Brigade Models

Previews, new releases, interesting stuff … and cakes !

Brigade Models - Previews, new releases, interesting stuff … and cakes !

Category Archives: Shapeways

Off to the shipyards …

Several British spaceships were today spotted making their way towards the Brigade shipyards, ready for moulding. Most of the fleet were there, although the new Fisher-class dreadnoughts were conspicuous by their absence (the real reason ? I left the Fisher file out of the package I sent to the printers … :-( ). We’ve also had to get the fighters reprinted (I got the scaling all wrong and they were far too large – not doing very well, am I ?).

But the rest of the fleet is looking good now that the prints have been cleaned up and the gun turrets attached. Let the mould-making commence !

GB-1
(top to bottom) Heavy Cruiser, Battleship, Battlecruiser

GB-2
Carrier

GB-3
Minesweeper, light cruiser and destroyers

Brig​ade Shapeways Store ​- 10% off this week ​only

For this week only, all of the items in our Shapeways store are 10% off. To get this deal you need to e-mail us with your requirements, NOT purchase them directly from the store. We’ll send you a PayPal invoice and at the end of the week we’ll place one big order (this way we all get cheaper shipping as well :-) ).

So if you’ve always wanted a 6mm Pegasus bridge, now is the time to get it …

Tiny Houses (redux)

A couple of weeks ago we brought you pictures of some 3D prints of our first set of Land Ironclads scale (roughly 2mm / 1/1000th) houses. Sadly these weren’t really up to scratch, being a bit off the mark in terms of the print quality. Fortunately the nice people at Shapeways also thought so, and offered to reprint them for us. These new prints have arrived in double quick time, and are a massive improvement – so 10/10 for Shapeways customer services department. The detail is much crisper, the edges are square and the windows no longer look like they’ve been pushed into a bit of plasticine with someone’s thumb ! There were happy faces at Brigade Towers this evening, it must be said :-)

The models are the same – we have a set of 20 English village buildings (mostly houses, with the odd inn, pub or shop amongst them) and nine two-part churches. The nine towers will fit any of the three naves, allowing for plenty of variation.

Because we’ve made enough prints to completely fill two moulds, we should be able to release these in double quick-time because we can bypass the intermediate master-mould stage and go straight to production moulds (the original hope was that we’d have these for SELWG, but that didn’t happen). The houses will come in a single pack of 20 houses for around £5, while the churches will be in a pack of three (one of each nave and three random towers/spires) for £3. The successful printing of these also gives us the confidence to go ahead and order more buildings – we have farms, factories and terraced houses ready to go and lately I’ve been working on some Mediterranean buildings as a break from 15mm tanks. I’ll preview some of these later in the week.

Tiny Houses

As mentioned in a recent post, we’re planning to expand our range of 2mm scenery as part of the Land Ironclads range. To this end, we were rather excited when a bunch of 3D prints arrived the other week.

The first batch consisted of 20 different English village buildings – mostly houses, with the odd inn and shop thrown in for good measure. Each building is unique, so it will allow you to build a largish village or maybe two small hamlets without any repetition.

The second batch was nine English churches in various styles. The larger size meant that I had to model the towers separately from the naves, so I took the opportunity to make a common join, which means that any of the tower designs will fit any of the three nave types. There are three main tower designs (crenelated tower, steeple, low-pitched roof) but each is slightly different, so it’s possible to make up to 27 unique church designs.

Unfortunately, the prints weren’t all that we had hoped for – the definition isn’t great and some of the buildings are mis-shapen. They certainly aren’t as good as the various forts and lighthouses that arrived before them. We can’t decide whether it’s a bad print, or it’s simply that we’ve pushed the limits of this particular 3D printing material too far with these tiny, tiny houses (some are only 5mm across). We either need a (better) reprint using this material (which we like for buildings because of the natural rough surface finish) or find a material that can cope better with very small models. Either way, we won’t be able to put them into production immediately as we had hoped :-(

Back to Neu Celle

Neu Celle has had to take a back seat recently with the preparations for SELWG and Crisis, but I managed to find some time in the last couple of days to do a little more work.

The buildings have all finally been drybrushed, which has pulled together all of the staining and shading from the washes, and I have to say I’m pretty pleased with the final result. The combination of the staining from the various wash stages and the lighter drybrush has resulted in some pretty worn and weathered looking buildings, exactly what I was after. All that’s left to do for now is paint the doors and other details, and then I’ll be able to put them on the table (at last).

