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3D Modeling And Printing A Vehicle For Tabletop [Guide] - LordCommandHook - 06-01-2022
First step is to have some vague idea for what you want. It doesn't have to be concrete, at this stage I call it "The Search" since the design will shift and change as I start working. In this case, I want a fighter jet for BattleTech, so step 1 for me is to research existing fighter jets.
Here's one that I like the look of and fits my general desires. It's an old aerospace fighter from the 2660s, is perfect for my tabletop games, but nobody makes any official miniatures for this one! Luckily I can manufacture my own. The next step is to make some very rough profile sketches, they can suck, it's just to help place the first geometry in Blender.
And I mean VERY rough. We're still searching for exactly what we want, here. However, with this, we can start thinking about our 3D printing process. I'm using a cheap Ender 3 FDM machine, so a jet like this makes sense to print "standing up" as if it was a flying straight upwards. Knowing that, we have two good options for printing it with quality:
You can print the jet in one piece. To do this, we'll either remove the gaps on the bottom or try to fill them with support material that can be removed later.
OR you can print the jet in two pieces to avoid any overhangs whatsoever and superglue the two parts together at the end, like assembling a factory mini model.
This decision depends entirely on how good your 3D printer is and how good your settings are for things like supports. If you glue two pieces together, you'll have a seam that might need sanding or filler to hide.
In my case, I know this will be a tiny model with thin wings. I happen to know my personal 3D printer's supports don't work well on wings that might only be 3mm thick. I also don't feel like supergluing and sanding parts, so I'll just tweak my profile sketches to just eliminate any overhang and print as a single ship.
So the last 2D sketch will look like this, still satisfyingly "close enough" to the official BattleTech plane for my tastes, but still very easy to 3D print!
Then get your drawings set up in Blender (or your 3D modeling software of choice) and you can get started! I like to use a map scale hex as a size reference for a game like BattleTech, but remember it's very easy to change scales later, even in your 3D printer's slicing software.
RE: 3D Modeling And Printing A Vehicle For Tabletop [Guide] - LordCommandHook - 06-02-2022
I'm not going to go over how to model a vehicle in Blender, there's lots of great videos for it elsewhere.
But some general tips are:
Keep it low-poly while you're working so changes are easy and you can keep shapes smooth.
If you see an area of your model you know has a defined shape, start there! Make some floating islands of geometry that look nice.
Above: more examples of "islands" of geometry. I knew exactly what the shapes should be in those places, so I just went for it. I'll connect them later.
Once all the islands are connected, I start adding details.
And once I'm done adding details, I increase the poly count so it looks nice and smooth!
Remember, simple is best. Cheap FDM printers don't handle lots of detail well, so you might as well go simple and save yourself modeling time.