28mm Isandlwana Project (now with 3D printing!)

[SPQR7070]

Over the course of the pandemic I've embarked on a journey to recreate the battle of Isandlwana in 28mm using The Men Who Would Be Kings rules. After painting hundreds of redcoats and Zulu warriors I began working on the iconic mountain next to the British camp. Here I ruminated for a long time on the best method to construct the massive terrain feature. I wanted it to be an imposing table piece and be instantly recognizable for those familiar with the unique shape of the mountain at Isandlwana. Not trusting my foam-surgery skills, I turned to my shiny new 3D printer.

Of course no 3D model of Isandlwana existed yet, so I had to sculpt my own. Using Blender and some cool terrain add-ons I was able to sculpt a mountain that was a ballpark approximation of the Isandlwana mountain.

Declaring my creation to be perfect close enough I cut the model into pieces and fired up my 3D printer. Twenty hours later I had piece 1 of 18 finished. My god, I thought to myself, what had I gotten myself into? Turns out that a project of this size is not a great candidate for 3D printing. Including failed prints it took nearly a month of non-stop printing before she was finally ready to glue together. Behold!


Zulu for scale.



At 32" long, 20" wide, and 12" tall she certainly is imposing. I've sealed any straight edges with some filler, and now she's ready for flocking then painting. If I had to do it again though, I think I'd have just used foam.

[Mad Guru]

WOW!!!  Everything you said makes perfect sense, but even though you'd do it differently next time, that is an impressive accomplishment!  I'm excited to see how it turns out after flocking and painting -- or vice-versa -- and then to see it together with your 28mm armies!

[gamer Mac]

WOW how much did that cost you in resin?

[SPQR7070]

WOW how much did that cost you in resin?

I reckon it cost about $60-70 worth of PLA to print it (if I had used my resin printer it would be more like $500-600!). The real cost was the psychic damage inflicted through having to fix my 3D printer several times throughout the project - it broke down from the strain of continuously printing large pieces, haha.

WOW!!!  Everything you said makes perfect sense, but even though you'd do it differently next time, that is an impressive accomplishment!  I'm excited to see how it turns out after flocking and painting -- or vice-versa -- and then to see it together with your 28mm armies!

Thanks, I primed and base-coated it this afternoon, so I'm hoping to finish it up this weekend and then I'll post some glamor shots!

[Redshank]

Sound like a mammoth project both in terrain and minis required - hats off to you for your commitment. Looking forward to seeing the results.

[modelwarrior]

Cant wait to see the pictures once this is all done. Do you have a suitable backdrop lined up the unveiling ?

[SPQR7070]

Well Ladies & Gentlemen, she is finished! Thursday I said goodbye to my students and I spent Friday feverishly painting and finishing up the mountain.

Some glamor shots:





And a wide shot to show you just how inadequate my backdrop is for an item this large!



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As you can see, a couple cracks opened up during my finishing stages, so that'll be something to fix eventually. For now though, I'm going to focus on painting the last units of Zulus so I can begin planning the game itself.

[SPQR7070]

Parading my forces. The British are entirely painted now(thank god) and have pleasing array of uniforms.

Approx 230 miniatures.

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The Zulus still have some work to go. They're fast to paint, but fairly monotonous so I keep getting distracted.


Approx 312 miniatures.

[syrinx0]

It may have been a pain to print but it looks great on the table.

[Barry S]

Nice work!

[Diablo Jon]

The mountain is impressive the 3D printing seems like a lot of work for something you could do in polystyrene though. I know next to nothing about this 3D printing lark is there a cost saving to printing out the pieces over buying some foam sheets? I have to say the finished mountain reminds of the Vacform scenery that was popular in the 80s.

Great collection of minis to.

[SPQR7070]

The mountain is impressive the 3D printing seems like a lot of work for something you could do in polystyrene though. I know next to nothing about this 3D printing lark is there a cost saving to printing out the pieces over buying some foam sheets? I have to say the finished mountain reminds of the Vacform scenery that was popular in the 80s.

Great collection of minis to.

It definitely would have been cheaper, faster, and easier to make it out of foam. This was a bit of an experiment, and I quickly realized it was not an efficient way of making terrain this large, but was too stubborn to stop once I'd already printed a couple pieces, so I saw it through to the end!

One consolation is it did turn out nicer than my foam-terrain skills could have created. You can see the difference when you compare it to the other pieces of terrain on the board, which are made out of foam and have a distinct blocky quality to them.

[Helen]

Lovely collection of miniatures for the campaign an a super looking piece of terrain, well done.