01 May 2022

Soviet Infantry-3D Prints

No, I have not started to print Space Marines on my Photon Zero!

I first got my resin printer about 16 months ago in a Black Friday sale, it was $100! I felt there was little to lose as my main focus was to print vehicles that I could not find in hard plastic for my 1/72 WWII wargaming. I am not a big modeller so precise detail on the models was to critical to me but I was finding that my FDM printer although good for buildings was really not the thing for small scale vehicles. I had seen that you could do a lot of post processing to improve things but that would have defeated the purpose of pumping out tanks so I could play games. There are no end of fairly good STL's for free and once I got the trick of placing supports, things were going well. I was expecting to stop there.

And then along came this STL designer, Propylene Foliescu who was putting out the most amazing looking infantry figures for the Winter War, a particular area of interest for me. I knew had a pretty dated printer but I said why not give it a try. I first printed up a bunch of Finns that came out quite well but I already had a lot of Finns so I shifted my focus to the Soviets which I was short one section for a full platoon. 

I went ahead and purchased what he had on Wargaming3D, and made some adjustments to the scale and off I went, I really had a problem with only a single model of the Soviets but when I had a look at the actual models I could see I had a problem. The bulk of my Winter Soviets are from CPModels, these sculpts are really quite nice, anatomic and ...tall. When I compared the 28mm models scaled to 70%, they looked like dwarves. One of the great things about 3d printing is that you can mess around with the scale. I played around and came up with a print where I scaled down the model to 70% and then increase the vertical scale to 80%. They were near perfect as you can see below.
The CP/TQD model is on the right, it still looks a little taller but that is because it has a base, proportionally they were quite similar.

So, I went ahead and printed a batch of models, the Photon Zero has a tiny build plate but it was pretty easy to print 12 models at a time. I was really quite pleased by the result. 
A Soviet section which is quite variably sized through out the course of the war.  there are 15 figures here, with 13 rifled armed troops, a JL and a 2 man LMG team.
Some SMG armed troops to use as supports, there were only 2 different poses.
One thing I was really lacking was guns, here is a Gun team with a SL and  a  m1936  76mm gun as well as a m1937 45 mm gun. 
The guns are from Night Sky Miniatures 

I finally got some troops to put in my Quad Maxim Gaz Truck.
A Soviet Field Kitchen from Night Sky Miniatures
I now have a complete Soviet platoon for CoC, I had been using a unit of NKVD as my 4th section but I am now good. I will try to get the Finns I printed some time ago painted and post them.

 

 

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