There’s a bit of a revolution going on right now in the tabletop gaming industry. Many gamers and hobbyists are no longer purchasing physical products in the form of miniatures and scenery, but are instead investing in digital models that they can then manufacture on 3D printers.
Obviously this means you need a 3D printer in the first place (or a sympathetic friend with one!) but by happy chance many tabletop enthusiasts are also 3D printing tinkerers too, and the new wave of affordable printing systems mean that now is as good a time as any to jump on the band wagon.
Here at Tribe HQ we recently took delivery of a printer ourselves – an Anycubic Photon resin printer that was more affordable than I could have dreamed of just a year or so ago (review coming soon!). We’ve been using this new toy to print all sorts of miniatures and gadgets, but had always presumed it to be too small of a print bed to do any wargame scenery.
That changed when we saw the City of Tarok Kickstarter from Black Scroll Games (BSG). BSG have already made quite a name for themselves with their printed floor plans and 3D models, but it was our first experience of their products and (spoiler), we were blown away!
As I sat drooling over the images of the buildings for City of Tarok, my only disappointment was that they seemed designed for the most popular 28mm scale.
Not only was the Photon printer bed too small to accommodate anything this scale, but my own preference for tabletop wargames was the now out-of-print Rick Priestley classic, Warmaster, which uses the far smaller 10mm scale.
So without further ado I contacted Antal Kéninger at BSG and asked him how feasible it would be to scale down the models to 33% of the original (true 10mm scale) or possibly even smaller, as many 10mm/Warmaster players favour scenery as small as 6mm.
As it turned out Antal was planning on testing 10mm versions for himself using his Ender 3 with a custom printing profile, but confessed he lacked the resin system to go for any smaller.
So I offered to provide that test bed to see how feasible going down to as little as 25% of the original size would be.
The 28mm models come in a number of pieces, which serves a couple of purposes. Firstly the model can be split up into manageable sections that can be printed on the average budget printer bed without needing any support material.
Secondly there’s a wealth of interior detail that 28mm skirmish or RPG players would appreciate, particularly when furnished with the wealth of fixtures and fittings BSG are offering as stretch goals for the City of Tarok campaign.
With 10mm scale and below however, interior details aren’t necessarily relevant, particularly once you start printing nearer 6mm. For most that favour this tiny scale (the wargaming fraternity), buildings are merely obstacles to manoeuvre regiments around, so the internal decor, different floors and opening doors are irrelevant.
With this in mind we started working with BSG to refine some of the models solely for printing at this smaller scale, mainly floor removal, fusing pieces together to print in fewer pieces (preferably one!) and then tackling any problematic areas that might be created in the process.
Luckily Antal is as speedy a 3D modeller as he is proficient, and after a few prototypes we had soon figured out how to best work at this new scale and were printing incredible buildings in one piece that looked absolutely stunning, with the detail from the 28mm versions preserved perfectly at the smaller scale.
And as Antal and BSG proved in this recent video, you don’t even need a resin printer to get amazing results from their models at 35%/10mm scale.
The resin system still held onto the title when it came to printing stuff at the 25%/7mm I favour for Warmaster, and I even printed out some truly tiny versions just to see how small we could go!
Verdict
If it wasn’t obvious enough by now, I’m a big fan of everything BSG. The 3D models aren’t just beautifully sculpted, they’re intelligently designed too, meaning they need a minimum of supports to print, if any at all.
This means that as soon as your print is done you can slap some paint on it and get it to the table, without spending ages removing spindly sprues of plastic or resin and getting the sandpaper out.
And if you’re wondering how the scaled-down models look with a lick of paint, here’s our Tribe HQ print looking all pretty:
So if you’re looking for 28mm scenery for your games, what you get for $60 from the City of Tarok campaign is kind of a no-brainer. The campaign already gives you 10 different buildings and a wealth of additional set-dressing pieces, with new stretch goals being unlocked every day.
But now any 10mm (and below) enthusiast can start reaching for their wallet too.
There’s even a free cottage model for you to download right now to test out on your printer before you pledge! So what are you waiting for?
At the time of writing the campaign still has a week left to run, and at the rate it’s going there’s going to be plenty more stretch goals unlocked before it’s done. Check our sidebar for how long you have left to pledge your support.
