I have to say that I am not happy that the Corvega Coupe seems to have only been released as a set of STL files. I neither have a 3D printer or want to print figures myself at this point. I really hope that Modiphius changes their mind on releasing anything as STL only and releases the actual figures as well in the future, otherwise they may wind up losing at least this customer.
I’m of mixed feelings about it. I sincerely hope that they release a physical version as well. But at the same time this is pushing me more toward getting my own 3d printer as with the price of miniatures vs the price of the printer and filament, . . . it could pay for itself in in time assuming they do more than just a couple of large items this way.
It is probably a fairly inexpensive way of using the renders they already have. The production of actual resin miniatures takes a lot of time and not using the renders in the meantime is not very economic.
I’ve also seen that people especially like to 3d print terrain pieces, because the detail is less important and mistakes can be easily covered. For that they use files that are extracted from the game files and this is highly dubious. I think by offering their own, official and legal files, Modiphius might be trying to reclaim that market.
For me personally this is not an attractive offer, but it might me more directed towards people who already own a 3D printer and might otherwise get their prints from illegal sources which in turn would be a monetary loss for Modiphius.
I wouldn’t be worried about Modiphius going full-blown STL files, because to my knowledge you can’t print miniatures as fine as the resin miniatures are, at least not with most 3d printers for private use. This may be more of an attempt to gauge peoples reactions and to provide some content in the usual busy pre-christmas time.
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Chris has already said that this is a test to see if it is a viable extra way of releasing stuff because there are a lot of people already using 3D printers to print non official stuff
He has also said that the intention is for the model to be available and in I have a gut feeling that this means we may see it in the first 1/4 of next year
I’m pretty happy about it. Right now, I have a friend who’s more seriously into Fallout: WW than I am, and I’ve just been using some of his “cast-off” (misprinted) items – but if there was a line of official Fallout STLs, I might just have to get my own printer. (I’m surprised at how the prices have gone down for them since the last time I checked when the novelty of home-3D-printing first caught my attention.)
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I checked and printers have become surprisingly cheap! It’s also the first time I have seen resin printers instead of filament printers and supposedly their level of detail is just as good as casted minis.
Still a bit expensive, but I’m actually tempted to buy one. Darn…
Yeah, as someone without ready access to a 3d printer, I was a little annoyed myself as well.
But after I thought about it for a bit, I figured this is most likely a model that Modiphius don’t have time to produce themselves right now. So I consider it more of an “early release” or release of something that otherwise wouldn’t be released. If that’s the case, I’m ok with it, but I really hope Modiphius are able to release a “proper” version of the model at some stage.
Then again, like @Banquo I had been considering buying a resin printer anyway… Modiphius releasing official printables might be just the push I need to firm up that decision…
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I’ve been straddling the fence on an Ender 3 for over a year now. I’ve looked at resin before but can’t really justify it basically only for Fallout and a couple of other games. It doesn’t bother me that they release STL files for some terrain, especially if it has a real release later. I just hope they don’t do it with the minis.
@Banquo: I don’t know how much of it is because of the resin, or simply because it’s a newer machine, but my friend who does the 3D printing originally had a PLA printer (a PrintrBot Plus, which he still uses for printing terrain pieces and other large-but-not-so-detailed bits), but more recently got a resin printer. He’s printed out a few figures with it that I’ve been able to see, and on some of them I can’t even pick out the “scan lines.” The resin also allows for much, much finer detail.
HOWEVER, those fine details are correspondingly very fragile. He printed for me a whole bunch of speaker posts for my “Creature Feature” drive-in theater scenario, complete with hanging cables for the speakers … but if I tried to snip off the sprues, the resulting shock would shatter the “cables” attached. I instead had to very carefully saw off the supports, while gently bracing the model against a firm (but not completely rigid) MDF surface on my worktable, and then I sometimes would succeed in removing the supports without breaking off those delicate little wires.
The PLA at least has a little give, so it can withstand a little stress without breaking, but so far with the resin it seems that there’s no discernible give at all without something breaking (or even shattering). Some amazing detail-work is possible, but if I were to get a printer of my own, I might very well still go for the filament printer, since I’m mostly focused upon terrain pieces, and concerned about fragility.
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Thanks for the warning.
Do you know how the brittleness compares to the “regular” resin of the miniatures? I’ve accidentally broken a few weapons before, but I’m overall happy with the sturdiness.
Just to let everyone know, we are releasing this as a test and may well do more STLs in the future, but that doesn’t mean we won’t also make these kits in resin.
It will be focused around scenery only also.
So, anyone who doesn’t have a 3D printer (like me) don’t worry, there will be product in the future for you that includes this can and other sets we do this way.
