No man is an Island

I mentioned last time that there is a middle ground between scratch building terrain and buying it (specifically for Armada).  3D printers keep getting cheaper and (I hear) easier to use.  

I had originally hoped to get into this hobby (and this is an entire hobby into itself) through a kickstarter almost four years ago (supposedly it is ready to start manufacturing once shipping costs come back down to a reasonable level).  Last month I went ahead and bought my first 3D printer - and Ender 3d v2.

After my suggestion on making a compact turn marker for Armada, a reader from Australia (with his own blog here) took the idea and made a version, posting the link in a response to my post.   This was one of the first things I printed - Compact Turn Marker.  A bit more searching on thingiverse and I found a bunch of printable armada terrain.

This set has 7 islands, 4 sand bars, a harbor, and 4 rocks.  The islands are designed to be printable in 'vase' mode - which is basically upside down and hollow.

There is one Extra Large Island.  This is about the size of the combined cardboard harbors from the starter.  All of these are about half an inch tall.

Once finished with appropriate clump foliage to represent trees, then the should look pretty good.

There are two large islands, about the size of the four combined cardboard islands

There are then 4 small islands, each about the size of one of the quarter island pieces.

Of course, I have to show these in comparison to some of the purchased islands

One of the islands from Novus Designs

and the smaller islands from Amera Plastics.

What I wasn't able to purchase however were sand bars.  But there are 4 of these included in this set.  These fit the cardboard version almost like they were designed for them :-)

They will definitely need to be covered with sand to make them 'realistic', but that is easy enough.

I'm really liking these, and enjoying starting to learn a little about 3d printing.  But Armada isn't what I'm excited about using these for (but once again, that is next time :-) ).

Because it is all fun and games . . .