With a company day off on Friday, I was able to arrange an evening of wargaming and food with my former housemate (who now lives relatively close that really, I should be playing more games with him). After some discussions, we decided it was time for him to get his Adeptus Titanicus collection out for some robot smashing.
However, my friend did mention that we might need some more terrain which did a dangerous thing – giving me a reason to print and paint some 6mm terrain. Let me explain.
My friend over at The Lazy Forger has been (for longer than I like to admit) working to get me to try out the playtest of his new large scale near future/sci-fi combat game Full Spectrum Dominance (a game which is looking pretty exciting and I’m already getting stuff together for it). However, as a little bribe/treat, he’s sent me some of his excellent build STLs that he sells over on MyMiniFactory.
The Medina Buildings are some really good older style Arabian city buildings, perfect the old towns of possible nations. I really like the mix
But, after arranging the game at the start of the week to playing some Adeptus Titanicus, these buildings were going to be too small. So, after a week of mainlining the Gundam show Iron Blooded Orphans and having bad ideas about clashing mechs, I returned to MMF and instead picked up a few of the Asian city building packs that are listed there. Including the rather fantastic modular school building set, ideal for either your romantic animes or the background to said clashing mechs. For these, I spent my money (seeing as I like paying for good things).
Now, you may be thinking that 6mm buildings surely can’t be that big. Well I’m here to tell you they are WAY bigger than you think. As you can see, the single apartment block managed to fill the entirety of the Mars Pro build plate and the school buildings filled the Saturn’s larger one. Luckily, both of these buildings are hollow with internal support structures so don’t use up too much resin – the school buildings worked out to be about £6 for a large structure.
They also took a while to print. I’m using 0.03mm layer height for the extra detail, as well as a light off delay. Put together, this means that the school buildings ended up taking around 12 hours, while the tower block took closer to 16 hours. I actually have a few electricity pylons which will eventually reach 20 hours in total for printing.
Next stage was to get all the supports off and it took a while as I carefully tried to avoid damaging the fine surface detail. It took me a while to realise the flat overhangs on this model in particular were part of the supports. Even at this stage though, the details look wonderful, with all the balcony details and the rooftop surfaces.
(as an aside, I really should have gloves on at this point – even cleaned, this resin still hasn’t been 100% cured)
Once they were printed, it was time to get them based up. I’m using some thick plasticard bases, giving them some structure and helping them to blend into the base. I noticed some curling on the edges (as well as a touch of warping) so adding to bases lets me fill in the gaps. Although in this case I went with the irregular shape, I think next time I’ll trim them down into a more regular squares.
For the Medina buildings, I think I’ll leave them irregular shape though. I also had a lot of fun playing with the different building pieces, assembling short streets with gentle curves thanks to the corner pieces. I also really like the arch ways, letting you setup some access to the back alleys that non-infantry bases can’t use.
Alas, I ran out of time with these sets to add some of the extra details that the SF Medina set includes. These are things like water towers, billboards and piping. I think I’ll add some solar panels to the mix.
Before painting, I finished the bases off with basing glue and a dip in some chinchilla dust. Usually I’d use sand, but chinchilla dust is much finer grain and so should provide a smoother finish at such a small scale.
With time running out, I had to go for a quick spray paint. As is tradition, a black base coat went down first. Afterwards, I hit all the buildings with a tan spray from a 45 degree angle – to begin with, aiming for the lower reaches and the dust on the base. I used a little more tan on the Medina buildings to give them the suitable colour and cover up more of the black. For the industrial buildings, I instead used more of a grey to give them the more concrete look, still leaving some of the black shadows. However, I went a little far with the grey, so a final blast of tan made them look more deserty.
Packed into bubble wrap and packing peanuts, a quick jaunt down the M1 took me to the battle grounds and out came the tiny titans.
I’m actually really happy with how these buildings came out. There is something glorious about them, the tiny details at a new scale, the way they help to put the titans around them into scale. Getting a table full of this terrain would be really cool, so it’s safe to say that the 6mm bug has bitten hard.
Okay, That’s all the buildings talked, lets talk about the game of Titans next time…