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I’ve been printing on and off for a couple of years. There are tons of videos on how to tweak various printers to get the quality of a decent miniature, especially with an Ender 3. Resin printers are a no brainer and the least expensive resin printer is less than $350…An Ender 3 with some upgrades is $250. Good filament like E-Sun’s PLA + is what you want to use and it’s $20 a kg at amazon or so. The resin costs a bit per kg, but you get finer details. The only disadvantage of a resin printer is the potential for mess as you clean off the excess liquid off the mini. It requires to handle them until it’s cleaned off. With the Ender 3 you can get good results using Tom Tullis’s Cura config files with a .4mm nozzle and you can get really good results with his settings and a .2mm nozzle.
I like where this is going because we can either buy the car for $35 or we can buy the file for $8 and print out as many as we want.
I remember Chris talking about the prep for the release of Liberty Prime. He mentioned that they were waiting on the 3-d prints. Looking at some of the fine resolution pics of people’s LP models, you can see fine lines from the master which makes me think they printed the masters and then cleaned them up. I don’t think selling the files for Liberty Prime would be a good idea, but when they had the bottlenecks in production for the various terrain pieces in the past, they could have sold the files for a third of the price of the model and reduced the load on the supply chain. Just a thought.
I’m working on two Coupes, one printed with PLA filament, and another printed using a much finer resin. The “striation” on the lower-res PLA print for me was most noticeable on the hood/trunk/roof areas and windshield – but fortunately those were also the most accessible surfaces that I could sand down to get a smoother surface. (I base-coated the PLA low-res print in white, before I decided to resort to sanding, hence why the “wood grain” effect is even more pronounced in the second picture, once I’d started sanding the surfaces down.)
At first, I didn’t notice the striation effect at all on the much finer resin-printed car; I could only pick out the “wood grain” effect once I spray-painted it, which brought out such irregularities that the bare resin hid thanks to a somewhat “soapy” effect (faint translucence) such as what I observe with un-painted Reaper Bones plastic minis.
The printed car is in two pieces – one for the upper-body “shell,” and another for the undercarriage, wheel hubs, and grill – that are each sturdy and thick, and nest together well.
I /wish/ there were an option to print with separate gull-wing doors, missing windows (even if that would mean exposing an un-detailed interior), and/or tires (because, hey, I might want to make a “restored” or pristine Coupe for whatever reason … or I might just want to print up some tires). I really liked the early Chryslus model that had the removable doors by comparison.
Not pictured, but I spray-coated the low-res printed car again after sanding down the roof/hood/trunk area a bit, and at least with my initial examination it looked a LOT better. The printed car shell is thick enough to do some heavy sanding without fear of wearing through the surface. I was considering using some Apoxie Sculpt to help fill in the gaps (as Apoxie Sculpt, once cured, wet-sands pretty well), but I think the sanding alone has gotten me far enough along for something that’ll look decent on the table as a junked-out abandoned hulk (which is what I assume this model is intended for in the first place, given the lack of tires).
I’m definitely a fan of this, and I think there would be a lot of possibility for accommodating customization options this way. It would take up several SKUs to have versions of a given car model that does or doesn’t have doors, or has the hood open, tires on, tires off, flat tires, etc., but those choices could be left in the hands of the end-user who’s operating a 3D printer. (Maybe I want a drive-in theater full of several copies of a car, but I want to vary them a little, so this one is missing its doors, that one is relatively intact, etc.)
IMHO, I’m much more a fan of 3D-printed terrain elements than minis due to the tendency of the former to involve more solid, durable forms, versus the fine detail of figures. Some really impressive detail is possible with 3D-printed resin, but the stuff is also incredibly brittle. I far prefer the durability of the F:WW boxed minis (which, among other things, I can cut off of sprues without the shock shattering fine resin parts elsewhere on the figure – a problem I’ve run into when removing scaffolding from certain fine 3D-printed resin minis).
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Thanks for posting that! I’ve been put off 3D printing for a while because of the visible striations, but that resin print looks brilliant! I’ve been hearing it come up every now and then, but I confess I don’t really know what the differences are between it and a non resin one are
@Alaiteir: Disclaimers – I am speaking without technical knowledge of this, but rather what I think I recall from someone with more technical knowledge trying to explain it to me. 
The PLA filament 3D printer basically uses a long strand of plastic “filament” that it heats up to melt and then shoots through a tiny nozzle, maneuvering it into position to build up a model from the base up. The striation is basically because of a “scan line” effect: on any given layer, the print could be very refined and follow circular or other patterns, but there’s still inevitably going to be a certain amount of distortion because it’s slicing up the 3D image and doing it one thin slice at a time. The thinner the layer, the better, but there will always be some evidence of the “resolution” of the model, if you look at it closely enough. Also, since it’s putting the model together a layer at a time, it’s going to run into issues with certain shapes if there’s no support for the plastic it’s putting out. So, a certain amount of “scaffolding” is needed to support any points where upper parts of the model extend outward beyond the “footprint” of the figure at the base.
