@RotS -- The Freeship export file formats are IGES, DXF (3D mesh, 3D polylines, 2D polylines), Wavefront file (OBJ), STL, of FEF.
@RotS -- The Freeship export file formats are IGES, DXF (3D mesh, 3D polylines, 2D polylines), Wavefront file (OBJ), STL, of FEF.
Thanks, sad to see I can't inport it directly, but it still looks fun to fool around in.
Depends on whether it can be made to Bend rather than Break. I honestly prefer Bendable -- if it Bends, it can be Bent Back. (It just takes a while.)Originally Posted by fredmiracle
But I don't want to HINDER the discussion with opinions too much.... ;)
Well, having seen and handled some printed models of little toys, etc., I think PLA (the recyclable corn-based filament) looks more bendable and the traditional plastic is more brittle. For environmental reasons I was already inclined to use the PLA. But I think it also might help make less-brittle ship models and masts. When I print my first ship I'll know.
Progress pic
Got the deck fixtures in place on the Niagara's hull now. That finishes the hull, other than to sculpt out the little U shape at the stem for the bowsprit and check it for mesh or thickness issues that could mess up a print. From what I understand, a fine-looking model on a screen can turn into a mess very quickly on a 3D printer due to issues that aren't visible to the naked eye. So I have to run some tests on it and -- even then -- just try a print next week and see what happens.
Now, on to the challenge of the sails/masts. Since the bottom of a 3D print has to be totally flat, I'm wrestling with the best way to design masts/sails for 3D printing. Any suggestions? Someone was telling me that if I printed them vertically, they'd droop because the plastic wouldn't harden quickly enough to keep the yards straight. But I think he was envisioning a much larger model. Maybe keeping it so small could help me here.
(Now I realize I need to add 1 more gun to each side because the Niagara had 18 carronades, not 16. It also had two long 12s but I won't depict them.)
Brig Niagara - the 3D printed hull!
Behold, the Niagara in 1/1000 scale. Tiny, yes -- but even the little cannon and some deck details are discernible enough at this size to stand up to the Ares models. Painting it would be quite a challenge, to be sure.
Working on the sails and masts next...
Looks nice. Probably would work for USS Hornet also while she was rigged as a brig prior to the War of 1812.
Very nice! Keep up the great work.
Nice work, very high detail on that small ship. Do you intend to use this as it is for playing/display or do want to make a mold and start production?
Great start, Gina. Very nice work.
I am looking forward to your next installment, especially on how you will fasten the masts to the hull.
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” ― Plato
My plan was to make this ship as a proof of concept, to explore whether I could...
*Learn the software tools required to make 3D printed ships and figure out the workflow,
*See whether the print technology as it stands now could make 1/1000 ships of acceptable detail for SGN,
*See whether the time and cost per ship would make them feasible to produce beyond my own collection,
*Discover which distribution mode would make the most sense.
So far, I think 1 and 2 are accomplished and the results are very encouraging. I still have to finish and test-print the Niagara's sails and masts, which are as challenging in their own way as learning how to make this first hull. I'll need to try painting it and see how that turns out.
Tech-wise, there's no question that 3D printers are up to the job. The guy who printed this for me was banging out squadrons of Niagara hulls 4 at a time once we got the final calibrations worked out. The PLA filament is cheap. The time to print a set of 4 hulls was maybe 20 minutes. This is as small a ship as a printer is really capable of making, though -- to do things like gunboats, bateaux, etc, I'd put several on one base, print them as a single object, and have them operate in SGN as a unit. With larger ships, it might even be feasible to have masts that snap into a socket, rather than be glued on. That would enable them to be positioned for wind, and be removed to represent damage in game.
I don't own a printer, so while I have access to several for prototyping, I'd either have to get a printer or outsource that. For example, with a Shapeways store site. I definitely would not sell prepainted ships because the work involved would kill me. But perhaps there are some people out there who are frustrated enough with the scarcity of SGN models, want to see some specialized ship types that Ares doesn't make or might never make, and who wouldn't mind having to do some minor assembly and some painting to have affordable fleet expansions. We'll see...I'm open to suggestions.
I would make only models, and then leave it to the community to develop and share SGN-compatible ratings and cards for them.
