So Moose, why do you create models for a game that's almost a decade out of print? Battlefleet Gothic is my favourite GW game, I think mostly because of the ship designs. Each race had different playstyles and nifty ships, and only the Necrons were horribly unbalanced. But that made sense thematically so it was ok! The Imperial ships were gloriously arrogant, the Chaos ships predatory, and the Eldar ships sleek. Unfortunately I only got a few ships before the game went out of print. But this can be no barrier!
I decided to start modelling BFG ships basically to keep my CAD skills sharp, and to try to combat the ridiculous resale prices, or the shady recasts. Plus some of the old models fall apart if you even look at them. However they're all generally nice, chunky designs which also lend themselves well to printing.
My original "in" to printing was in uni, when I designed and printed a working ramjet. It worked... kinda. Didn't quite burn down the lab at least! It was printed using laser-sintered powder, which behaves a little differently to printers most people encounter. It's most similar to resin printers which also use light to solidify the print material. Laser sintering works using a high powered laser to melt the surface of powdered particles. The particles join to each other and the layer below. After each layer is complete a thin layer of powder is brushed across and the process is repeated. This allows very strong materials to be used. My ramjet was printed in stainless steel, a cut above ABS or PLA in toughness!
What's more common are Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) printers and Stereolithography (SLA) printers. FFF printers are the classic filament reel printers that most people think of when they say "3D printing". They operate by laying down thin lines of melted plasic that eventually form shapes, which are then layered to form objects. It's slow and quite an analogue process but generally well behaved. I own a knockoff printer that I've slowly upgraded. It's now got a Duet control board and a proper Titan Aero extruder. The trick to really high quality FFF printing is a good nozzle. I use an e3d 0.15 mm nozzle. This is tiny, considering the typical FFF nozzle is 0.4 mm. This allows me to comfortably hit 0.06 mm (60 micron) layers with nice crisp edges. I'm still working on getting overhangs right, where there is not much material underneath. At the moment it hangs over a bit too much, giving a bad finish. If you do use a FFF printer, I would recommend spending actual money on the nozzle. You can get cheap ones on Ebay/Amazon for pennies, but you're not paying for the material, you're paying for the tolerance on the nozzle. If you're buying the right nozzle, the size on the datasheet is the size of the nozzle with a tight tolerance. This means your printing will be much more repeatable and reliable!
SLA printers use photosensitive resins and either a laser or a projector to cure the resin layer by layer. They can hit much thinner and more precise layers and in some cases can actually print faster than FFF printers if the bed is full. This is because the time for each layer is the same, no matter how much is on the print bed. However the resin is fairly nasty stuff. Ventilation is very important, as are gloves. Once printed the objects need to be washed and cured to clean off leftover resin and harden the prints. Most miniatures that you see printed these days are SLA prints because the detail is so much better. Popular SLA printers are in the £300-500 range, not including extra resin and all the other gubbins. I live in a small rented house so a messy, smelly resin printer isn't really an option.
Before you get a printed object though, you need something to print! I started designing ships well before I had a printer. The first model I made was of an Imperial Sword-class frigate. It's a nice small model with all the important features of an Imperial vessel: chunky hull detail and a complex prow shape. I'll cover making this sort of prow in a later post, as I see a lot of chunky or simplistic prows. This model was done in Solidworks, however all my later models were made in Autodesk Fusion 360 under a hobbyist license. In CAD software like this there are a lot of tricks for making it look like you've done more work than you have. Patterns and assemblies are excellent for re-using effort. I'm much less familiar with sculpting tools, but I'm slowly getting the hang of Oculus Medium for Tyranid ships, because doing organic shapes in CAD is a nightmare.
If you'd rather not learn obscure tools, there are plenty of models available online to print. The big place to find them is Thingiverse (https://www.thingiverse.com/), however at time of writing the site can be agonisingly slow. Your best bet is using Google, or other more specialised search engines, to actually locate the models. Then patiently load the Thing's page. An alternative is Cults3D (https://cults3d.com/en) which has paid-for and free content. Both of these support donations, if you appreciate a maker sling them a few bob to say thank you! Not all the models you can download are appropriate for printing as some are ripped straight from the BFG: Armada games. These are absurdly detailed, so if you can get your printer to get them to hold together they look fantastic. You may also have trouble picking all that detail out with a paintbrush. A SLA printer is your best bet. Although it takes a surprising amount of work to get a printable file from these rips I tend to look down on it as a bit shady. I know that sounds a bit rich, but there you go! If you want something even easier but more expensive, Shapeways (https://www.shapeways.com/) has a good number of models for purchase. Shapeways tends to use laser sintering for its products. The quality is a little below a good resin print but it's much easier to pay someone else to do it. Good search terms are "BFG", "Battlefleet Gothic", and "battlefleet_gothic". It's also very expensive. A final alternative is hunting down a friend with a printer, the BFG Facebook groups are good for this if you have FB.
Watch out for certain shady folks selling Thingiverse models on Shapeways and Ebay. This is a dirty practice and is very demoralising for designers as they get no credit whatsoever and someone else makes money of their hard work. A good simple escort model takes at least six hours of solid designing. Battleships can take days! My up-detailed Imperial Battleships took several days of gruelling CAD work, on top of the time it took to create the original model. So please do me and others a favour and don't buy from the vultures.
So that's an introduction to me. I design ships out of a love for the original game and to share the enjoyment of one of GW's best game systems. I hope this blog will be of use to people. I hope to cover in future posts things relating to the design and printing of BFG models, and the odd rambling musing about space-related topics.
Welcome to (Don't) Paint it Black!
Further reading:
https://www.3dhubs.com/knowledge-base/introduction-sla-3d-printing/ - An introduction to stereolithography printing
https://all3dp.com/2/fused-filament-fabrication-fff-3d-printing-simply-explained/ - An introduction to fused filament fabrication printing
https://all3dp.com/1/best-free-3d-modeling-software-3d-cad-3d-design-software/ - A good list of different 3d modelling tools. Save yourself the stress though, and don't try to use Blender for serious modelling! It's soul-destroying. Fantastic rendering and animation tool though.
https://cults3d.com/en/users/Italianmoose/creations - My Cults3D page
https://www.thingiverse.com/Italianmoose/about - My Thingiverse page
Did you enjoy this? I always appreciate pizza: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/italianmoose