Death Star Micro Tiles + Trench Run (STL files V8 available)

Well, consider the audience -- I my post close up photos on the internet because I enjoy sharing, but the audience for the actual diorama is me; it sits on a shelf about a meter away; at that distance none of the flaws are visible unless I use Luke's macro-binoculars :D

(actually, that would suck -- the display on those things is low res 1980s interlaced CRT as hell)
 
I know it's been a long time since I posted an update here -- for the most part my micro trench has sat partially painted while I worked on lots of other projects. Well, I just picked up the full set of Archive-X acrylic paints, and have added a few touches. I misted a coat of ILM DS Surface Grey on the whole thing, which is just slightly lighter than Tamiya grey primer.

Then I masked off and airbrushed some details of ILM DS Olive Oxide and Dark Reefer Grey, both of which appear on various parts of various tiles. I picked where to put both of them fairly randomly. Some masked off, and some done freehand with the airbrush, just like the originals.

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So -- first off, if you're following this thread and have somehow missed 3DImpact's Death Star surface thread, go check it out immediately, I'll wait. Death Star surface - pyro model reproduction

OK, cool, right?

That inspired me to return to mine -- when I built most of my 20mm tile set last year, I did an arrangement of _most_ of the pyro surface model in SketchUp, but never finished it because (a) there were some tiles I couldn't identify, and (b) there were some tiles I hadn't modeled yet. With the help of the reference material 3DImpact kindly posted I've nearly finished modeling everything I need to complete it.

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So I'm getting another tile set release ready -- in these screenshots all the bright green tiles are new, the hot pink ones are changed (just adding additional detail to existing tiles). The grey ones are the core set of tiles based on what you see on screen.

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I'll be ordering test prints of the new ones shortly, and I'll have an updated set of files posted once I know they're actually printable.
 
So -- first off, if you're following this thread and have somehow missed 3DImpact's Death Star surface thread, go check it out immediately, I'll wait. Death Star surface - pyro model reproduction

OK, cool, right?

That inspired me to return to mine -- when I built most of my 20mm tile set last year, I did an arrangement of _most_ of the pyro surface model in SketchUp, but never finished it because (a) there were some tiles I couldn't identify, and (b) there were some tiles I hadn't modeled yet. With the help of the reference material 3DImpact kindly posted I've nearly finished modeling everything I need to complete it.

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So I'm getting another tile set release ready -- in these screenshots all the bright green tiles are new, the hot pink ones are changed (just adding additional detail to existing tiles). The grey ones are the core set of tiles based on what you see on screen.

View attachment 1494618

I'll be ordering test prints of the new ones shortly, and I'll have an updated set of files posted once I know they're actually printable.

Fantastic! I just got my Elegoo Saturn last month and it would be great to print some of these out.
 
I haven't quite had the time to finish getting all the individual STLs exported and cleaned up, but I'm getting there. I spent a lot more time working on the 40mm version of the whatever you call this tile -- the big vent with the quarter arc. Since it's a larger tile, and quite prominent in the pyro model, I wanted to get it a little closer to the real thing than the micro-sized version, and add more detail befitting the larger size. It's not anything approaching "accurate", but it feels a lot more like the real thing than the scaled-up micro tile did.
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Version 6 of the tile set is up!

At Death Star Micro Tiles - monster.party.hat as always, or the direct link to the ZIP file is https://monster.partyhat.co/article...es/monsterpartywars-DS-Micro-Tiles-STL-v6.zip

This has all the additions I've made to get closer to completing the ILM pyro model.
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As before, in this top-down screenshot of the entire tile set, green tiles are new, hot pink tiles have been modified since the last release (adding more detail, although the changes may be small). The grey tiles are the ones I consider the "core set", the three light grey tiles are originals in the same style as the core set, and the white ones are generally base on my original hand-made tile set; they're less accurate and have less detail than the newer ones.
 
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Just like I did with the citadel tile, I started re-working the thermal exhaust port. The current version is still very much based on my hand built original, and with SLA printing you can do so much more even at this scale. This is a 40mm tile. The next release of the tile set will be a complete re-org to categorize the tiles in a bit more logical manner.
 
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Making all the panel lines and panelling is pretty tedious, so for the moment I've done the lazy thing and, having completed one side, just mirrored it to the other side. I'll probably go back in and make both sides unique later, but for now this is good enough for me. As usual, there's a couple of variants -- just the 20x20 center portion, and the whole thing at 1/2 scale, to match with the 10x10mm tiles for *really* small trench runs.

There are surprisingly few good photos of the original thermal exhaust port for reference -- it's not like many of the other tiles where original copies have show up at auction to be lovingly photographed in high detail. I'm guessing that because they didn't need to make a ton of copies of that tile, none survived (or at least, none that have surfaced).
 
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I also went and produced the variants of the Citadel piece that crop up here and there -- in several of the filming layouts ILM used versions of this piece with either the big "vent" quadrant removed, or that plus one quarter of the opposing quadrant removed. One could, of course, make these variants the old-fashioned way, by printing or casting the full piece and cutting the bits out with a cutoff wheel or model saw, but why not have the convenience too?

For fun, this is all of the variations of this piece I've made so far. The largest tiles here are 40mm, the very smallest is 5mm. In the 10mm size we have my original scaled down, and also a new one based on replicating the "high altitude" version of this piece, which is a low-detail tile -- I think the original was 3 inches (versus the 2 feet of the full-size, highly detailed "low altitude" tile). That's second from the left in the middle row.
 
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