One thing I'm sure about: The long term health and growth of SGN will depend on a lot more user-created content being made and exchanged. That fosters a community around the game and system, and will actually help Ares sell more games in the long run. I see a lot of whining and wishful thinking where players keep begging or demanding that Ares provide more goodies. But the tools are out there to make what we want, the way we want. Why wait?
Does your camera have a macro setting? Would really help to get the fine details showing.Behold, the Niagara in 1/1000 scale. Tiny, yes -- but even the little cannon and some deck details are discernible enough at this size to stand up to the Ares models. Painting it would be quite a challenge, to be sure.
Working on the sails and masts next...
That's definitely as small as you can go, any smaller and all you'd see are the print lines, which are already creeping in here (look at the diagonal lines on the deck)
Sadly, I don't think bigger ships will show much better detail with the printer you're using, though you might ask him if he can play around in the settings to make the detail finer, but I really don't know the particulars, so this might be the best we can do.
How brittle does she feel?
Is that waffle-plating effect amidships supposed to be there?
That's a result of the printing process, each line is a result of the printer head's path over the layer below it, the only way to get rid of it is to soak the piece in acetone vapors, which slightly melts the surface, but you would lose many of your hard lines, and if it sits there too long it could weaken the structure, depending on how thick the walls are.
My suggestion, rotate the model in the printer 45 so they run lengthwise, and see if you can put more fill in, it may look better if the deck is slightly thicker.
Thanks so much for the feedback!
Re: the questions about the model...
Brittleness -- Yes, pretty stiff. Feels like that plastic they used to use to make Crackerjack prizes. Also VERY lightweight. Will be interesting to see how the finished ship feels and looks and handles, and whether the masts break any more easily than the Ares ones.
I won't be making any pins or holes on the bottom, to keep the bottoms flat and smooth for any minis system. So for SGN one would need to use a dab of blue-tack or something like that to stick them on a game card and base. People who do this now with other brand minis say it works great.
Texture on the deck -- Actually that's a byproduct of my own learning process in making this first model. I made the deck and bulwarks by taking the filled solid hull with a flush upper surface, and sinking (negative extruding) it into the model. When doing that I had 2 options for the bottom of the extrude: Flat, or Normals (following the inner shape of the model). I first did flat, but that made the rear of the deack break through the angled transom once it was pushed down. So I chose Normal, thinking it woudl be flat anyway since this is a waterline model. But...I'd failed to make the bottom of the model perfectly flat in the beginning. We eventually had to fix this in printing because every object has to sit flat on the print bed in order to print. But the deck was already made, and remained with some variations in height that aren't really that noticeable from playing distance but are visible on close scrutiny.
In future models, If I can, I'll probably just make a solid hull from waterline to deck, then define the sheer edge and extrude it upwards to make the deck and bulwarks effect. Also, now that I'm more proficient with smoothing brushes, I can polish imperfections on decks to get them a bit nicer.
A bit here about my intent on these models:
A model, by definition, is a representation of a real ship and not the ship itself. So every model lies somewhere on a continuum, with 0 being a generic game piece (like a hotel in Monopoly or a meeple in a Euro game) and 100 being a totally authentic scale replica that includes every rope, pulley, and visible detail from the real ship. I'm going for ships that represent the original in the major areas most visible to the SGN gamer, at the distances that the gamer would normally be looking at the model during play. That includes major things like the hull shape and style, the masts and sail plan, etc. But these are game items and not intended for the minis connoisseur or the collectors of Langtons, etc. They're just meant to look good enough alongside the Ares models and fill the need for a more diverse range of ships. And, since I want an automated process, I'll be making some tradeoffs due to the nature of the print technology. So, for example, my initial sails will be 3D and "billowed" on the front side but flat on the back, with 3D masts that get attached to them. I'll have to see how that looks, but at this point I think it won't matter that much because we tend to look at the sails mostly from front and sides, and the lack of a concave back isn't that big a deal. I predict the front "billowing" will tend to fool the eye into seeing them from a distance as 3D in back, even if they're not. If I do find a way to make printable masts/sails that are 3D on all sides, I will. The guy who's selling replacement first rate foremasts already on Shapeways has apparently done it, but I'm not sure how to do it yet.
On how light she is, might do a complete fill, costs a bit more plastic, but might give her a good weight. Since she's so brittle, you might beef up the masts a bit, they worry me the most, since they're so thin, easily snapped. You might look around for another material if the test masts snap too easily, but I wouldn't know what to recommend.
