Tag Archives: 3d printing

Legions Imperialis Token Holder

I was immediately frustrated by the tokens that come packed in the Legions Imperialis box. They look fine: they’re a bit small, but I could trivially punch them out and bubble sticker them like any other respectable Infinity player… but half of them are double-sided!

GW can’t seem to QC their way out of having two departments working on a thing to mutually exclusive ends. Orders are chosen secretly and placed by the unit. Double-sided tokens defeat that purpose. It’s also super weird that only half of them are double-sided.

So: I can fix this.

I’d just had a breakthrough with multicolor printing. This isn’t a new thing, but it was new to me. Nothing fancy: not a multi-material printer… just swapping filaments at the appropriate layer.

Designing the tokens was pretty easy. But how to store them?

I started with a cylinder. Magnets on the bottom to hold it in place, magnets on the top to hold the lid down. I think it’s pretty cool… but with a game where 99% of the models are less than an inch tall it quickly became clear it was impractical.

Settled on a tray, which is quite a bit shallower.

I printed off 25 of each token and made a tray that holds them. Also magnets on the top and bottom as with the cylinder.

I’ve only gotten a ton of positive feedback on them, and have had a couple of commissions to print them for other folks. 25 is too many, so I’ve been running off subsequent trays with 20 tokens.

This is the most recent one I’ve printed (I haven’t dropped it off, which is why I have it to photograph).

Alpha Strike Mech Silhouettes

So back a few weeks ago, when I played Alpha Strike with Dave, I learned that Alpha Strike has an optional rule that is, effectively, Infinity’s Silhouette rules, wherein every model of a particular type has a specified volume which can be substituted for the actual model. This offsets the tendency of models that are intended to be about the same size but often have wildly different poses and shapes, which can make Line of Sight… strange.

I think these rules, particularly Infinity’s implementation of them (of course), are Necessary and Very Good.

Alpha Strike doesn’t have a specific Silhouette stat per se, but if we look at the table:

Practical Line of Sight Size Table – Alpha Strike Commander’s Edition pg 171

That table reduces down to 5 categories:

sShapeDescription
01″x1″ ProtoMechs (All)
11″x1.25″Infantry (All)
Combat Vehicles (1-4)
Support Vehicles (1-3)
22″x 1.25″BattleMechs (1-4)
33″x1.5″Superheavy ‘Mechs (4+LG)
4“It’s complicated”Support Vehicles (4+)

So, of course, I doodled up some S markers for these.

I’m not deep into Battletech, and Catalyst isn’t making Protomechs in plastic, so I’m not going to worry about them (that’s why I started numbering at 0). Support Vehicles 4+ defy a simple shape (seriously, there’s a 15 item table with footnotes to cover them and there’s “use model” in the main table), so I’m not worrying about them.

Honestly, S1 and S2 are probably the only ones I’d ever see on the table, but it’s convenient for me to have the S3.

S1 and S2 are magnetized, so they can snap together, and they fit comfortably inside of the S3. I can just tuck them in or I can set the S2 on an A-Case tray, the S1 on top of it, and the S3 on top of them both, and they should be reliably stay where I’m asking them to: even though the S3 isn’t sticking to the tray, it’d have to slide up the 2″ length of the S2 to fall off and in the meantime is holding the S1 in place.

Printed these at .2mm layer height with organic supports. I ironed the topmost layer, but I suspect that made the text less legible. If you use supports, I recommend a support blocker covering the magnet holes on S1 and S2; support material isn’t needed for a 6mm gap and goes a long way towards making those magnets maybe probably not fit properly. Use 6mm x 3mm magnets.

I’ve put these up on Cults for the nuisance fee of $1.

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Adeptus Titanicus Dice Tray

I knocked together a little dice tray for Adeptus Titanicus last month that I’m pretty satisfied with. I really enjoy doing stuff like this.

Because the provenance of the various images used for the slots is all over the dang place I’m not going to publish this to Cults but I’m sure I could make it available somehow if someone wanted a copy.

Monsterpocalypse Storage

I should have posted about this back in March (when I set the thing up) or a month ago (when the Kickstarter was running), but I’m lazy.

As much as I dislike Privateer, I actually like Monsterpocalypse a fair amount. I’m a sucker for the subject matter, and the game itself is a fun little thing. But: if you’re not doing foam, it’s kind of a bastard to store and transport because everything is on these clear acrylic bases.

The clear bases make sense when you consider how much of a boardgame the thing is and how you really do need to be able to see beneath the model (though I’m not sorry that the Mythic version has dumped it in favor of just normal plastic bases). Clear acrylic that’s only 3mm thick isn’t exactly conducive to magnetization.

So, I did what I did for Aeronautica Imperialis: I rigged up slots for the monsters and buildings to rest in.

They’re designed to rest inside of 11L Really Useful Boxes. I wasn’t able to track these down without just having to order them from RUB directly, but they had the best length x width for fitting a useful number of bases with a useful amount of space around each of them and the best height to be tall enough for these models without being too tall. They also come in regular and XL versions: same footprint but 91mm and 125mm deep internally, which further helps with the tall enough but not too tall requirement.

(I spent a lot of time noodling through the dimensions of their boxes.)

The slots are tall enough that nothing should shift, short of tossing the thing down the stairs or just shaking the dang thing.

I’ve also got some MDF apartment buildings from Phalanx Consortium (that are really great, if only because they were exponentially easier to paint than any other MonPoc building), so I put together little spacers for those to rest in because I didn’t bother mounting them to acrylic bases.

