A bit about base 3D printing; also Cry Havoc! And let slip the Hounds of Chaos!

By TomJanuary 21, 2017

Last year I bought a unit of unbuilt Chaos Hounds off Ebay on a whim. Which turned out to have no bases and missing a horn. Sigh. When you buy on the cheap, youse gets whats youse gets.

First I stuck them on square cavalry bases, but that looked just wrong. I think I have decided not to use square bases any more, as I prefer the round ones, so I took them off again. Then I tried some 40 and 50mm round bases, but the 40mm ones looked too small, and the 50mm ones take up too much space on the shelf for my liking, what with there being 10 models. Shelfspace turning out to be coming somewhat at a premium with all the minis getting painted these days…

So I tried oval bases from warbases, which did the trick. But still. Those square-cut edges clash stylistically with the chamfered/lipped bases I have come to prefer. So the dogs got stuck in a box with all the other “not entirely inspired to paint these yet, something is not quite right, need to think a bit” miniatures. Too bad no one seems to make plain, chamfered oval bases. And I have searched extensively for such.

And then in December a paradigm shift occurred. I got a 3dprinter. I started off happily printing out terrain piece after terrain piece, discovering that there are massive amounts of models of tanks on thingiverse, so printing a few of those, all the while learning what the printer can do.

And then some days ago it dawned on me. Why not print the bases I want myself?

well, the first reason would be I don’t know how to 3D model. My first admittedly very cursory foray was into a free program called blender. Woah, talk about your steep learning curves! How to even set up a working environment there? I will need to spend some serious time before making either heads or tails of that. Or start with a simpler program.

But the printer’s own slicer program does let me scale things, so if I only had a base model to work from, maybe…*search search search*

Some playing around with an excellent base model I found on thingiverse later:

Voila! One 50mm x25mm oval lipped base. That’s the same footprint as a cavalry base. I had to change all three dimensions to make this, as the original model was too tall. But it turned out all right. And is easily resized for other dimensions as well. So now I can get the best of two worlds, both my preferred, esthetically pleasing chamfered base for individual viewing and skirmish game enjoyment, and backwards warhammer fantasy / kings of war compatibility for practical mass battle game functionality. Just stick them on a movement tray and off we go!

oval-bases-unit