Digital Kitbashing Miniatures is AWESOME (and easy)

hey friends welcome to once in a six side this will be the channel's first video in a series that will look at 3d printing for tabletop wargaming and to kick things off i want to show you one of my absolute favorite things made possible by 3d printers digital kid bashing if you have a 3d printer and aren't aware of this concept or maybe you are but have been afraid to try i'd like to show you this is actually very very simple to do and with a single free piece of software that's easy to use you can really easily chop and mash together elements from different models to spit out something totally unique to you and your army or warband or kill team or whatever i don't know what i'm saying this lovely little grim dark towering war machine is the heavy vault mech from the maker's cult sculpted by gear guts in collaboration for one of their monthly patreon releases i've been wanting to print one of these off for a while as i really like the aesthetic of the model however there's one part in particular that really i think could use a little bit of kit bashing and that's the head while the included head is fine i felt something a little more techie for lack of a better word would be better suited to this mechanical marvel of the 41st millennium something with lots of eyes perhaps or sensors or cables or all of the above so i started looking through my stl collection when i came across this little gem an epic scale warlord titan head now this model no doubt is a little naughty to have and so i unfortunately can't share it nor tell you where to find it but just quickly on that note i'm not so convinced myself that it's theft as this model has been lovingly crafted by an enthusiast in the community and distributed for free it's a bit like a cover song right it's not the original it's another artist's interpretation anyway that's probably a topic for another video so now that i have my new head for the heavy volt mech it's time to start making it compatible with this model i begin by importing the various parts of the model i will need into microsoft 3d builder this is that handy little piece of free software i mentioned at the beginning of the video i can't speak to older versions of windows however if you're at least running windows 10 you can grab this from the microsoft store and be up and running in just a few clicks for mac and linux users i really am unsure what to recommend here perhaps bootcamp and virtual machines microsoft 3d builder really is a great little piece of software unlike everything else microsoft makes and most other options that i'm aware of come with a much steeper learning curve looking at you blender when you first try and open a model in 3d builder you will see this screen here asking you to confirm the units of measurement your model is in before importing them i always leave mine set to millimeters so if you're unsure just do the same and click the import model button now you might see something like this a red box drawn beneath the model and a warning in the bottom right hand corner of the screen this means the model has some issue but check this out by clicking on the warning 3d builder has fixed whatever the issue was now this doesn't always work but it's pretty damn good most of the time also you can work on models in 3d builder without attempting a repair you'll just have to ignore the glaring warnings you might want to do this sometimes as repairing a model can take a very long time depending on the severity of the issue and the horsepower within your computer in my experience the vast majority of these issues do not impact the final print at all okay so we've imported our model into 3d builder let's take a quick look over the basic tools to move the camera around you can rotate around the model by left clicking and dragging in the direction you would like to spin and for panning simply hold down the right mouse button and drag in the direction you'd like to pan finally you can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel by clicking on your model a toolbar will appear at the bottom of the screen the first icon is for movement allowing you to move your model about the scene in the x y and z axes the second option is for rotating the model around those same axes and the third is for scaling the model you can click on the little padlock icon to enable uniform scaling now with those basics out of the way let's go ahead and open up our titan head as well as the original mech head and torso with those files all open together in the same scene let's start by positioning the new head roughly where i'd like it to be on the final model [Music] looks great no scaling required which is nice however there is clearly no neck to join to the mech torso and for this i'm thinking let's try the original head moving the original head into position we can see it has the perfect little neck nubbin to index nicely with the torso next up i'm going to cut the torso model in half using the slice tool keeping one side to create a cross section to better allow us to see what kind of space we're working with here i'm then going to drag the new head back into position followed by the original head as you can see you can simply overlap models in 3d builder allowing you to quickly mash together various different shapes and you know what this actually looks pretty promising already i do notice however that the original head is sort of jutting out a bit in a couple of places more than i'd like for example there's a bolt protruding through the cables that we're gonna have to do something about so let's move the old head back out of the way and make a couple of quick modifications i'm gonna start by selecting the split tool again and this time setting it to keep both parts of the cut then positioning the cutter near the top of the neck i'm going to create a split there then selecting both parts with control plus left click i'm going to create another split this time slicing the face off now i'm going to select everything except for the neck piece and choosing the scale tool i'm going to shrink the parts down in the x axis by a few millimeters i then add