Battlestar Galactica The Thin Red Line

When you design an object to be 3D printed. You want to maximize the best print quality you can get. All FDM printers have the best resolution in the Z axis (Vertical). So by example this ship would be best printed Nose Up.

Now with that in mind, printers have a real hard time with 55 degree angels or more. Some times you can do 60 or 70 degrees but it requires you to do .04 Layer Heightes.  But back to the over hangs, some 90 Degree over hangs can work if they are very small 1-4mm’s.

So all those little square boxes you see on the side have a very slight angel to them to help over come dealing with over hangs. Yes you can do supports to stabilize those over hangs but that causes extra print time and often does not produce a smooth surface on the underside of the over hang.

The other way to deal with over hangs, is to cut the model right in the middle of an over hang. So when the model is printed nose up, the cut in half section of the over hang is the base of the print.

But what about the other side of that over hang? Basically the from that over hang to the aft engines is all one piece now. Well simply you still use that cutting section as the base of your next print again going vertical.

Next you have to look for the next trouble area that has an over hang. And Cut the model in half before it. Again by doing this process it eliminates the need for supports and produces a cleaner 3D print.

You just keep cutting up the model this way until its done.

Now you will notice each engine has 3 little nozzles sticking out its side. I order to get those to print. I made sure those can be printed seperately and glued in place later. But this also means you need to build a base for these to be glued to, to make you lifer easier when it comes time to assemble.

In the future I may do a series of screen shots to show this process better.

I use a free program called Meshmixer to do all my cutting of my models.

I really needed some Civilian ships to be added into my fleet. Something bigger than a Cylon Heavy Raider but not overly to big.

While I spent the next two weeks printing the Valkyrie. I had a little free time to 3D model the Gemenon.

Not the best picture since the lighting in the house wasn’t great and I didn’t want a bunch of distractions in the back ground. Most of the seamlines between parts where taken care of filled, sanded and primed. The turrets had 3mm x 2mm magnets put in them. I used a pen drill and did these by hand until the magnets fit flush in the bottom of the turret. Using a 2 mm drill bit, I made the holes that where needed to for only the head of the nail and about 2-3mm of the nail itself to be inserted into the hull.

You would think this would be a fairly fast process but it became a whole night of hobby’ing after work.

This project will seem rather discombobulated for a while. Since there is no way to just delete prior posts and starting over fresh. I will be over writing older posts with the newer content and direction.

So after much thought, I decided to shelf my BSG game permanently. Yet I have a ton of 3D models I created that could be used with Are’s Game System.

Then it occurred to me, I should go large scale. At the time no one has vested much effort into doing this yet. And not to sound flashy but I wanted something that would catch the eye of anyone walking by. So I could hook possible future players into the game and game system.

So the biggest hurdle to tackle is scale. How big is to big? and how small can you still go and get a sense to its size with out taking up a huge chunk of the table.

Again it all started with the Colonial Mover and this would sort of be the base line of size for all the ships going forward. At the time of this photo, my base set of BSG was still in transit so I didn’t have any physical fighter models to line up against it.

So the thought was to make the Mover roughly 3 times larger than the Viper Mk2.

Since the Colonial Mover was a step in the right direction for me. I thought I should start working on a Large Scale Adamant Frigate.  Again, I keep going back to how big is to big? And how long do you honestly want to be printing to create it. My 1st thought way s to make this ship 28 inches long. After cutting up the parts to checking print time, it just didn’t much sense.

Again comparing a 28 inch long Adamant to a 8 inch Colonial Mover would just seem completely off scale to each other. I ended up settling with a 18 inch long Adamant Frigate which I will go into details later.

Now a thing to remember with me and artists in general. Before they finish one project they are already thinking about the next project they want to work on.

After 54 Hours of printing I assembled the three pieces together. Again I was still waiting for the basic game to arrive. So I 3D printed and painted a Viper Mk2 and Raptor to give an approximation of scale.

Finally my base game arrived and I was able to put the correct scaled Viper Mk2 in this picture.  This picture give you a better sense of the scale of all three ships together.

After the Adamant was primed. I used a rattle can  “Stone Gray” for the entire base coat. The majority of the ship will be this color with highlights of a Steal Gray and a Light Gray on some of the panels. The engine cowling is Lead Belcher with the panel before it a Steal Gray. A few panels I used GW’s Caledor Sky.

Once I was happy with this base paint. I sealed it with a semi-gloss clear coat to make my next step easier on my self.

Next I painted in all of the black panel lines. Because of this clear coat, if I get black on anything I don’t want it to be on. I can use a clean wet brush and remove this mistake with out much work. Also most 3D printed surfaces are fairly rough and or absorbent. So this clear coat also allows the paint to flow better on the models surface.

