Big little Napoleonics project - updated 5/3 Austrian light cavalry

[6mmfan]

Something I found useful when doing 10mm was instead of using grass flock, I had sand textured bases and just painted those in patches of green and brown. Would that work between your ranks?

Good idea I didn't think of that. I also have very fine foam flock which I might use instead of static grass.

[6mmfan]

Finally getting back into this, although the 3d printer has been going flat out. I'm printed 100 bases (200 strips) of infantry and 40 of artillery including limbers!

My 5mm dice arrived from China and I also printed a few test dice holder pieces for the bases. Looking at the OOBs most of the units need 2 dice instead of 1, so I will mostly print those. The Grand Armee rules uses unit strengths and the easiest method is to have dice on the base to show the strength.



Generally I will use them in the following way
Green = Russian
Yellow = Austrian
Orange (meant to be Red!) = British
Blue = French
White = mixed nations
Black = Prussians

Also here's a photo showing the base with my plastic strip design. I will stick some magnetic strips down at the back so I can have removable unit labels for different battles. Obviously I'll paint and flock up to the plastic strip.



Thanks

[Sangennaru]

It's looking great! I agree with the others regarding removing the static grass in favour of some fine turf, but for the rest it is top notch!

BTW, being 2mm, would you be interested in some of these? http://thelazyforger.com/sculpts/naval-scale-town-houses/





Cheers
jack

[6mmfan]

BTW, being 2mm, would you be interested in some of these? http://thelazyforger.com/sculpts/naval-scale-town-houses/

Thanks, no I hadn't and they are very nice. Forward march Studios (who makes the figures) also has buildings in their pack and I have been printing those out along with some other buildings I found on thingverse.

Here's one of my first test prints (before I got the settings tuned in to reduce the lines and terrible edges!

[6mmfan]

Its been a while but I have managed to finish 4 base of Napoleonic French Guard - 2 Old and 2 Middle Guard.

The can also be used as Consular Guard in earlier periods, even though the flags are wrong. The figures are the FMS "2 to 1" figures which I printed a few of as samples, but wasn't keen on the style, and they are a bit taller, so perfect as Old Guard. I sanded the top of the head slightly as they were cone shaped. I'll also use some of the other samples as Austrian grenadiers as they had tall pointy hats.

I have switched to a fine foam flock instead of static grass and it looks better, but I just want to adjust the shade of green slightly.


The last photos shows my dice holders and for Grand Armee. Stronger units usually have a 10-11 Strength points, so I need 2 dice to represent that.

Middle Guard






Old Guard

[6mmfan]

I've finished my first couple bases of French Foot artillery. I used a mix of limbers but will settle on the "Epic" series for the remaining bases (except what is on the painting block). I'm not super happy with these but the close ups are not very flattering!





Cheers

[robh]

The collection is looking really good, basing is fine now.

[6mmfan]

Thanks I will start churning them out a bit faster now.

[6mmfan]

Well its been a while but I have finished some buildings.

The Church I found on Thingverse and the Cloister was from a 1/1200th colonial buildings set also on Thingverse.

To paint them I used a white undercoat and tried out the new GW contrast paint "Skeleton Horde" on them. The colour and shading was very nice but it didnt work very well on the smooth surfaces and tended to bring out the poor parts of the print. But it was very quick - two coats followed by some touch ups and then highlighting.

Overall I'm very happy with the colour and the finished buildings especially when the 2ft rule is applied!

Church





Cloister







.

[6mmfan]

A while back I was off work for 8 weeks so I was printing 2mm infantry and artillery 24/7. I printed an additional 200 individual infantry bases and  80 limbers and 80 guns and lots of cavalry, which was on top of what I already had. Each infantry base take about 1 1/2 hours to print as I used very fine nozzle 0.2mm and settings (saves a lot of cleanup later on!) You can print fast and spend a lot of time of cleanup, or print slower and have less cleanup to do.



Unfortunately I haven't made much of an impact in these as I have been trying to finish off other wargames projects.



Also some of the flags didn't print out very well or are too weak, so I got out the green stuff to add flags, as having flags really helps id'ing 2mm figures from a distance.


Cheers
Kieran

[Sangennaru]

That's looking impressive anyways!

For the flags, i'd suggest something less chunky though. Have you considered using this materials (in a much simplified shape) ?
http://thelazyforger.com/tutorials/sashimono-and-banners/

[Forwardmarchstudio]

I know you modified the files a bit.  Did you modify the flags at all?  I made them chunky specifically to keep them from falling off.  I personally use paper flags that I print out and glue on.  I do that because I'm bad at painting flags; if you use a typical white glue, pager flags should stay in place even with rough handling.  The figures weigh so little that they generally can't knock flags off each other when they're moved around and stored together.

[6mmfan]

I know you modified the files a bit.  Did you modify the flags at all?  I made them chunky specifically to keep them from falling off. 

Yes I did but hey are not solid enough so they need to be thicker. I think I made the 0.8mm thick.

[6mmfan]

I'm a bit slow with the updates at the moment. Hopefully I can get some photos this weekend as I have finished a number of bases.


I did lay out all my cavalry that I have printed to see how much I have, and I have a lot of heavy cavalry although they are pretty interchangeable. The orange command bases are made from slicing up Epic cavalry bases in Tinkercad. I didn't bother with flags and I may not for any of the cavalry.


Left, Heavy cavalry, right Light cavalry, at the back is Lancers. A number are warped so they will be made into smaller regiments

[Forwardmarchstudio]

That is a LOT of 1:1 figure ratio cavalry!  How many regiments is that?  The cavalry units are my personal favorite.  You almost never get to see cavalry units deployed in anything like a correct formation on the table top, and when you do you really get an idea of how intimidating a charge by them would have been.  If you square up an infantry battalion, you can see how the men in it would not have been able to see anything but horses moving around them during a very large cavalry action.