Caravan Project

Caravan Project
This is a series of prints to make up a full caravan set for use in D&D.

Hay Wagon
204min/6.77m/$0.51
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:800707

Draft Horse
59min/2.96min/$0.22
https://www.shapeways.com/product/5BY3QR7MG/draft-horse?optionId=59691060&li=user-profile

Barrels
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:32016

Treasure Chest
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:74041

Crates
25min/1.58m/$0.12
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:45107

The Hay Wagon by Kevinrau is amazing.  Lots of detail and a great size for D&D miniatures.
Because this model has many overhangs, you're going to have to add supports.

In Flashprint if you add supports, there will be A LOT of them!  Just look at the green stuff!

If you were to print this with a raft, it would take 4 hours and 36 minutes!

So here's where you can play with the print in Flashprint to position the model manually so that you have minimum rafts.

Rotate the model 90 degrees so that most of the detail is vertical and the overhangs are minimal.  In the original model the body of the cart is a huge overhang.  So we make it vertical so that there is less of a surface area facing down.

After rotating it as close as you can (I can only get like 89.98 for some reason) you can go to Edit -> Auto Layout All and it will re-centre the cart on the build plane.

 Now adding supports you can see significantly less supports:

The time even with a raft is now reduced to 3 hours and 32 minutes. Yes. it's a long time for a cart, but we saved an hour and material by just making a rotation!

When printed, the cart worked out well.  There was a suspicious inconsistency in one of the arms of the cart which made it kind of weak and easily snapped off.

I thought maybe this was caused by my extruder pulling on the filament since I'm not using the built in holder for the Flashforge Finder and an external one that has to be pulled by the machine.  So I printed 2 more and found similar issues but in different locations.

Time for some custom modifications!
I go to Tinkercad.com where you can import and modify models.
Maybe I'll go into detail how I did it but basically I widened the cart to make sure it fit the crate model by importing the crate and important a 2nd cart.  I split the two carts in half and merged them back together.  Then I added a hexagon shaped pole to the front to make it stronger and printed it.

The big cart printed well!

And here it is loaded up:


Draft Horse:

 Chests and Barrels Batch:

 Chests and Barrels Big Batch:

 Crates Batch:

 It's party time!  The Warrior Bear tells his caravan to go forward, guarded by bears, wolves, and a minotaur!

D&D Werewolf - 6 pack

Werewolves - 6 pack

193min/6.58m/$0.50

https://www.shapeways.com/product/BQ976VSUT/werewolf-for-printing?optionId=57336051&li=user-profile

This is another beautiful model from mz4250's D&D set on Shapeways.  I decided to print 6 at a time because 1 werewolf just won't cut it against a whole party.

FlashPrint quoted this at 193min (3hrs, 13min) but you can see that it actually took 3hrs and 35min.  I'm starting to add 10% to the actual just so I'm closer to what it would really take but I'll still put up quotes from FlashPrint.

The werewolves came out great except one thing...

The left hands were mangled up about 50% of the time due to the support not working out.  I think I can fix this by putting custom supports in FlashPrint which I'll show next time I print this.

D&D Gnolls

D&D Gnolls - 6 pack
373min/13.84m/$1.06
https://www.shapeways.com/product/UBL429H6S/gnoll

mz4250's D&D collection has lots of great stuff and this gnoll is a really nice model.

I let it print for like 6 hours overnight and woke up to this:

It's a fine pack of Gnolls but there's one thing to note.  The spear is so thin that it will most definitely snap off with the support material.  I'm going to have to find a way to replace the spears completely because they will be a casualty of getting rid of supports in this case.

Other than that, it is a good solid model.

D&D Minotaurs

Asterion, the Minotaur - 3 pack
339min/16.93m/$1.28
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:583949

Another D&D usable mini from Dutchmogul, but this time I thought it'd be cool to have 3.
I usually run this kind of stuff before bed and have something nice to wake up to.

A 5.5hr run is usually longer than quoted, so this was one of my longest prints so far.

The figures came out very well.  Nice and solid, plus I had enlarged them somewhat so they would be tougher and more menacing.  I think these are about 180% increased in size.

I had to use supports and they worked pretty well except you can see the middle guy's support just got messed up a bit.  I don't think it actually mattered and this makes me wonder about how well FlashPrint's support program is.  I think I can start trying to add my own soon just to see if I can fix a few to save some time and filament.

D&D Wolf Pack

D&D Wolf (6-pack)
151min/6.2m/$0.47
https://www.shapeways.com/product/RJCAAAXW7/wolf?optionId=59691068&li=user-profile

Printing from mz4250's amazing set of free prints again.
I decided to do a whole pack and set it to autoshut off at night.
It worked well but as soon as I tried to lift one off the plate, I broke his legs off!

OOPS!  One down right? Nope, I broke a lot more just trying to take off their supports.  The feet of these wolves are VERY thinly attached to the base.  I eventually just accepted that I will either snap all the legs or at least just the first two.  It's ok though, these can be glued back on.  It's a great model, just know that you're going to snap legs!

Fantasy Warriors Swordsman - 28mm

Fantasy Warriors Swordsman - 28mm
6-pack
185min/8.87m/$0.67

https://pinshape.com/items/17064-3d-printed-fantasy-warriors-18mm-scale

This is just the swordsman from the 3 pack that is on the link.
I used supports because the overhangs were a lot and I left this one overnight so I took a chance and did 6 of them on one run.

It came out great!  I love the white and the detail is definitely acceptable.