I’ve also painted the rubbish skips and Moisture Collector Units (MCUs) which we released recently. All of the models were rinsed in clean water first to remove any dust from the 3D printing process, then given a quick white undercoat from a spray can once they had dried. The skips were easy to paint, just a simple coat base of paint followed by a heavy wash to dirty them down. Incidentally, after a slight redesign of the models we’ve dropped the price by about 65p or so, which has to be good :-)

The MCUs were superglued to 1¢ (euro) coins to act as bases (and weigh them down nicely so they don’t topple over). They were then washed in Citadel Badab Black, followed by a drybrush in white, then some small coloured details (just a red band around the top). The base was textured using Tamiya textured paint (this is very expensive but I had some left over from a previous project, so I might as well use it up !). A little bit of flock on the base and that was it. The MCUs will be very handy as small terrain pieces in both 15mm and 6mm – there’s not much to give their scale away.

Rubbish and Water

The average town or city produces lots of one and requires plenty of the other. Neu Celle is no different, so we’ve put our minds to servicing the town’s needs.

Firstly, the rubbish needs to go somewhere. So you need bins, skips or dumpsters, and we have the perfect ones in 15mm. Two British-style rubbish skips for the big rubbish and three dumpsters (large rubbish bins) for the household stuff. Find these now in our Brigade3D Shapeways store.

And now to water … despite decades of terraforming, Mars is still mostly arid. The icecaps have yielded sufficient water, but in more remote areas the problem is making it accessible. The answer lies in moisture collector units which use heat exchange mechanisms to condense water out of the thin Martian air, and store it in underground tanks or the roof tanks built into the domes of most buildings. Again, these can be bought directly from our Shapeways store.

Painted Mobile Phone Mast

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned our new 15mm Mobile Phone Masts which were available through our Shapeways Store. I’ve finally had a chance to paint the first of these, the tower mast with three antennae.

I first stuck the model onto a 40mm round figure base, with a large washer stuck underneath to weigh the base down and make the tower stable. I made a little stand from it from a square of plastic card with a bolt in each corner made from hex section plastic rod. The base was then covered in PVA and sand. Normal superglue works fine when sticking Shapeways plastic parts, you don’t need any special adhesives. Once everything had dried, I undercoated with a spray can of white primer.

 

I then painted it in two shades of grey, a pale grey for the base and top framework and a green-grey (Tamiya Slate Grey) for the tower body (although this isn’t too obvious from the photos). After a black wash and drybrush, the three antennae were picked out in white. The final touches were a few splashes of orange-brown wash for rust patches (these towers are out in all weathers after all). The base was painted in Tamiya Flat Earth, drybrushed a pale stone and then patches of static grass were PVA’d on.

So that’s it – a simple enough paint job, bringing communication to the backwaters of the galaxy.

The other phone mast, the larger lattice tower, is being saved for a later date – I have a slightly more elaborate base planned for it.

Phone Home …

We have a new item in our Shapeways store today. As I commute back and forth to London in my day job (that’s the one that pays the bills, not this one !) one thing I notice through the train window (when I’m not asleep) is the proliferation of mobile phone masts and towers across the countryside. These struck me as ideal subjects for 3D printing, being tricky to produce in traditional metal or resin castings. So I’ve made a couple of different styles, one being a solid tapering pole with three antennae at the top, the other a triangular lattice mast with nine antennae. They’re ideal for modern-era 15mm gaming but also look techy enough for sci-fi layouts – mine will be painted up and added to my Martian Neu Celle township.

The masts are currently sold as a pair, but if anyone wants just one type then let me know and I can add the individual types to the store.

New Shapeways Items

We’ve updated our Shapeways Store with a number of new items recently – not all of these are on our website yet, so you’ll need to straight to Shapeways website to see them.

Pegasus Bridge houses

These include more of the items from the Pegasus Bridge game, including the Vorpostenboot with which I had so much ‘fun’, more houses and a rather nice farmyard. There’s also an odd subject, a small (scale unspecified) model of a bridge (based on the design of Long Bien bridge in Vietnam) which we produced for a friend to use as a ground target for Vietnam-era aircraft games.

Farmyard

Power to the People !

Following a rather irritating no-show by a customer who placed an order to be collected at Salute, we have a number of sets of our Shapeways Power Pylons available for sale. These can be found on the website, and you can purchase them in the usual way through the shopping cart along with anything else you would like to order.

Power Pylons

We also have some water towers – one each of the small, mushroom, spheroid and British. I haven’t added these to the website because there is only one of each, so please e-mail me if you’d like to purchase one of these.

%d bloggers like this: