Custodes and Sister of silence

I just picked up the Burning of Prospero box and just had to build and paint a Custodes and Sister of silence. These are insanely detailed models and great fun to paint. If this is the future of plastics I will not miss resin at all. I went for a bit of an unconventional color scheme as I thought that just making them pure gold would look a bit flat. So instead I went for my trusted recipe of worn white metal as a base and then painted the shoulder pads, graves and plates in gold. It still looks like an golden armor but you can also see the under laying layers. I am pretty happy with these, especially as I painted them at the same time in about four hours, which for me is a bit of speed painting.

General WIP, knights, warlord and cult mechanicus

This week has been very hectic with me spending the whole week away from home. But I have managed to squeeze some hobby time in. Mostly I have raced to do as much as possible with the 3D printer as I will have to give it up soon. One thing was to re-do the cockpit for the knights. This time I did it as a one piece to get a better fit bet ween the components. Sadly I managed to get some of the measurements wrong when I re-did it. First I managed to get the height of the dividing wall wrong so it did not fit into the knight torso, and I also managed to get the seat to narrow so the pilot did not fit. After some remodeling and quite a lot of swearing (as I had not set up the model for this kind of editing) I managed to fix these two things, just to realize that I also managed to place the dashboard to far back, so the pilot still wont get into the seat, which means one more, and this time really substantial re-modeling again. But at least I now have the basic form down, and if I only can get the front right I might call it on this one and print a few for the future.








One other thing I tested was to make some air intakes for my warlord. It almost looks like the model is missing something on the front of the cooling ducts on the back. The small round air intakes look a bit small, and when examining the model one can actually see that there are some cross-members extruding from the air intakes that are ending with a chamfer that actually lines up to a plane. So by adding some flat pieces to the sides one can get a nice fit to them. As I noted before, printing flat surfaces are not a good idea with the 3D printer as they turn up striped. So I decided to just print the borders for some intake covers and then glue them onto some smooth plasicard. I think this turned out very nice and I like the look of the cooling ridges with these air intake covers. Just need to print another set and make me a second one.



I have also been fielding around with some green stuff on the insides, mostly filling in gapes etc so there is not much to see at the moment. I have also worked a little on the weapon servitors, were they are getting attached to some wires etc.

Doing all these things in a short time is actually quite stressful, so to relax I painted a mechanicum electro priest. So all in all I have not done much but a little on many things.

When putting models next to the War Lord torso one realizes that it is actually not much bigger than a standard building.

WIP: Varangian insides

This week there really was not much time for doing any hobby stuff. But I managed to get some time in with the Varangian to finish the internal build. So there you have it, All the pieces are built, now they should be green stuffed and have a lot of detail added. This also means that I can move forward with the actual build of the Varangian as I do not need to fit stuff inside and hence, the torso can start to bulk out. There is only one thing that I have not decided on. As the roof is not glued down there is no connection between the shoulders apart form the walls. I think the walls will be enough once all the shoulder parts are glued in, they make up quite a solid network of resin. I had prepared to add a cross member going from one side to the other with a threaded rod that could be removed. This will however pierce the mechanicum panel at the top, so I am a but out on if I should add it or not. I could always add some "hocks" to the side of the roof that goes down over the sides to keep them from bulging outward. I will let it sit or the week as I will not have time to work on it and decide how to proceed next weekend.

3D follow up

I have now painted my first 3D printed test interior for the imperial knights (very sloppy 30 min paint job as it will not be used). One thing that is directly obvious with the print is that the layers are clearly visible on any "smooth" surfaces, especially when dry brushing. Thing are a little better if there are lots of details etc. This is a raw print, i.e. I have not done any post processing to smooth it out or to enhance the detail quality. From a distance it looks ok, and I think that with some filing and green stuffing this could be a great method to at least get a skeleton in for custom work, which would help a lot with symmetry, scale etc.
Next up is to change the nozzle of the printer to a smaller bore and see if this helps with the detail level. I will probably only print parts of it again for comparison. Other things I could mess around with are a tone of settings for the printer and also the calibration of distance from the base to the nozzle. In the end it might also be that the high impact polystyreen is not an ideal plastic for printing and that a "smoother" plastic would give better results. This is also something I might try if I have the time.

I will also play around a bit with the design, keep the parts that came out ok and redesign the parts where the printer could not get the details right. I will also try to make it more of a one piece to help keep things in the right place. For final design though, one I know that everything fits nicely I might break it up again for ease of painting.

I will also try out some hybrid schemes with details like borders, insignia, bolts and such printed and then glued to plasticard, Similar to what I did for the shield of the close combat knight but more consistently (on the shield I only used printed nuts)

WIP, 3D print

So, after finishing the design of the Knight interior I spent the evening having the printer push it all out. Sadly it does not really fit into the Knight, so some measurements needs to be adjusted. There are other things to That I will change for the next run. One thing I noticed on the printer though is that the calibration of the nozzle is really important as it tends to smear the layer below if not done correctly. I might also try a smaller size nozzle and see if that improves the detail level. All in all it was a fun experiment and show that it is possible to print decent structures for modeling. In the end I think a combination between plasticard, green stuff and 3D printing might be the way to go, where each medium has it own strengths.

Unexpected developments

Well, I have been thinking about sculpting vs CAD + 3D printing lately, as I do not feel that the things I sculpt is not really sharp enough. So the other day a friend of mine said that I could borrow his 3D printer as he was not going to use it for a month or so, which means I get to play around with it a bit. So I decided that since I already have built the interior to the knights I might as well take these pieces, measure them and put them into CAD. A few hours later I have some sort of preliminary rendering, now I just need to test print them and see how it looks and also how it fits into the knight. I will get back with the results. And if it turnes out to work, I will just have to design the rest of the pieces that I have now sculpted for the knights and I will have a means to rapidly turn out knight interiors. In this case I should also probably by some of the FW pilots and make sure that they fit in the throne.

Fallen / Pre heresy Dark Angels and Varangian insides

After finishing the War Dancer I cleaned the palette by painting a Pre heresy / fallen Dark Angel. I find this paint scheme quite easy and relaxing and I can do a model in about two to three hours Sadly the camera does not do them justice as it has a hard time with the colors with the lighting that I use. The black comes out to shiny compared to IRL, and it pics up some of the pigments better than others, making the transitions look rougher than what they are.

I have also worked a little bit on the Varangian, filling in the last blocks of the inside and cutting them down to fit with the lid on. So now I can have everything in place on the inside and still close the lid. That means I can start with the detailing, finishing this part of the build, not that I will be done in a hurry, but it was one of the big questions marks on this build. The rest of the modifications will be pretty basic with GS sculpting and some minor re-shuffling of some pieces.