Normandy Scenery

Well they haven't just arrived ... but we're finally in a position to show them off

We had a number of buildings and other items made for a 1/300th/6mm scale game depicting Operation Deadstick, the British airborne assault to capture the Orne River and Caen Canal bridges on D-Day (now more famous as Pegasus Bridge and Horsa Bridge).

The bridges themselves were the two most impressive items, but we also had a number of buildings, bunkers a church and even a gunboat made. These depicted the real buildings around the battlefield, and allowed the layout to be far more realistic than if we'd just used existing generic houses.

The models were mostly printed in White, Strong, Flexible - the bridges and gunboat were polished which gave a really nice finish and some small pieces were Frosted Ultra Detail.

You can read and see more about the game on the club's website :
http://www.brigademodels.co.uk/mws/ShowGames/Pegasus/index.h tml.

Oh, very nice work... And how long has that taken?

Glenn

Thanks, Glenn

The build took around 3-4 months all-told (including about 3-4 iterations of Pegasus Bridge itself until we finally came up with a version that would print and survive polishing - I have to thanks Joost at Shapeways for getting me through that ).

I've never dared to add up how much it all cost ...

Great work.
It's pretty hard to work in such a tiny scale.

Thanks, pfeiffer

The small scale was chosen because we wanted the ground scale to be as close to the figure scale as possible (we had a fixed size table and I wanted to get both river and canal in).

I quite like the very small scale, I've been gaming in it for years. And to be honest, the smaller the scale the more you can get away with in terms of the odd inaccuracy here and there ...

Very cool What is thickness of bridge railings?

Between 0.8mm and 1mm - I had to put supports between some parts of the railings to help them survive polishing, which then have to be cut off when the model arrives.

Very nice.

Indeed, nice work.

Have you thought about printing the houses in "sandstone"? They look printable to me and at that size might come out cheaper. But the best thing is that you could make them coloured. No need to paint them.

Greetings
Karl Heinz

Have you thought about printing the houses in "sandstone"?

I hadn't thought of that ! The houses are all thin-walled shells (the walls are all around 1mm thick, I skirted very close to the WSF 0.7mm minimum in many places) so they'd need thickening up before being printable in sandstone. But it might be worth an experiment to see how one comes out. And I guess some of the smaller details would be lost, but I'll have a try if the results are any good I'll post them here.

Most of them would be more expensive.
WSF buildings with 1mm wall thickness are sturdy enough for regular game use. And those who are afraid can simply fill them with the cheapest plaster available at the local DIY store.

FCS requieres a wall thickness of at least 2mm - and that's still pretty brittle.

Also, FCS's colors are not waterproof.

That's right, WSF costs about double the price of sandstone per ccm, but sandstone needs double the wall thickness (hence volume) and the fixed handling fee for WSF is cheaper, so it will depend on the exact shape of the item. For example something that is too thin to hollow out could come out cheaper in sandstone.

WSF is very tough. But I didn't find Sandstone especially brittle and quite up to normal gaming use. Tougher than plaster, not quite as tough as resin.

The colour on Sandstone is indeed watersoluble, but otherwise holds on well. It can be protected with the proper type of varnish - see the discussions in the forums.

Greetings
Karl Heinz

Thanks, Karl-Heinz. I'll give the Sandstone a try when I get a chance - even if they do cost slightly more, it might be worth it to have them effectively pre-painted.

Brideder,
I think you will find it is cheaper. I just had this printed,
This picture was taken in direct sunlight and the skin tones don't look as light as they actually are. This is a 2" head and is very thick and cost me about 24 bucks to print. It would have cost 35 in WSF.

rkapuaala,

I think the issue with cost is that my models are hollow with very thin walls - 1mm. If I have them printed in Sandstone I will have to thicken the walls to at least double that, so the volume of material used will be doubled - which will offset any savings in the cost of the material unfortunately.

That said, I like your head - and the printing on the surface looks really impressive.

Yes, thickening it definately would offset the reduction in price. Thanks for the compliments, It photographse better than it looks. the skin tone is a little dark so that is something I will have to toy around with on the next texture, but then again it looks really sweet in the pics like this one.

By the way you might want to use photos of the actual buildings on yours. Mine was done with the paint tool in sculptris and probably would have turned out better if I had an actual color photo.