The one with more digital wargame-fiddling, remixes and HOTT for TTS..

The past couple of days have been fairly quiet in the painting-booth (well, table really, but you know what I mean). Managed to paint about half of the bronze on my Sea People before my patience ran out yesterday and I haven't touched them since. 

Here is a rant to be had on the downside of digital sculpts. 
The are way to detailed for army-modelling!
This goes for the bigger scales without saying, but my brother-in-wargames... Imagine cramming all that detail on a mini that you scale down to 15mm. The amount of miniscule details like armbands, rivets and even sheildbosses is staggering on my Sea People miniatures. 
Most (if not all) sculptors I have seen a few videos with sculpt in 'uge sizes and then scale the models down to the preferred sizes for the final STL to be released in, let's say 28mm. (Please correct me on this if I'm wrong). While sculpting on a 'uge model, it seems to be really eay to get carried away with the detail it seems. 
When I search for (historical) models to downscale into 15mm or 6mm I always try to reach the sculptor before I buy the STL to ask if they are readily downscaleable to what I am looking for. Many of them honestly haven't tried, but everyone so far has been kind enough to send me a couple single STLs to try for a final print. Pretty much everything that is 28mm from the start is so-so at 15mm, and straight into the bin at 6mm. 

My preferred go-to for small additions to my various projects is, believe it or not, Thingiverse. There are alot of stuff there for free that has simpler designs, maybe because it all started up as a FDM-site in it's hay-day. My phone-camera doesn´t really do miniature-details any justice so I won't take pictures today, but when discussing the detail needed for 15mm infantrymodels I don't need a myriad of tiny details. The whole "1-meter rule" and all that... 
When it comes to 6mm the statement goes double, even for vehicles. 
If you look at my french tanks, hell, half of them have completely smooth tracks, not an individual link to be seen!  

Anyhow. I will probably snap a few pictures once I unpack my 15mm Gepid army since it has some "simpler" sculpts done in 1:72 that I downscaled, so we can compare them to my 15mm Sea Peoples and add fuel to the fire on my thoughts on the subject.

I have poured som hours into the hobby elsewhere tho.
Remixing the french buildings from the KS takes time for sure. Again, it's about rescaling them from 28mm to 6mm, which is supereasy. The not-so-easy part comes during the actual printing and "hobbying" as it were.
First and foremost, you get alot of small parts you have to glue together. Remember, in 28mm they have to fit on the buildplate on a FDM-printer, thus they are chopped up into manageble chunks. When I downscale (and therefore get everything to fit on my buildplate) I merge the parts in together in the software so they already come out as a complete building.
Secondly, resin-printing costs money. There is no need to print stuff that you don't see or to have solid structures in your models. In this case, let's take the roof-parts as an example. The difference in price to print a solid roof, as opposed to one that is hollowed out is €/$0.2-0.3 with the resin I am using now. Make 100 parts like that and we start talking about some savings to be had.
Third, when you hollow out the models it creates pockets of unhardened resin that remain inside the model. This is bad for all the reasons you can imagine and you want to get rid of it. The easiest way is to add holes in your model. In an earlier post I talked about having done it straight in Chitubox, and had about as bad results I kinda knew I was gonna get. I will stick to the fact that the more of an hole you can have in the base of the model, the better. Some might need vents in the top-end (that prints last, ie. upside down) aswell due to their size.
Fourth, resinprints can and will warp if they get the chanse. This means that you want some internal supportstructure once you have hollowed out the model. 
Fifth.. There was a fifth, but I guess I have rambled on long enough. Here are som pictures of my process on the individual buildings. I went thru about half of the KS, building by building to prep them.
It's a bit of a bad series of screenshots since I am remixing the 28mm versions of the building before scaling them down. Normally I import them scaled down at 25% for 28 -> 6mm.

I start my process by scooping out the innards of the part by adding in square holes.

 

Next step is to add some internal crossbeams to add sideways strength.

Here are all the parts for the building stacked together before the final merge.

The roof is scooped out with wedges at this stage. By the magic of the internet, now in 6mm scale.

My final buildpieces, ready to export and print. There are 5 different houses and I have single, dual and triple-elements ready to print whatever configurations I want with a minimum of glueing.

Other than playing in CAD I have tried to wrap my head around how to make custom stuff in Tabletop Simulator. I responded to a call for TSS users who wants to play HOTT in the software.
Obviously I know very little about how to play HOTT in TTS (or irl for that matter) but fortune favours the bold!
Long story short, I now have a custom fantasy-gothic army with a 'UGE bear made up in TTS. I haven´t really figured out how to resize the elements, or if I even need to tho. Apart from that I got a few different model-packs from the workshop, managed to move stuff around, get them merged onto bases and even got the tooltips to display their data. I gotta say I'm quite pleased with myself and will probably make a couple more 24 AP armies just to browse around in all the nice models out there.

The HOTT GOTH(s) in all their glory.

I know that I am very late to the "let's sit home and play TTS since we can't leave the house nowadays"-party, but here's to hoping to catch the tail-end of the digital wargaming revolution that popped up during the pandemic.


Cheers.
/Fred
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