsmouth' collection and have given me some ideas for future fantasy projects.

'The Snapper Brothers' - Frog Man
A swivel-gun totting amphibian psychopath - the elder brother of this duo, his toxic bite is as deadly as the bark of his canon-ette !

'The Snapper Brothers' - Shark Man
He never sleeps and his search for prey is ceaseless! He'll get you, by tooth or he'll nail you...

These models take me slightly away from my original peg format with their modified bodies. I think I could have made something similar out of wood, but the great advantage of 3D modelling is it allows a lot more latitude for on the fly experimentation which encourages trying new ideas.

So, that's my monsters and now I'll have to finish off this small series with a few more human cast members. It'll be fun, though, setting these up against 'normal' figures in a skirmish game! 😁

Link to all posts in this project series: Innsmouth Bad Boys/Assault on Innsmouth.

Innsmouth Bad Boys - Progress

While I'm getting there with my 'Innsmouth Bad Boys' I wanted to show the intermediate progress rather than simply going straight to the completion photos (which are about a day away). That would be a bit too much like those frustrating Blue Peter 'and here is one I made earlier' reveals! 😁

While most of these figures have been pretty straight forward. I have topped the project with some painting that is a little more involved than usual...

In particular, my 'frog-man' has been given a facial that is more detailed than my normal cartoonish peg figures, with some graduated tones and textures.

The reason for this little departure from my usual super-simplified style is that I wanted to emphasise the monstrousness of these characters as compared to the 'normal' human peg characters in the series.

They are still - obviously - not 'realistic' by any means, but it was an interesting small departure for my painting style, if only to see what I could do for fun.

A Sunday Stroll into 28mm Territory

 Really, while planning and designing my next figures and trying to use up the last of a PLA filament spool, I decided to experiment with scaling down my normal 50mm designs. I was intrigued to know how scaling would effect the detail that I had on my peg sized soldiers - would it disappear or deform beyond recognition? ...One way to find out (I thought)...

So, I reduced my 3D Steampunk figure using TINKERCAD to what I considered an equivalent of 28mm scale (according to a web search that is 30mm form foot to eye level of the figure)...

As I said, I made no concession to the effects on detail by shrinking the existing model so I had no idea whether some of the finer detail would simply disappear during printing. Also, I have never printed out a 28mm scale miniature using my Flashforge Adventurer 3 so that was a bit of an unknown too (although I know a lot of gamers regularly print out 28mm miniature using such a 3D printer and are happy with the results).

In any event, I was sort of pleasantly surprised by the what was spat out! Bear in mind - because I like to tinker - that I decided to print this small figure out in one-piece (the body anyway) instead of three pieces like I did with his big brother. The arms and the sword I printed the usual way and separately...

Not too shoddy eh? (But it did need a clean up.) 😁

Here's a comparison photo of the 28mm fig with the original 50mm soldier. I haven't worked out the percentage reduction of this but it looks like it's about a 50% down-scale-ish...

As you can see, it's a little rough round the edges of some of the smaller detail I created for the 50mm fig. But it's not too bad and would probably look better once painted. If I'm honest, I've actually had worse plastic soldier figures from commercial companies and not complained! (I'm looking at you Airfix!) 😉

So, what have I learned here? Well, I do have to make some concessions to the smaller scale, perhaps by making some of the finer detail a bit chunkier so that it holds itself in the reduction. There has to be a balance in robustness of the design when I think I might be doing both a 50mm and 28mm version of the same figure.

Useful experiment.

Invasion of Mars, 1899 - Grenadier Officer

Well, I completed my first prototype figure for my 'Invasion of Mars, 1899' series. It was a bit more involved than my normal 50mm peg soldiers but I did enjoy making it.

I can now get on with the rest of this unit (six figures total) with the 'ordinary ranks' carrying heavy rifles with under-slung rockets. 

Unfortunately, I didn't take into consideration the magnetising of this unit which would have been handy as the air tanks make it rather top-heavy. I am now wondering if I can modify it with a tiny magnet which I could fit into the shallow base. ???

If I can manage to fit a magnet I could then make a unit base with it's own small magnets. Hmmm (today's project).