Desiging a Medieval Castle Walls B 3D Printer Project!

After the success I had making and 3D printing my Medieval Castle Walls (how-to is HERE while 3D printer project launch is HERE) on CNCKing.com…

… it’s time to go all-out and build a 3D printed model even more complex with more detail here on CNCKing.com! I want to have arched walkways, 45 degree angled wall details and a few turrets! Let’s go nuts and see what happens! Unlike vases, using a grid for reference will come in very handy for this project to keep things symmetrical.

As I want a lot more detail, all my meshes will need to have a lot of information in them to give me the resolution required to extrude directly onto it as much as possible without having to resort to boolean operations. Boolean operations are great but they have their limits – nothing beats the accuracy you can get from topological modifications straight on the mesh itself. In this case, I created a turret and extruded the top square surfaces to form a wall and negatively extruded the floor to create some height. I will first “rough-out” the elements of my castle walls then improve on detail as things progress.

Once I had one soon-to-be 3D printed turret roughed-out, I put them at all four corners of my build, the next logical step is adding a wall from one wall to the next and adding medieval details to them.

Here the wall is made in much the same way as the turrets, I extruded my way towards making the details I wanted to make. I would like my model walkway to actually go through each turret which will mean hallowing out the inside of the turretes but first let’s take a look at how everything looks all together so far.

This 3D printed castle walls is starting to look good! I need to either make the walls higher or the towers shorter as they seem way out of proportion with one another. There is also some smoothing going on with the towers that I dislike so I’m going to have to work a bit more to refine those.

Modeling mesh to e 3D printed is pretty easy so once you have a form and proportions figured-out, it’s generally easier to just rebuild it from scratch instead of trying to endlessly modify elements in a model. Keep in mind that although I may have a model made-up of 8 separate elements so far, I really only have three that are unique – ON PURPOSE! Here are the results of the turets is split in half (lower part separated from top cap) and the walls are now beefed-up. I want to make this model big and stocky unlike the first version of this wall.

What I did here was heavily modify one of the walls to create the entry gate in an efficient manner, I then created an archway mesh which I’ll then boolean to delete from the wall. This is for an extrusion 3D printer so I can’t have any 90 degree overhangs, they have to either be a 45 degree slope or arch to be printable.

Although I’d like to create a 3D printed gate that opens and closes for this model, it would have to be vertical but my market for this project is kids and this model is already going to be pretty small, it’s just something that will get lost too easily but what I can do is have the walkways go through each turret. They were build by extruding an arch then bending it 90 degrees until things lined-up walkway to walkway. As these turretes are all instanced, modifying one modifies the others. To have a bit more room for the walkway archway, I made the turret slightly higher for extra tolerance.

I find it easier to do all my boolean operations at the same time as adjustments are easier before the operation is performed than after. I’m also playing around with adding some ornamental details to the model. Again, focused on only one turret column which will automatically be applied to the others in this model.

The virtual 3D printable version of my medieval castle walls B is looking very good – remember the how the first version I tested to see if fine details would work along with arches – this time around, I’ve added a lot more of both elements and now inside of each turret, a walkway is shown along with some elements removed from it on both sides. I like this model, I think there are enough changes from the first version to see how it 3D prints. I could keep adding details but let’s test what we have done so far before doing further with more details.

After doing an STL check and exporting the project as a STL file, I opened it in Cubify – the software interface that allows my 3D Systems Cube to print and the verdict is in, we are looking at a build time of 7 hours… not bad at all! Next blog post on CNCKing.com… the building process. Let’s see how it goes!