the neck to the selection so the entire head is now selected and then click on the group button to join them all back together now i can go ahead and move it back into position with the new head and see how it looks clicking on the deselect all button will remove the blue lines giving us a better view and look at that it's like it was meant to be i might just shift it forward a little more and then selecting both heads now and moving them back into position i can see this part is going to fit well and look totally slick while doing it so all that's left to do now is to select the two heads and group them together with the group button remove the torso from the scene and export my new head as an stl file oh a quick side note models that are made this way absolutely have to be printed solid don't try and hollow these as the internal walls of the overlapping geometry is just gonna create some weirdness so just print them solid if you're interested in how to go about uh combining models like this and have it so that you can print them hollow perhaps for like a much larger model stay tuned because i will do a more advanced digital kit bashing uh introduction sometime okay back to the video with that all done i can now bring the file into my slicer add some supports and send it to the printer adding supports is a whole other topic which i will cover in a future video as i have a lot to say about them but for now let's get this model printed assembled and painted and take a look at the final result but before we do that this video is sponsored by me do you like terrain stls because i've been learning how to make them and i am proud to introduce you to my first proper creation this glorious sci-fi imperial looking bunker thing optimized for fdm printing and assembled using open lock clips this little labor of love by me is available now over on colts 3d for just 10 bucks and that's in australian dollar dues too so basically nothing this thing is going to look dope on any gaming table so please check it out and grab yourself a copy today then be sure to take lots of pretty pictures when you're done and sharing with me and the community i can't wait to see this building make its way onto other people's gaming tables and i really hope you enjoy yours as much as i've enjoyed making it there's a link in the description so go open that in another tab finish this video and then go get it but yeah in that order definitely the last part too where you buy it and and then i get money and and then i i can buy a bigger printer if enough of you buy it that would be sick that'd be so sick oh my god please buy it all right now let's take a look at this custom heavy vault mech [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so there you have it i think he turned out pretty good i rated my bitsbox 2 for this guy and put together a nice little base for him with a dead stealth suit and gave him a little birdie perch on his shoulder the paint job was a pretty speedy one a base coat and oil wash with a tiny bit of highlighting and the final result i'm pretty happy with i'm really looking forward now to deploying this guy in some games of grim dark future now before i go i realized this video only just scratched the surface of digital kit bashing so really quickly i just wanted to show you a couple more operations you can do within 3d builder that are really powerful and useful such as the emboss tool which allows you to easily create 3d text on the surface of a model or other simple shapes and then there's one of my favorites which is the subtract tool which allows you to take one model intersect it with another and then use the intersecting geometry as a cutting tool on the other model so in this example here you can see i'm using the ball joint on this claw arm model to create the socket on the body model or this example here inserting a cylinder shaping it to be 1.25 millimeters in the x and y axes and using it to pre-drill a flame effect before i print it making for easy pinning here's some examples of digital kit bashes i've done in the past this was one of the first ones i ever did this cool little snail model where i gave it some wheels and guns and other stuff and you know mashed it all together in 3d building added supports printed it off turned out awesome here is the golden emperor boy uh i didn't like the sword he came with it was like it had a really gaudy flame effect on it uh and so i basically lopped off his hand and the hilt of the sword i didn't like and added the blade of the sword i did like printed that off worked out pretty well uh and then this one was a another little car model basically this one was really hard i had to like do a lot of modification to this jeep thing to get these little guys in the back uh and add some you know guns and a driver and stuff and armor plating um yeah this this one this was a mission um but yeah it turned out pretty cool i think it's one of the first ones i did oh and of course this uh armoured mite mrhv tank kit that i got from colts 3d from a maker called ace minis uh this tank is great because it comes with so many different weapons options um but i needed to modify it to have somewhere to store all those extra weapons options after magnetizing them so what i did was behind this front door panel i created a cavity and some magnet holes that lined up so i could yeah have a little storage box to put all the extra bits in turned out awesome love this thing so there you have it hopefully i've been able to show you what you can accomplish with 3d builder some stl files and a 3d printer if you're feeling creative and i also hope you've enjoyed this video and found it useful it was a bit of a challenge to put together more than i anticipated but it's been pretty fun and i look forward to doing more so thanks for watching and i'll see you on the next one [Music]

Channel: Once in a Six Side

Views: 27,876

Keywords: 3D printing, Tabletop Wargaming, Digital Kitbashing, Warhammer 40000, Resin Printing, 3D Builder, How to digital kitbash miniatures, Kitbash STL files, Digital Kitbashing STL files for 3D printing

Id: vuD3rSv38gc

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022