With resin, it’s a little different. There’s a vat of liquid resin, and a platform within this vat that serves as the base for the model. A laser traces the surface of the resin, solidifying it as it heats it up. The platform then descends, so the solidified layer is now submerged, and there’s liquid at the surface again for the laser to hit and solidify. Supports are again needed, for the same reasons as with the PLA: gravity otherwise will cause any solidified portions to warp and drape if it’s not supported by something solid underneath. However, much finer layers are possible, because that layer of liquid resin up top can be very thin, versus physical constraints on how thick molten plastic has to be and still reliably flow through a nozzle without cooling on its way out and gumming up the works. Anyway, once the printing process is done, the solid model is basically just lifted up out of the liquid resin, with the excess draining off (and usable for future prints).
In gross terms, I’ve heard that PLA filament printing is still cheaper than the resin. The laser involved in resin printing has a limited use life (I mean, I guess that’s true of ANY machine, but this is apparently more-so than what’s used in filament printing), just as it’s a problem with laser-cutting MDF or acrylic.
There’s also a difference in cost of materials (though I don’t really have a grasp of that).
Also, as long as you’re willing to put up with the lower resolution, the filament printing seems to be able to more QUICKLY churn out rough models. This can be fine if you are okay with a certain degree of abstraction, or you’re creating a shape that you’re going to be doing a lot of work to anyway (e.g., it’s pretty much just a “skeleton” for something you’ll be building up, or you account for a degree of sanding and other work as part of the process).
I think there are ways to minimize the visible impact of the striation on the final product as well. For instance, if you had a shape that was a tall spindle, with gently curving sides, it would probably look better if you printed it vertically-aligned than if you printed it on its side. When vertically-aligned, the differences in width from layer to layer would be much smaller than if the same shape were printed on its side. I think that could possibly be a contributing factor to why some people have been printing off the Coupe STL at a 45 degree angle rather than horizontal (but then, I can’t help but wonder if it would work even better if the Coupe were printed vertically?).
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I’m really happy they released the STL file. I’ve printed the car and it looks really good. It took around 35 hours to print but it’s the first time I’ve paid for a stl and it looks much better than a lot of the free files I’ve gotten.
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That’s really interesting, thankyou! It sounds like I’d probably lean towards resin over PLA filament simply because of the better resolution, even if it’s more expensive. That said, I don’t have the money or the space for a printer at the moment, so this is of course just me day dreaming!
It sounds like there’s definitely a market for releasing the STL files as products. As long as they still release a physical model at some point as well, it sounds like engaging those with 3D printers rather than ignoring them is a good way for Modiphius to go 
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Progress on the Coupes. The green one is the PLA filament print. One unfortunate side-effect of all my sanding on the roof, trunk, and hood, was that I obliterated the etched detail of the gullwing door top sections. It doesn’t make it look bad as a car, per se, if I didn’t happen to KNOW that it’s supposed to be a gullwing door … but I know, so that’s bad. I’m probably going to have to just paint in the detail of the door edge. (This is another reason why I wish the doors could have been separate pieces. Even if my intention was to have this as an assembled, intact car, if the door pieces were separate, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about destruction of detail by sanding down the roof of the car to minimize the striation.)
Despite all my sanding, the striation is still very visible. I hope that I can camouflage it further with weathering effects. (I mean, I could go in with some putty and more sanding, but life is short, and I’ve got a big backlog of other things I need to get done and off my workspace.)
The red car on the right is the resin-printed coupe. I’ve come to notice that there’s a slight distortion in the hood area, as I think the printer might have been jostled during the printing process, or something along those lines. It’s not a HARD shift, however, but a warp, so I’m really not sure what to attribute it to. It’s fairly gentle, and only noticeable when the lighting is just so – and, again, it’s the sort of thing that I might be able to ignore if I don’t KNOW it’s not supposed to look that way. For now, I’m just going to roll with it.
One thing perplexes me: Where does the coupe hang a LICENSE PLATE? Maybe it goes within that oval-shaped flat area on the back of the car, behind the trunk. (I suppose that can’t be any sort of exhaust or ventilation, since immediately on the other side of it is TRUNK SPACE, after all.) I can’t find any evidence of in-game coupes sporting a license plate, so it could just be a detail that the modelers overlooked (kind of like how many cars end up missing the proper signals, rear-view mirrors, wipers, et al., and not every building has a restroom or a utility closet).
I’m grateful at the detail on the undercarriage of the car. It’s very shallow, and I wonder how the suspension works, but at least there IS some detail underneath there, so if the car is flipped, it’s not just some smooth, featureless surface. A great shorthand for indicating that a car is a wreck, after all, is for it to NOT have all four wheels on the ground, so I’m glad that as a terrain piece, this is one that can be displayed that way.
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the weird pattern on the green one reminds me of the Target store logo, why not try and use that pattern to make a interesting detail on the car and then weather it?