3D Printing and At-Home Fabrication Tips

There are many different slicing programs out there, but my printer came with Slic3r Prusa Edition, so that's the one that I learned to use.  When printing a mini, the rule of thumb is "low and slow".  You want the lowest layer height and nozzle size that you can reliably manage and to print it as slowly as you can tolerate ;) In my case, I've had pretty good results with .05 mm layers and a .25 mm nozzle, printing no faster than 25 mm/sec.  That's a pretty conservative speed, so I could probably get away with faster movements for much of the print on my models... but minis tend to have a lot of really tricky parts, like overhangs, thin sections, and bridges, that benefit from slower print speeds. Why do you want lower layer heights?  Two reasons: they have less visible layer lines and they show more details on the model.  As you can see from the below Slic3r previews, the smaller layers are able to represent much more subtle details along the Z axis.  For som

I hadn't really planned on making my Meshmixer supports post into a series, but I got a few really good questions about the technical process of drawing the actual supports, rather than the theory of how to design supports.  That post is already gargantuan, so I figured that it was time for a sequel!  I'm already off the rails, so who knows, maybe this will even become a trilogy (ok, probably not)! The act of drawing supports in Meshmixer is not super intuitive.  What is is, however, is consistent.  When you're drawing supports, you're drawing a 3D object using a 2D interface.  Meshmixer does its best to help you, but it can still be a bit tough.  There are a few ways to draw additional supports, and I use them all at various times while designing supports for a model! The easiest way to draw additional supports is to just click on a red highlighted part of the model and let Meshmixer try to determine a viable path for the support tree.  Often this works just fine,

The more that I use Blender, the more impressed I am with how powerful it is.  One skill that is crucial to my use of Blender is my ability to change my perspective on an object as I'm working on it.  Fortunately, there are a whole bunch of shortcuts that allow me to do exactly that! Numpad 1 : "Front" view, looking directly along the Y Axis Numpad 3 : "Right" view, looking directly along the X Axis Numpad 7 : "Top" view, looking directly along the Z Axis Numpad 2,4,6,8 : Orbit your view by 15 degrees in the direction implied by the key (2 is downwards, 6 is to the right, etc.). Numpad 9 : Orbit your view 180 degrees. Numpad 5 : Toggle Orthographic view, which renders things "flat" making them easier to line up.  I do most of my modelling with this view enabled I use those shortcuts constantly, flipping between the perspectives when I want to move things around or when I want to rotate something.  When I'm setting up the rough po

I recently picked up a Scythe expansion and, due to a packaging error, received 2 Wind Mills for one of the factions... but no Power Token!  Not exactly the end of the world, but certainly a good push to design my own Power Token replacement (which I had been thinking about doing, regardless).  So, that's what I did! It was a very simple process, actually.  I started by doing a quick google image search for the Scythe board, looking for a high resolution image of the victory track (since I know that it has a clear and moderately large image of the power icon).  I eventually found a good photo in an Ars Technica Review , which is cropped here. Next, I opened up Inkscape , which has been my favorite art program for years (although Blender might be surpassing it...) and imported that image.  Then, I drew a Bezier curve over half of it (my intent was to mirror it when I imported it into Blender, which gave me this result. I wasn't super happy with the result and, part way th

I really enjoyed the sculpting work that I did on the  Flame Demon , so I decided to dive in even deeper with some more of Zacharias Reinhardt's techniques and try my hand at the Night Demon .  In this case, I specifically wanted to use his Improved Asymmetrical Sculpting technique .  As I watched that video, I was immediately reminded of the process that I used to make the Living Bones model , where each part of the model was its own object and so could be individually posed.  I found that model of posing very intuitive (and forgiving of mistakes or late-game idea changes!), so was eager to try it out! Just as he does in his videos, I started with a cube that has a Subdivision Surface  modifier on it to make it roundish.  I then extruded faces to make the very general shape, doing a very rough version of the extrusion-shaping that Miguel Zavala  has perfected.  Since I knew that I would be doing sculpting work, I didn't worry about adding in details the way Miguel does.  Be

I've been playing Scythe recently, so I finally got around to printing and painting my full set of buildings!  If you're curious about how they came out, I posted some pictures on my Scythe Upgrades page , so check it out!