This is this the Battlestar Valkyrie which was Commanded by Adama and his trusty XO Tigh.  This ship was only seen in the Episode Hero, you will eventually see a more modern twist on this hull design later.

I did a very low poly version of this as I was exiting the Home World: BSG mod Fleet Commander. So yesterday I started to take a closer look if I could salvage this model and increase its detail. Yet be able to break it down into printable parts. My biggest concern was the engines. If I couldn’t smooth them out and cut in some details it just might be easier to start from scratch.

Obviously since I’ve posted this, I have found away to do it. This picture marks about 8ish hours of work. I will be tinkering with this model for the next month.

In a prior post I forgot to mention making the base for the Adamant.

Keeping with BSG tradition of not cutting corners in this production standards. I went in and cut the corners off the base. It may be hard to see from this picture, but the base has firing arcs laid out on it. The peg for the base is designed into the base it has a 5mm diameter and is roughly 4 inches high.

So to get this base to work as intended you have to find the center mass for balancing and take a 6mm drill bit and make a center line hole. Once that is done and the hole is cleaned up a bit. A 3D printed insert is glued in place which will allow the 5mm peg to slid up into it.

The 1st Base I printed worked great for the Colonial Mover. However for the Adamant I cracked the peg on its first use. The issue was with 3D printing you tell a Slicer program how solid you want the model. Most people hover around a 10%-20% infill for their prints.  If you wanted a model completely solid this infill would be set at 100%. Now the problem is the greater the infill the more print time and materials that are being used.  For those that haven’t had much time around 3D printing, this infill will be printed out in a honey comb like pattern narrower or wider depending on your infill settings. Most 3d printed objects are basically a 1-3mm thick shell of the object with this honey combed infill pattern inside it.

To counter the weight of the Adamant I bumped my infill setting to 50%. To give it more than enough structure to hold the weight of it. This also meant this base print would take 14hours to do.  Needless to say it did the trick.

Painting the base was a very simple process. Automotive black primer , then sealed with a semi-gloss clear coat.

Remember when I said most artists are already thinking of their next project before the one they are currently working on is done?

This thought started with what would be the biggest ship I would do on the table top and two ships came to mind. The Loki which was seen in Blood and Chrome or the Valkyrie which was only seen in the “Hero” episode. Since the Loki was already modeled and Valkyrie was a Battlestar. I thought I should take a closer look at what I could do with the Valkyrie.

Again going back to previous posts 28 inches is about the hard limit to the biggest ship I would want on the table. Keeping with in the scale of the Adamant Frigate the Valkyrie and the Loki both should be close to 28 inches long. Upon reexamining this scale, the Colonial Mover would be closer to 10-14 inches long. I may go back and fix that issue latter.

Nothing can be more eye catching than seeing a large scale Battlestar on the table. I really want to develop a player base in my area and this may be a thing to help lure them in.

So I will be spending the next few days adding in the details to the Valkyrie.

Here is the end result of working on the Valkyrie for the past six days.

I designed all of the turrets that are rotated outwards to be printed separately. These will get magnetized to make storage and transporting easier on everyone. No one wants to print a part for a day only to break off turrets the 1st time it leaves the house. A new base will have to be designed due to its size.

Like I have stated before, I get the game so far along. Then I see something that needs to be represented in the game. The Loki support ship was one of a few in BSG: Blood and Chrome I needed to do!

This 3D model/Mesh took me roughly over 100 hours to complete. I designed it to so it is broken up in peices to make printing it easier on me. In the 3D world you will often hear how many Poly’s a model is. This is referring to how many polygons where needed to create the model. In this case the Loki sits in the mid 300K poly range. To put this into perspective those old gamers that played Gears of War two. Your player models ranged from 10-15K range. The Galactica in the new series (pilot) was just over 1 Million poly.

I got into 3D modeling in the mid 90’s because if a PC game called Star Fleet Command. I learned how to modify the program and import new models into it with different stats. Those models needed to be under 5K and that was pushing the game engine at that time. Game models use texturing on those models to make them more complex than they really are. It wasn’t until 2010 when I finally started to push my poly weights in my models to surpass the 100K mark.

When I say I started 3D modeling in the 90’s. What I am trying to say, I am a self taught 3D modeler. I played with the programming until I got the result I wanted and that is how I learned.

Well after two weeks of printing, I have all the parts needed to start assembling the Valkyrie.

As you can see, I started printing out the Valkyrie. This picture of the Adamant next to the first two sections of it should give you a sense for the scale. The larger section took over 36 hours to print, in all this ship will take just over 250 hours to print, not counting the base and turrets.