Agreed about the masts -- they have to be at least 1mm diameter just to print. The Ares masts are thicker than scale, about 1/16 inch from what I can see from a casual measurement. That would be about 1.5mm. I might even go to 2mm if that doesn't look too clunky.
Of course many modelers have gotten very nice looking sails/masts using wire and paper combinations, etc. But my goal is to make an entirely 3D printed ship if that's possible, to make replication easy and cheap and to test whether this would be possible and still get a model good enough to trade broadsides with the "official" ships.
By the way, the Niagara was printed on a printer that has a 0.4mm nozzle. But it still needed the model to have twice that thickness at minimum at any point in order for it to print properly. The larger the ship, the finer detail (in relation to overall size) would be possible, and the more that detail would be worth modeling because it would be more readily visible.
Gina, I'd go ~1.62mm like the Wave 1 sculpts. Small ships like sloops you might get by with 1.5, but anything taller or bigger than the Swan sculpt minimum 1.6, possibly 1.7+ if you get into First/Second Rates.
OK, thanks for the specs. Will do.
General rule, the bigger the mast, not only the more you CAN get away with beefing it up but the more you NEED to.
Also, I'd suggest printing the masts as separate pieces from the hull, slightly extended and on a "to be cut off" base--that way if you have a dud mast you're not out the printed hull, too.
3D print progress - foremast and sails
I made the sail set as one piece, and the mast as a separate piece. The two, if they print successfully, will be glued together before mounting on the deck.
But I just brought the 3D designs into 123D design so I could show you what they would look like ideally once assembled:
(Edit: I realized after posting these that I think I positioned the mast upside-down. Oh well - you get the idea.)
For those curious as to how I got these: I pulled up a line drawing of the sail plan for a brig, then traced the sails and mast and filled them with black as separate jpegs. Next I turned them into scalable vector graphics (SVG) files using Inkscape, and imported them into Blender where I made them into objects and exported them as STL files. The artsy part came in Meshmixer, where I used various combination of sculpting tools to sculpt the mesh into the convex front billowed surfaces adn the concave rear surfaces. The mast was a simpler process from 2D to 3D, just a matter of scaling and shaping. The mast is 33mm tall and the sail set is 23mm tall. The mast looks a little thicker than I'd like, but I don't want to go under 1.5mm thickness for fear that these will be too fragile in PLA plastic.
I should have a test print in another couple of weeks to see how and whether these worked out.
Last edited by Broadsword56; 09-23-2014 at 23:28.
Assembled 1/1000 Niagara in digital 3D - printing comes next
I finished modeling the 3D parts for sail and mast assemblies. To test how they all would look when assembled, and see how they fit together (in theory), I put everything together in 123D Design and took some screenies:
I was pleasantly surprised by how well the hull printed. But that was relatively simple because the hull has a flat base at the waterline. The real test will be the sails and masts -- much more complicated to figure out the best orientation, use of supports where necessary, etc., due to the lack of 100% flat bases.
Looks fantastic. A real work of art. Some things have to be exaggerated in small scales, and bulwarks are one of them. But your bulwarks actually project above the deck houses too much, though. Get the roofs of the deck houses above the bulwarks and it will enhance your model immensely.
Curious rigging layout for a brig... usually the difference between a brig and ketch rig is brig is Main-Mizzen (taller mast ahead), while ketch is Fore-Main (taller mast astern).
Yes, the Niagara (and it's twin the Lawrence) were oddities.
That's part of what I like about the Great Lakes campaigns in 1813 -- a strange and diverse collection of ships on both sides, some one of a kind. I think SGN would be all the more interesting if we were to see ship-rigged brigs along with sloops and schooners and gunboats all in the same actions.
The SGN ratings and maneuver deck for the Niagara/Lawrence would be interesting, too -- the Lakes ships were built with extremely shallow drafts (IIRC, 9 feet for these) compared to seagoing ships of the time. So they really couldn't sail as close to the wind as, for example, the frigates we have in the game now.
Schooners and other fore-and aft rigged ships, while they could sail much closer to the wind than square-riggers, were highly vulnerable in combat because the full width of their sails was exposed broadside to the enemy -- making rigging and mast/sail damage much more likely.
