Late last year, we made our Black High Definition Acrylate (BHDA) available for sale by our Shop Owners, enabling them to market incredibly detailed models. Since then, we’ve been watching with a ton of excitement as miniature makers prototype and iterate their concepts to prepare them for sale. Shapeways Shop Owner Gareth Nicholas, the multitalented 3D designer and award-winning miniature painter, shared his thoughts and process around designing for and finishing BHDA on his blog, and we were so blown away that we had to share.
Nicholas took his already expert-level experience in painting Warhammer and Reaper miniature figurines to the next level by creating his own figures with 3D printing. On his blog he explains:
“Concept-wise there’s nothing particularly original here. Games Workshop have been starving me of High Elves recently (at the moment it’s starting to look doubtful they’ll ever return, but I live in hope) so I decided to make my own. As I usually do when I sculpt something, I spent a while with a pencil and paper sketching various designs for armour and so on. I rejected a few designs that I thought looked cool on the grounds that they probably wouldn’t print very well or look good when painted.”
To start the design, Nicholas blocked out the character with simple shapes in (free software) Blender. We strongly recommend emulating his process here because he kept the overall model at the same level of finish throughout his process. This allows him to make good judgements as he improves the model through iterations, working from the most general forms to the most finely detailed.
“I roughed out the proportions in Blender and spent a fair bit of time viewing the model from every angle until I was happy that the anatomy wasn’t too awful. I then went back and refined each element, and made decisions about how the hair and the cloak would flow.”
Afterwards, Nicholas describes how he took the smooth finish of BHDA and made it glow with simple paints (check out his blog for more awesome expert painting tips).
“I elected to go with non-metallic metal when painting as there are some interesting shapes and I wanted to explore the reflections. For the steel parts I used my tried and tested method of highlighting with cyan and shading with red added to the mix.
“Overall I am quite pleased with how the miniature has turned out for a first effort at this scale and I’ve learnt a lot that will hopefully lead to better results in the future.”
Finally, check out the finished product below, and find more of Nicholas’s original miniatures in his Shapeways Shop here. This High Elf would be an impressive addition to your next Warhammer battle or Dungeons and Dragons campaign.
Looking for more custom-made miniatures? Check out Gareth Nicholas’ shop here, Tabletop & Wargaming accessories here, and the Miniatures marketplace here. And, let us know in the comments what figurines you’d like to see in the marketplace in the future!
It looks great, but the greatness isn’t because of the 3D printed miniature but because of the incredible paint job done. The highlights and fine details are incredible. Sure, having a good 3D printed model is useful but the right paint is more important.
Which reminds me that Shapeways still lacks a good color-printed 3D material so people don’t need to manually paint their work. The colored sandstone is okay and I have a few of those already. But it’s not practical for models this small. The colored plastic that Shapeways used to have tends to fade. It also wasn’t suitable for these small prints. So, because of a lack in 3D colored prints, these kinds of models are still mostly hand-painted. And that’s a bit of a shame, since most people can’t paint this well…
having a high detail full color solution would be great we agree, but as of now we think even this level of detail without color is impressive
You wont get this paintjob to look good unless all the minute details are there in the model to be painted on. I have experienced this. So great job both with the paint and the print.
Wow, I really couldn’t disagree with you more. Sure, an amazing paint job is, naturally, amazing. But lipstick on a hog still leaves you with a pig covered in expensive wax. If the base model isn’t sculpted well, all the great painting in the world won’t make up for a poor cast. The resolution of this print is super super tight, and that’s what helps this incredible paint job really pop. It’s a symbiotic relationship, one doesn’t truly excel without the other. But the base model of this miniature is really very intricate for a 3D print, far more intricate than anything we would’ve had just a few years ago.
I am wanting to create 3D figures from 2D photos. I am wanting to populate my model railroad (HO scale) From photos of family members who worked on the railroad. My painting skills are average, and I’ve yet to find an app that produces the detail I’m seeking. BLENDER looks promising, but I wonder how long it takes to learn.
I cannot say if blender is easy or not but it seems easier than this monstrous 3ds max.
I personally used cinema 3D and it was easy to learn and convenient to use. I think that blender is also easy and popular amongst game moders.