What did you do today.

[me_in_japan]

@jye - yay! I love trolls. Beautiful work

[The Other Dave]

Agreeing with the troll love! They're lovely models too.

I finished up some little tonques this morning:


Next is the better part of an artillery company and a couple stray superheavies.

[The Other Dave]

And some more! A mere two-thirds of a full artillery company

[Primarch]

Nice tiny tanks!

[me_in_japan]

ooooooh! the toiny chonky tonks are soo cuuuuuute Can I keep one, dad, can I keep one?

(Actually, I really do like the bigger, longer ones. Are they Malcadors, I think? They're fantastic designs, though, and I want one in 40k scale for my nurglies, rules be damned.)

As for me, 3d printer goes brrr. I spent really far more time than was reasonable prepping this model for printing. See, thing is, if you download an stl from a legitimate vendor, it'll be designed specifically for 3d printing, and have supports and so on, making it really quite plug and play, at least if you've got your resin settings calibrated properly. But, if you're digging around certain corners of the internet and come upon a repository of what are pretty evidently 3d scans of existing models, you run into all kinds of technical issues whereby the externals of a model look fine, but it has all kinds of mad internal geometry that would make a necron squee with delight. My son calls them "twongles". They're basically triangles that have been twisted into 3 dimensions and spread over the internal geometry, usually tethered to really important areas, so that when you delete them, half the model's skin disappears into the ether and has to be manually resculpted. As a result, I now know way more about vertexes, lines and faces than I ever wanted, and can explain what the word "manifold" means. On the plus side, should I ever need to do it again, it should be a lot more straightforward second time around.

Anyway, here's the fruit of my labors - a leviathan dread, with weapon options. The big hole in his chest was put there by me, and I have the grill thingy to fill it with once I'm 100% sure he's fully cured and off-gassed. Some things to note are: his laurel wreath printed perfectly, but I'm a clumsy oaf and knocked off the left one while I was cleaning it. Scrubbed a wee bit too forcefully while it wasn't fully cured. Ah well, lesson learned. His left knee is...mysteriously MIA. Like, it's in the file, buuuuut...not in real life. Weird. I've since separated it from the rest of the leg in the 3d file, and can print a replacement whenever. Anyway - this cost maybe 500yen in resin for the dread, 2 sets of guns and 1 set of claws. (Astute observers will note there are other weapon options, not pictured. I didn't print them, but I do have the files, should I feel the need.) Since a regular leviathan dread costs 12,000yen for either the shooty or fighty option, I'm calling it a win.




Those print lines really show up when you zoom in like this, but in the hand, they're invisible. Also, I printed this at a resolution of 0.05mm, but the printer can comfortably do 0.02 or smaller, so it was really a compromise between acceptable detail and time spent on the print. If I was doing a display piece or something a bit more swooshy I'd spend more time and up the resolution.

[Primarch]

@M_i_J - Where is the swoosh? I'm assuming it's for your son's army.

I think there are proper, made for printing remakes of most minis kicking around, so you don't have to use dodgy scans to make models from. Jus printed me a Levi that was better than the official kit a while back.

[Jye Nicolson]

Nice little tanks and nice dread!



All these mushrooms slowed me down almost as badly as Elden Ring!



Did have enough time to drag this Castigator over the line to acceptable - they're pretty good right now!

[Primarch]

Having painted nothing since the end of April, I sat down yesterday and painted for most of the day. Today I did some varnishing and applied some flock.
My first minis in months, some rebel militia for the American War of Independence. (A few days late for the actual day though, sorry).

[The Other Dave]

Always good to get back in the swing of painting!

Speaking of, the parade of tanks continues, form of: a couple of stormhammers.



They're kinda silly, what with the weird recessed double battlecannon and the porcupine-looking multilasers sticking out everywhere, but that's 30/40K tanks for ya! (They're also more reliably long-ranged than baneblades, which scale up in effectiveness as you get closer but are lackluster in the "outside of enemy guns' reach" range solar auxilia like to operate at.)

[Primarch]

They're kinda silly, what with the weird recessed double battlecannon and the porcupine-looking multilasers sticking out everywhere, but that's 30/40K tanks for ya!

They are a thing of beauty! The designers looked at the Baneblade and said, "Yes, but what if we added more guns?"
Early Imperial tank design at its finest.