And while it's easy to dismiss the gunboats as too puny to matter at our scale, they played an important tactical role on Lake Erie. Perry placed them at the head of his line to prevent the British getting a rake against the head of his formation. And, because each gunboat had a single long 32, they could inflict terrible damage on a larger ship armed only with carronades, if the gunboats could avoid enemy broadsides and, say, fire from standoff distance against a damaged enemy.
Understood. But in the case of the Niagara/Lawrence, those aren't deckhouses but raised skylights. And they didn't come up above the level of the bulwarks, as you can see ina photo on Page 7 of this model kit instructions:
http://www.historicships.com/TALLSHI...0%20Manual.pdf
Technically speaking, the USS Niagara was not a pure brig but, because of this layout, is classified as a snow-brig.
More on snow brigs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_(ship)
So the Battle of Lake Erie was a...
[sunglasses]
...SNOW JOB?
B)
Okay, Lieutenant Caine... :p
Not so sure Niagara's rig is unusual. A brig still has a taller main and the snow is just a variation on how the mainsail (spanker) is rigged (on a separate spar). A ketch has the smaller mast astern, and in modern ketches much smaller.
Nice picture of Niagara here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brig
I doubt most people will ketch the difference.
;)
Very nice work, Gina.
This will be an exciting set of additions to our games. I like your philosophy regarding making ships nice enough to stand alongside Ares ships in gameplay. This past weekend as we ran WoG games at the WWI commemoration event, I noticed once the games started, players weren't paying attention to the planes as they focused on thinking about maneuvers. Better to have a diverse collection of good enoughs than a few highly detailed replicas.
With Shapeway's announcement of increased prices, I hope you can find a third party printer that is affordable.
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” ― Plato
You are absolutely right. Fantastic Job. The brig was only 110 ft long, so the Bulwark height is correct. The sails look great, too. Keep up the good work. Lots of great potential in what you are doing.
Thanks so much, guys!
The plan from here:
1. Test-print my sails and masts for Niagara in a couple of weeks, the next chance I have at getting access and help to a local 3D printer.
2. If I'm satisfied with my completed prototype Niagara, then I'd send the 7-part kit to Shapeways (or another 3rd party site) to buy a print from them. This would tell me whether the site is able to do a satisfactory job using my files, let me see the model in a more sturdy plastic than PLA, and tell me what the cost of a 3rd party print would be per model.
3. if I like the 3rd party print, then I'd set up an online store site and put Niagara kit on it as its lone item. I'd announce on the site that this is just the first model, and if I see sufficient interest and sales I'll make more and add them to the store. Some of the additional models I'd be interested in making would be the other Great Lakes ships, A merchantman, a privateer, and more Spanish ships beyond the ones Ares has coming. My intention would be to make ships available that are better suited to the nature of the SGN game system than the fleet-action oriented direction Ares seems to be following.
4. Once I have a ship up for order, I'm intending to run community contests to tap the collective brains of players for the best game ratings and maneuver decks for them. The gist would be something like: The first person to upload and share on the Anchorage a set of game ratings and maneuver deck for X ship would get the prize: A painted and assembled print of that ship. Others could take those ratings and design/share their own ship cards or mats to their liking -- there's no need to copy the Ares designs, and in fact I'd recommend against it because we all want to respect the copyrighted aspects of their game.
This is an ambitious plan, and it could fail or hit a snag at any point. But I think it could be a way to answer some demand, and at the very least I'd have a way to make any ship I want.
Question: What would you feel you'd be willing to pay for a 3D printed 1/1000 scale model, unpainted, requiring minor assembly, considering that it would be a ship not available through Ares or any other commercial miniature maker? Personally, I think I'd be willing to pay up to $10 plus S&H. Maybe a little more, but beyond $10 I think interest would drop off significantly.
Just an fyi for anyone who's been following the latter part of this thread. The USS Niagara is available for ordering via Shapeways now. I just ordered two sets. It's also nice to see that if you botch up certain parts of the ship you can order only the parts needed for repair, etc. Be aware that Broadsword56 (Gina) is offering both 1/1000 and 1/1200 scale options for ordering.
Not sure how long it takes for the 3D printing and processing, but I'll be sure to let you all know when they arrive. Cheers!
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