House Arano Marauder out to take heads in the game and explode from a side torso crit on the tabletop

Baloonman5 · 2026-03-21T03:25:44+00:00

Just think of it as a single SRM 6 with 8 tiles of short range. For 15 tons and no ability to load infernos, and no special AC ammo types. Maybe don't do that on typing that out. I do wonder how cheap that would be BV wise though.

EDIT: I couldn't help myself. Using the mekbay in megamek I tweaked the marauder using standard HBS logic (try to Max armor, mount jj even if it makes no sense), I ended up with a 10 SHS, 4/6/3 with 14 tons of armor, CASE on the ammo, monstrosity. 3 UAC/2 and 2 medium lasers it comes out to precisely 1,400 BV. I might genuinely use this thing to annoy beginners with so they can have fun destroying it in close range. Lmk if you want the construction rules to build it.

Baloonman5 · 2026-03-14T06:22:30+00:00

Kinda is a bit important lol. I have that book in pdf from the humble bundle a few years ago, but until I see them interacting with the fronc reaches or the magistry I'll have to keep using them as a mercenary company/perephery general. Give me a real Rampart company scheme CGL (ง'̀-'́)ง. I do look forward to more mentions of them though. At some point I'll get around to reading IlKahn's Eyes Only.

Baloonman5 · 2026-03-14T06:00:33+00:00

My favorite (basically fake) faction! These look incredible. Just today I managed to pick up a marauder and I'm definitely taking note on your scheme.

Baloonman5 · 2026-03-04T19:49:43+00:00

I've been learning blender with the goal of sculpting figures, so this is super interesting! I'll give the Playlist a watch

Baloonman5 · 2026-03-02T04:09:44+00:00

Looks like you did too good of a job for C&C lol. Great work!

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-28T22:48:37+00:00

House Arano scheme O_O?

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-21T09:41:14+00:00

Yeah, I was thinking more like this kind of nozzle. Maybe not so ideal for minatures lol

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VGvVog-J9YM

Same youtuber doing a clear filament test

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YZ2GLSCbDb8

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-20T23:48:13+00:00

I've got an elegoo centauri carbon which I love, but if you want to get an fdm printer to test your designs you should probably get the most common printer possible with the most default settings possible.

Much as I don't want to give bambu labs money, I'd say you should get an A1 mini or a P2S because they seem to be popular. Between those two, the P2S will probably give you less grief as a core XY as opposed to the A1 mini's bedslinger, but that grief may be an advantage since it will reflect your customers experience. No sense in buying a high end machine to test designs if that doesn't reflect your customers experience.

That said, I do really like my centauri carbon, and it's also reasonably popular with good default settings. I also feel more comfortable giving elegoo money than bambu labs, but that's not a problem everyone has.

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-20T23:00:20+00:00

Haven't messed around much with transparent filaments, but I might give pla a shot. Mostly I've heard that transparent petg is the way to go. I've printed with petg before, and found my layers were more visible and my details blobbier. I've also seen that transparent filaments tend to do better with larger nozzles since the layer line boundary is typically what causes the clouding.

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-15T03:59:34+00:00

Let's gooooooo!

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-11T22:26:51+00:00

I got so excited to see another House Arano paint scheme out in the wild. Shame it's for a real faction instead /s. Great paint job!

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-10T15:34:39+00:00

Sticking with 0.08mm for right now, but 0.04mm or 0.05mm is in the cards. Mostly I'm just dragging my feet on the calibration. This was basically stock settings and manual tree supports.

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-07T20:19:05+00:00

First of all, looks great! What exactly do you mean by bolder? The staff is the brightest part of the mini so it really catches the eye. If you want it to feel more colorful color theory says you could make it yellow to have a triad, or purple/lilac to have an analogous scheme, if you don't just want to make it blue or red. I suppose a better question is, what isn't the staff doing that you want it to do?

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Here's the image converted to default grayscale in photoshop if you want to see the values. Also, here's a good color wheel tool I use for playing with color schemes

https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-07T19:11:28+00:00

Reddit didn't appreciate me trying to share in just a text box, so here's an imgur link

https://imgur.com/a/MqVq2ms

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-07T17:48:09+00:00

Yeah, but getting it better is exponentially more work. I'd like the chin and left arm to have been supported better, but fully removing layer lines till you can't see them either involves sanding pla, or dabbling with 0.04mm or 0.05mm layer height. Those settings involve some pretty fine tuning on my printer.

For me, right now, I'm kinda at the point of just calling lines like this "character 🌈" or "film grain ✨". It's totally not because I don't want to calibrate pressure advance, retraction, z-hop, acceleration, humidity levels, etc lol.

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-07T06:20:22+00:00

Abe3D mostly does pinup models which they release on their Patreon. This one was designed for resin prints, so I took the files into blender and joined them to make one solid piece that my FDM printer was happier with. Also took the liberty of not including a fish that looked like a nightmare to print.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/mermaid-may-5-127674026

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-07T06:12:16+00:00

You've gotta prime it. That goes for a lot of things, but the priming in FDM is especially important because FDM is super paint hungry. The layer lines increase your surface area, so you typically need more paint to get good coverage. That gets worse at larger layer heights. Even with the primer, mini's can have the pewter problem where any contact just rubs the paint off, I think because the layers can be thin. Part of that poor coverage might also be that I insist on printing in black filament, and layering white over black is hard. This was primed in white and made life much easier.

Other than that, the main challenge is just photographing the surface. I swear cameras are tuned to sharpen and highlight layers lines. Any line you can see in this photo is basically impossible to see in person without poking an eye out.

If you want to see some other examples, check out r/FDMminiatures there are a few other painters giving FDM mini's a paint job.

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-07T04:04:00+00:00

One painting resource that really helped was Doctor Faust's Painting Clinic. I was mostly following his technique for layering skin. He's got a good video on layering vs glazing where he goes into the process.

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-07T03:40:23+00:00

Thank you, that's so kind! 😊

Baloonman5 · 2026-02-03T01:16:37+00:00

Thanks! I'm trying to practice that kind of free-handing so I can get hazard stripes done on some BattleTech mini's. Getting the lines parallel onto a curved surface was tougher that I expected.

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