My 3D printer is cranking out minis at a good clip lately, to the point where my painting and basing efforts will continue well into next year even if I were to go unplug the printer until I get caught up. Many of the STL files I download have plain, flat bases integrated as part of the model… but I don’t want plain , flat bases! I’ve learned to remove the simplistic built-in bases in Tinkercad, so I’m saving resin and time by only printing the minis themselves for the most part.
I have printed a few fancier bases, but I’d rather not do so – they use up a lot of resin and take time away from other prints, but mainly I want to custom-make my own. I picked up packs of flat wooden discs at 1 inch, 2 inch, 3 inch, and 4 inch sizes and have been using them frequently for outdoorsy bases – glue on a little dirt-and-grout mix, a little grass flock, maybe a rock or two, and it’s done. (Altogether these ended up costing a little over $40, which sounds expensive until you realize it amounts to 360 bases, and it’s easy to pay $6-8 for 20-40 of the 1″ cheap plastic ones.)
But not every mini goes well with dirt and grass. Sometimes I want cobblestones, or rough rocky textures, or bricks. I also don’t have the time to dedicate to making highly detailed, fully custom bases for every orc and goblin I print. I’ve known for a while about the texture rollers made by GreenStuffWorld and their potential use in mini basing, and while I didn’t relish the idea of spending $15 each on rollers, I decided to research the process, and if it seemed workable and inexpensive after the initial investment I could pick out one roller and gradually add others.
On the roller front, another solution presented itself. It turns out there are a lot of free STLs for texture pieces out there, notably this collection on Thingiverse. It’s a work-in-progress project and it doesn’t have near the variety of options as the SGW products offer, but still, my printer spent a day and a half or so generating over a dozen rollers in various textures instead of cranking out minis.
GreenStuffWorld recommends, of course, using their Green Stuff products with their rollers when making bases. Green Stuff is good stuff, but it’s expensive in the quantities that would be required to make a lot of bases. However, GSW has also made a video about making less expensive bases by mixing Milliput with children’s plasticine clay.
This sounded even better, and I was going to try it. But the idea of using cheap 2-part epoxy plumber’s putty in some kind of terrain crafting has been rolling around in the back of my head for a while, and this seemed like a good time to experiment.
Mixing and Rolling
The epoxy I ended up using was $3.85 for 2 ounces at Home Despot, which made it slightly cheaper by weight than the standard variety 1.6 oz Milliput at $5-6 – and easily obtained locally without having to go through the drudgery of clicking “1-Click Purchase” and waiting for the Prime next-day delivery. A 2-pound block of white plasticine (Sargent Art’s “Plastilina” brand) was $6 or so from the craft aisle at Walmart.
I had an open box of the fine white Milliput around and, on comparing its actual size vs the material I’d purchased, found that the plumbing putty was dense enough that, by volume, 2 ounces is less than 1.6 ounces in this case. I don’t know for sure how the cheaper standard Miliput holds up in this regard, but it’s quite possible that in terms of price by volume rather than weight it would hold its own against the hardware-store stuff.
The plumbing putty is rather fast drying once it’s mixed – there’s a realistic 3 to 5 minute window for sculpting. The GSW video explained that adding plasticine to Milliput would extend the drying time, keeping it workable a bit longer. I had no idea if it would work the same with the plumbers’ putty. Would it make the bases less durable? Would it maybe even stop them from hardening at all, since plasticine by itself is a non-hardening substance?
To find out, I grabbed a cobblestone texture roller and three 1″ wood discs. I mixed three different combinations of materials and covered each disc with one of them. After rolling the texture onto each one, I began the process of poking and prodding at them every few minutes to see how they were drying.
(IMPORTANT: Wet your roller with wet soapy water or some other lubricant before rolling it across the putty! I still need to chisel some out of one of my rollers because I forgot that step…)
From left to right in the image above, where lighter colors indicate more plasticine:
- Pure plumber’s epoxy. As expected this dried the fastest – after about 5 minutes I could still feel a slight amount of give if I pressed my finger into it really hard. At this point I trimmed the excess from around the edges with a razor knife before it got any more solid. The end result is fairly heavy for its size, comparable, for instance, to having a 1″ washer glued underneath. Very hard when fully dried.
- 2:1 Epoxy to plasticine. Took until the 8-10 minute mark until it reached the point of being mostly solid and ready for the excess to be trimmed. It seemed more or less the same weight and hardness as the 100% solution above.
- 1:1 ratio – equal amounts of putty and plasticine. This extended the drying time even more; I sliced off the excess at around 12 minutes and probably could have waited a little longer. As with the previous solution, the cured mixture didn’t seem get get noticeably lighter or softer than the pure epoxy.
Unfortunately life interrupted and I didn’t get the chance to continue coming back and checking them to see if they were fully dry to the point where I was comfortable gluing stuff onto them, so I don’t have time scales for a full cure. I came back to them after a few hours and they were all solid.
The lesson here is that all those combinations work well, with the 1:1 being the best in terms of both cost and workable time. So I used that to make a few more bases, wondering all the while if adding even more plasticine would be viable…
Will it glue?
At least as far as the superglue and E6000 I tried… yes.
Will it paint?
The cheap spray primer I use seems to have worked just fine.
I later made a few big 3″ bases with it for some giants I’m hoping to paint soon. I decided to just use cheap craft paints on the bases themselves, which seemed to work perfectly well. The only slight caveat was that when I applied Army Painter Dark Tone as a wash, it seemed prone to pooling on the upper surfaces and was really hard to get down into the grooves for some reason. Since there were already layers of primer and paint on the surface, I suspect this had more to do with the craft paint than the basing material mix itself. I decided to also try the home-made BMC-style black wash I use for terrain, and that produced a much better result.
Will it pin?
Apparently so.
Will it take a bullet for you, its creator?
Nope.
Well, I mean, I suppose you could construct some scenario where you’ve got a pocket full of plumber’s-putty bases and the bullet hits at enough of an angle to be deflected.
But in general, no.
Why would you even ask a crazy question like that? How bizarre and frightening is your life that you would need to concern yourself about the anti-ballistic properties of a pocket full of mini bases?
That’s just weird.