Wednesday, January 08, 2025

Hexton Hills - Kingdom of Aglarion - Onadbyr

 



I'm starting something new - it's 3D printed terrain from Hexton Hills. I received the hex terrain files as a Christmas gift from my son, I'm converting the mapping of our current family Dungeons and Dragons campaign to a 3d visual feast. We are currently playing the Crown of the Oathbreaker campaign from Elderbrain. It's an amazing campaign book and has a main city of Onadbyr where the initial primary story takes place but then opens up to classic hexcrawl with various spots of interest.

The hexcrawl map is huge - and there's a players version but there is also a DM's version with many more interesting places. Each hex on the map is 25 miles or a typical days travel in D&D. In order to map this into 3d terrain, I've taken the scale of 7 hex tokens = 1 hex map which makes each hex token about 8 miles. Which means the party can go three hexes in any direction. 

Each hex as printed using the files direct from Hexton Hills is about 2" on the short side of the hex and 2.5" on the long side of the hex. That means I'd need a board about 6' high and 8' long - way to big. So I've scaled them down 50% as I can put a board on the table that's 3'x4'. Now, according to Hexton Hills you can't print that small on a printer using filament (called FDM printing) and have to use the complicated and potentially toxic resin printing. Well that's where Bambu Labs and their .2 nozzle comes into play with the settings set using the factory best configurations of high quality at .06.

Red filament is printed at standard size and the grey filament is half size.



The really cool thing is that you can print with or without the locking tabs - I figured that at the 50% reduction the locking tabs weren't going to work as there has to be a high level of precision - I can't say enough about Bambu Labs printers - they lock! Here's a sampling...



It does it so well that the entire grouping can be picked up...


I tack the hex grouping to a coaster and then off to the spray booth. I'm keeping the rules simple as I'm going to have hundreds of hex tiles when it's all said and done. From a campaign perspective I simply need to keep ahead of the current adventure by a map hex (7 hex tokens) or two. I'm spraying Vallejo Game Air and I've placed the .35 needle/nozzle on my Badger Patriot 105 airbrush (that's the black ball - what Badger calls Super Detail).

Water
=====
* Ultramarine Blue
* Electric Blue

Land
=====
* Earth
* Sick Green
* Light Livery Green

Castle
=====
* Black
* hand drybrush Cold Grey
* hand drybrush Stonewall Grey


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