I haven’t done these for the minions, yet. I really should, and will likely get around to it before Mythic’s actually shipped anything. Foam works pretty well for them, since the 1″ foam slots hold the 30mm wide bases pretty snugly without grinding up against the models themselves… but why not? might as well make everything consistent.

I’ve published these to Cults: Monsterpocalypse Spacers.

Learn from my mistakes! Necromunda Zone Mortalis

My primary coping mechanism during this pandemic has been to plan for all the gaming I’m going to get to do if it ever blows over. One of my current plans is try my hand at a Necromunda campaign in my basement.

I’ve got Sector Mechanicus covered with the Deadzone terrain (which I’ve expanded on since that post during the halcyon days of 2014), but the table in my gaming room (constructed in November and un-posted about here; I should fix that) is 6’x4′, which doesn’t leave enough room for 2 4’x4′ tables (I’d have loved to have made it larger, but this is as big as the space permits). That’s a problem if I want to have 2 games/time.

I got the Underhive box when it came out, so I’ve got Zone Mortalis tiles, which solve the problem. I’ve got room for 2’x4′ worth of tiles; more if I shrink the Deadzone table down to a 3’x4′ or so. The tiles have walls marked on them, and the thing to do is to build some MDF or print off some walls to make them feel more real. Cool.

I did some waffling between the offerings from Warlayer and Corvus Games Terrain. I’m not interested in printing off new tiles, just walls, so the Warlayer set was the obvious choice. That was dumb. I should have considered Dragon’s Rest, which costs more but I think is a lot better looking and, while $19 is 4x as much as Warlayer’s $5, it’s hardly crippling. Didn’t think of it until I was 80% towards being done printing off the Warlayer, though, so I’d gone too far to change it up.

In working with these STLs, though, I’ve run into a couple of things that I figured I’d talk through. It’s fine: I spent $5 on them, that they require a little work isn’t the end of the world, and ultimately they’ll work out OK.

First off, after printing off about 1-2 of each piece, I decided only cared about the 2-square walls, 1-square walls, and the 4-way intersections. Those three shapes cover every variation on the tiles. The 3-way and 2-way intersections don’t fill the negative space on the tiles the way I’d like.

Secondly, they’re the wrong size. Ugh.

Look at these two pieces below: the one on the left is the default size: note that it hews perfectly to the squares… except the board has other spaces between the squares, which means the default size doesn’t actually fit the grid worth a damn. The one on the right is resized: I literally measured the size of the tile, divided it by 6, and resized the pieces around that.

The tiles are 289mm square, 6×6 square. That means each real square is actually 48.16mm square, not the 43.20mm it first appears. That adds up to a pretty substantial difference as you line these pieces across the tile.

So, I uploaded them to TinkerCAD and resized them. I probably could have done this in the slicer but I wanted to be able to make sure I knew what I was doing and that things lined up and such. In addition to lengthening all the pieces, I also had to widen them because those quad-intersection pieces were resized along both axes.

I also counted up how many of each were needed to cover each tile. Conveniently, the tiles are basically the same on both sides. I’m planning on using the walls and barricades that were included in Underhive, so I didn’t include printed replacements for them in my count. Were I to do so: +4x 2 square walls, +1x door, +2x figure something out for the 1 square-sized doors. I’m doing a few of the open window variants, because they’re there, and a few doors because why not. 6/26: I guess all of things I thought were plastic walls are actually supposed to be doors. That makes it easier. Still no good solution for the 1 square wide doors; I could muddle through something but it’d definitely be more work than I’m willing to put in.

6/26: I also realized I was very dissatisfied with how the duct tiles worked with the printed terrain. That was something easily fixed: I threw an 18-ish mm octagon across a 1 square wall. Took a little fiddling to get it looking right.

ShapeOriginal LxWResized LxW# Needed
2 square Wall88.19mm x 35.27mm96.33mm x 39.35mm12
1 square Wall43.12mm x 35.27mm48.16mm x 39.35mm23
duct wall48.16mm x 39.35mm5
4-way Intersection43.20mm x 43.20mm48.16mm x 48.16mm26
Door76.26mm x 13.33mm83.30mm x 14.87mm5
Table of shapes, original sizes, resized sizes, and quantity needed.

At these sizes, they fit perfectly.

Let me tell you how I screwed up magnetization.

These pieces come with 4 magnet holes 3mm across, 2mm deep at every connection point. The resizing did distort these by a smidge: they’re maybe 9% larger in one dimension? So, maybe a 3mm x 3.27mm oval and not an even 3mm circle, but I don’t think it’s noticeable.

I magnetized them, basically with a polarity: each piece goes one way. That way, I never end up with a piece that has positives facing out or negatives facing out. I can always line them up in a row.

For the intersections, I did the same thing:

I got about halfway through when I realized: this will work but it’s definitely not the smart way to do it. A better way would to have done the left side of each contact with one polarity and the right side with a different polarity.

This would mean that, instead of every piece having a correct contact direction, every contact direction would work. I was way too far along in the process before I realized this, though, so I’m pretty stuck.

I’m almost done printing these out.

I’ll probably do a very quick paintjob on them: I don’t think they’ll look great but they’ll look alright. This was a test piece done in a few minutes: primed white, Vallejo Air Hull Red, Vallejo Air Orange, GW Leadbelcher sponged on. I’ve got some red filler primer that’s pretty close to that Hull Red color, so I need to experiment a bit more with that before I do everything.