A Few More Painted 3D Prints

To follow up on my previous post, I painted up some more items from my first batch of 3D printed small sci-fi miniatures.

These are the power armour troops from Titan Forge that I showed in a previous post. Because of the bulkiness of the miniatures, they painted up well while still retaining a decent amount of detail. The interesting thing is that the middle miniature with two pistols was primed without my varnish treatment! If you look very closely, it has more print lines visible than the other two, but not by much.

Here is a close-up of the right side of that miniature.

One problem I did have was with supports. Because of the amount of supports, the back of the miniature with two pistols had a "melted" look, as you can see on the left. For the other miniatures, I oriented them enough to minimize supports, and the details look quite a bit sharper, on the right.

Here is a size comparison with my previous cyberpunk character in regular clothes. The power armour is suitably imposing.

I also painted up a couple of spherical sentry drones, which are from the Novus Landing Kickstarter and came as a free addition. They are nice and quick to paint, and Stargrave apparently has rules and scenarios for drones.

Here is a size comparison with all of these side by side.

I still have quite a few more miniatures in the queue, including figures from the Novus Landing system that are designed to be support-free. I'll put them up as soon as I can manage.

Painted 3D Printed Sci-fi Miniatures (Small)

I've finally painted some of my smaller 3D printed miniatures that I had previously shown. They mostly turned out quite well.

The above are all printed on a Creality CR-6SE FDM (i.e. filament) printer, treated with a couple of coats of varnish before priming to reduce the visible print lines. The dog, the cyberpunk character, and the robot are all from the creator "Papsikels" on MyMiniFactory. The Ewok is a free file from Thingiverse.

I really like the cyberpunk character, since he has a lot of detail that showed up very well even on an FDM printer. Here he is compared with a GW Genestealer cultist and a Reaper Bones pulp miniature. This is definitely a tall 32mm scaled figure, although I can scale him down a bit to fit 28mm miniatures.

The back still has decent detail, even with supports making the surface more "melted" than the front.

The Ewok is a free miniature, but is actually very well-designed. However, due to the small size, there are some print lines visible if you look close enough. Good enough for a crew member in Stargrave though.

The battle droid miniature has some very thin parts. Because of that, I had a hard time printing it until I upscaled it by 120%. Now it's a fairly imposing thing. A robotic member for a Stargrave crew?

I have even more miniatures being painted right now. Here is an example of how I prepare and prime them.

I usually give them two coats of varnish, which will cover up most of the print lines. Then I prime them with black gesso, my preferred primer. The gesso dries very tight and smooth, and will reveal any details, including print lines, mercilessly. I've found that horizontal surfaces with the varnish treatment end up very smooth, but vertical surfaces still often have print lines showing. Maybe the varnish flows off too easily when it's not dry? Here you can see the effect, this heavy weapons robot has very smooth horizontal surfaces but some of the vertical surfaces, like the sides of the gun barrels and the legs, still show print lines.

Here it is compared to the cyberpunk character. I don't know if there are rules for larger crew members with heavy weapons in Stargrave?

Inspired by another hobbyist at our gaming group, I also quickly painted up some terminators from the Warlord Games Terminator Genisys game. The game was pretty forgettable, but the injection molded hard plastic miniatures are a joy to paint and are very easy to deal with.

I have quite a few of these. Maybe they can be used in Stargrave as "pirate" troops?

Stay tuned for more 3D printed items.