3d Printed Hedges

[Fitz]

I got some STLs for hedges from https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/hedgerow-bocage-terrain-for-6mm-10mm/
They're presented as being for 6mm - 10mm gaming scales, and they're certainly best for those, but they're also quite usable for 15mm. In any larger scale though I think they'd just look like a herbaceous border planting.

These sorts of things are quite easy to make with some ice-block sticks and clump foliage, but the advantage (to me) of 3d printing is that I can just click-and-forget, come back the next morning and pull a bunch of hedgerows off the printer. Of course they need painting, so they're not entirely labour free, but painting them takes very little time or effort. Also, they're pretty well indestructible unless you jump up and down on them with hob-nailed boots. I can just toss them into a box without fear that they're going to lose any foliage.


Here they are alongside some 1/300 scale (5-6mm) Heroics & Ros Napoleonics, Spaniards in point of fact. In this scale they're easily bocage-size. If you wanted smaller hedgerows, they're easily rescaled down in the slicer, and they'd print a lot faster too.




In 10mm (1/150 - 1/144 scale) they're also large enough to represent bocage. Unfortunately I don't have any 10mm infantry. I printed this 1/150 Bishop as a test of one of Mr. Bergman's 1/200 scale models, just to see how it would look on the table, but I don't actually play in that scale. I would though, if I were starting out again from scratch.




In 15mm they're still head-high hedges, suitable for planting around pastures and what-not. It would be a simple matter to rescale them a bit to create 15mm bocage, though unless you have a big printer the larger STLs would probably not fit on the print bed.

[Codsticker]

Those turned out great. I like the subtle colour variation of the foliage.

[Two Inches of Felt]

Hello Fitz,

I am the designer of the files. I'm really impressed with how they turned out for you.  Your paint job looks great! I'm only a mediocre painter so mine are pretty basic in comparison.

Thank you for sharing your photos and comments. This is the first I've seen of them on someone else's table so it really feels good!

[Fitz]

They're great, I really like them.

One thing I did with them is to decimate them fairly heavily in 3d Builder, which made no visual difference at all to the printed end product, but it reduced the file size to about a tenth of what it had been. I also bodged together some smaller corner pieces in Blender, for maximum flexibility.

[Two Inches of Felt]

Ahh I should have decimated them myself. I may do that and re-upload them at some point.

Good idea to make a few corners too.

You mentioned that they were easy to paint but it looks like you got a lot of different colors in there..Is it mostly just random dry brushing?

[Fitz]

I primed them black to begin with, then sprayed them downwards with a very dark green (Vallejo Bronze Green surface primer). Then I wet-brushed quite a bright green (Vallejo GameColor Goblin Green) to catch the vegetation highlights, finished with a dry-brush of a tan colour in random blotches.

On some of them I splashed a brown (VMS Dark Earth) wash along the ground-work and lower branches, and that definitely looked better than without, but I don't know if it looked enough better to warrant the extra painting stage. I also mottled the ground mounds on some of them with various greens and browns, and again they did look better but at the cost of more work and time.

[Two Inches of Felt]

Thanks!

I definitely understand the battle between wanting to improve terrain pieces and the extra effort to do that last step.

I printed hundreds of pine trees and I ended up doing a dip wash in a bucket and no brushwork at all haha.

[Kikuchiyo]

pretty cool - I've been after some 15/18mm scale trees might have to look at these too now

[carlos marighela]

I love it that your first instinct was to create a miniature giant maze with them.