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My Seraphon journey

B
Skink

Benji

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Hey guys, Benji here!
Up until now I was just a silent reader starting to enjoy Seraphon miniatures more and more. That will change tonight as I want you to be part of my bigger projects.

At the beginning there was an idea:
Im a late warhammer fan and the total war series really dragged me into this, needles to say that Lizardmen are my favourites :> loved the models, loved the lore and finally came to love the miniatures, too. Although I have to say, that I cant fancy the pretty dated Saurus models. I started with skinks, testing out color schemes till I found one that looks nice and is easy to paint:20201004_003616.jpg

It was quite the dilemma for me loving Lizardmen in general and hating most of their gw line... Worst of all, till today there is no 3d party which makes better looking models, so a thought began to arise: 3dPrint!

It started as a wild fantasy, for the mere price of an ugly dated forgeworld Dreadsaurian I could buy a 3d printer and print my own one and many more models. Only problem was, good 3d models are rare... there are one or 2 patreons providing some nice stls, but mostly are highly stylized and dont fit the gw range too well. For my first big project: The Dread Saurian! Searching for stls, I stumbled upon 2 stls that looked promising. Many might know about VidovicArts model, but I wanted a bettter one. Back to the roots the only reeal choice was the total war series model which stl I found on thingyverseupload_2020-10-16_20-8-48.png

Reading up to this point one might see, that all I do is stumble from one problem to another. The last model suits my tase but lacks detail BADLY. My solution? I learned to handle blender and created something beautiful. After mere 40h of learning, trying and failing I made this:
unknown.png

adding a few million polygons, adding details, a skin, posture while losing some years of lifetime due to pc crashes while processing the sculpt, I would assume I created the best looking Dread Saurian model out there. Of course it is up to everyones self to judge and I would like honest critics.
some more angles:
upload_2020-10-16_20-25-50.pngupload_2020-10-16_20-26-31.png

Scaling this bad boy up to about 13/14 inches in length requires me to massacre him to many many smaller peices to print. Now that my printer arrived I will build him up, piece by piece, and when its all done and finished I plan to share my model and tackle the next part of my upcoming army, but that day may still be far away. I will keep you updated.
 
Oh man, you HAVE to release that STL file if the print works out! I never liked how static and derpy the original file was. can't wait to see where all this goes!
 
quick update - tumbling forward

besides Blender I use windows 3dBuilder, Meshmixer and Chitubox to prepare my files for the final print. Unfortunately None of these are able to load the whole model. 7gb of love are too much for either the programm or my pc to cut into...
Instead of giving up I decided to lower the subdivision layers to that limit where I can go ahead with my project and I lost a crucial amount of detail doing so.
Will I be happy with it? No! The only solution I found was to cut the low poly model into smaller fragments, so that I can now redo the whole skin/scales part back to the quality it was before. Which means many hours work were in vain. I guess you could call it learning curve.

I couldnt get a successfull testprint with my elegoo mars pro for about 6 tries which each and everyone of them ending up stuck on the fep film. After half a week it was yesterday my first print came out right - a new problem occured and I will tell you later about it.

For now it seems to work quite well. It takes many more hours to redo the model completely but I decided to release the current STL files part by part. Will do so for the tail of my Dread Saurian in a few hours, so those of you who are interested can print along ;)

P.S. Im still far from a professional lvl in modeling and printing (more like early amateur) I want everyone who is interested to take those files later (or the original from thingiverse) and encourage you to do it better. That might be the only way to improve model quality over time for all of us.
 
-bump-
updated thingiverse for the torso files. It´s been 72h printing now and I´m half way through. Working on the model parts and managing the printer feels like a full time job. I will update this thread for significant milestones on thingiverse or the resinmodel.
 
-bump-
It is done... I cracked the model into 36! stl files suitable for most resin lcd printers. Roughly 80h spent learning, sculpting and processing the model, estimated 130h of print time although Im not finished yet.
I feel exhausted, but Im confident it was worth it.
Will probably finish the print this weekend. I´ll keep you updated.
 
It is quite nice for a scratchbuild, I actually copied his headgear.
But after all I felt the need to make my own, because until today there was imo no adequate model for a Dreadsaurian which inpersonates:
a) the sheer mass and ferocity of the Dreadsaurian which makes mortals and demi gods tremble in fear
b) the model quality which makes me wanna paint it.

It took me long enough but it´s possible for each and everyone of us to create something beautiful. Just take a look at Seraphons Cold ones... They are so outdated that many are searching desperately for alternative models to stick their saurus onto. Yet there are many 3dsculpt which can be tweaked to be a fitting proxy much better quality. That may be my next project, as I want my dreaded centerpiece to have some tarpitwipe in form of a Firelance Temple-Host
 
Hey guys,

after a few days of silence it´s time for the next update:
20201107_202229.jpg

so what happened? I printed every part (which are included at the thingiverse project) and glued most of them together - excpet the tail. I already started fixing the horrendous gluelines (shows that I´m a big noob at 3d printing and modeling) but its starting to come together.
Notice a few things: The big headgear is from the vidovicarts model not my own. I simply resized it to fit my model. It´s hard to see but I also added a few skulls to the plate. Notice how I replaced the trinket on his forehead? That is a bastiladon headgear cut down to fit.
The reason why I am altering my own model is this: the printquality overall is good enough but not as good as gw standard. So I found it important to mix in highly detailed bits to distract from the overall poorer quality to set some attention points getting these awe effects after beholding the pure size of that model.I plan to "enhance" every single gold plate with some original seraphon bits to get some additional detail on this bad boi.

The reason this one is not yet built completely is, because I am waiting for some gs roll maker sets to finally remodel the ropes and string I had to scratch down on the original model for printability.

Furthermore I´m currently at work doint my own Saurus knight conversion. It´s quite simple: Terradon riders plus 3d printed Raptors from Lost kingdom which I scaled down to 80% fitting their new riders quite well. I will show you these later.
 
Wow, that Dread Saurian is coming along nicely. It has a much better pose and character for me than the existing model. Cant wait to see where this goes.

And new knights, hmmm....
 
So here is my first attempt for a suitable knight conversion - the skink knight:

20201108_142913.jpg

Lost Kingdom miniatures Raptor mount with gw terradon rider skink on top. I scaled the 3dmodel down to 80% in size to match the skink better. Overall the printquality is insanely good, much better then the original 2 cold one models (though both of them are pretty old by now) and I only need to buy new terradon packs for this conversion so it isnt all that pricey while still containing original gw plastic if that is important to someone.

My models would probaby be rejected at any official store or tournament although I keep the originals measurements in a wysiwyg conversion. But optics are my highest priority and skinks are the only current Seraphon models that can hold up to my standards.
 
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