I've seen so many cool   models  on Thingiverse lately, with incredible details sculpted onto them, so I decided that I need to learn to sculpt.  Fortunately, Zacharias Reinhardt has published some incredible videos about sculpting in Blender , which have been hugely helpful to me.  I can't overstate how much help those videos have been.  I've had several face-palm moments when I saw him doing something simply and elegantly that I had wasted hours fighting with. I had previously identified MZ's Bone Devil model as a good proxy for the Gloomhaven Flame Demon .  The Flame Demon doesn't have that cool tail, or many of the other cool distinguishing features of the Bone Devil, but I really liked the core build of the character.  After deciding that I needed to learn to sculpt, it seemed like I had come across a natural match.  I had removed all of the cool features from the Bone Devil, so this was an opportunity for me to sculpt cool Flame Demon features onto it! F

I recently bought a 3 pack of silicon nozzle socks for my Prusa Mk3 and have so far really liked the one that I installed!  A guy on reddit mentioned them as being useful to protect against the blob .  I'll admit that's certainly a good use for them, but I've found that they do one surprising nice thing for me on every print: make my wipe more effective. When the nozzle is heating up before a print, there's always some amount of material leakage due to the physics of holding a viscous fluid in a container with a hole in the bottom (aka the nozzle).  When the printer goes through its bed self-leveling process, that's even more time for more leakage to occur, so by the time the printer gets to the start of the print, I might have a few cm of filament dangling from the bottom of my nozzle. On my old .4 mm nozzle, that line of filament tended to be just that, a line.  My .25 mm nozzle likes to curl the filament, though.  I know what you're thinking: partial nozz

After printing 50+ minis for Gloomhaven, I realized that I needed some way to store (and, more importantly, transport) all of these little guys !  There are a ton of great mini storage solutions already on Thingiverse, but none of them were precisely what I wanted... so I decided to design my own.  Also, after all of this work recently with complex organic shapes, I was looking forward to designing something that was purely mechanically functional in nature =) I had a tote box from Costco that I wanted to use for my minis, so I designed this to fit inside of it.  I measured the inside dimensions (at the bottom, because I learned from last time ) and decided that I should make it fit half of the tote, that way it would be printable in a single piece on my Prusa ;) Those other options on Thingiverse were a great source for ideas.  In the end, I decided that I really liked the "slide-in channel" design that Thetrebor used, but I wanted my sheets to be stack on top of each o

In Part 1 of this New Thing post, I wrote about how I made the  whirlwind for my Gloomhaven Wind Demon model .  This time, I want to write about how I made that creepy demon hand. I used the same basic technique that I wrote about for the Forest Imp model , but I think that I improved it a lot here.  Like with the imp, the first thing that I did was to add the basic armature so that I could build my model over it.  In this case, I only wanted an arm and hand, so I just deleted the rest of the armature until those were the only bones that I had left.  Then, I added a mesh and drew edges over each bone, so that I could apply the Skin  and Subdivision Surface  modifiers to give me some basic geometry again. And it really didn't work very well.  As I saw while working on the Living Bones model , the Skin modifier really doesn't like it when you have a bunch of complex intersections... and the bones of a hand are nothing if not complex.  It was causing all sorts of weird non

I made a Wind Demon model for Gloomhaven!  I used some cool techniques that I want to share to make two parts of this model: the whirlwind and the hand/arm.  Today, I'm going to write about the whirlwind. I made the whirlwind by using a combination of the Screw modifier (like I did on the Harrower Infester's legs) and the Curve modifier (like I did on the Giant Viper model ).  I started out with a very simple piece of geometry - just one protruding bit of the whirlwind.  And before you ask, yes, this is probably the lamest screenshot that I've ever taken. That's it, 3 vertices and 2 edges.  I then applied the Screw  modifier and let it do its magic.  Since I didn't have the advantage of an Array modifier to make extra loops like I did while making the snake, I just made a really long series of twisting potential whirlwind.  I figured that I could cut it off at the bottom and top after it was all in place via a Boolean Difference  modifier, so there'd be