Tag: Catan (Page 2 of 2)

‘Tis the Season!

November 2, 2020 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

An Exciting Week!

Welcome back! We had an exciting week at 3D Orcs, with the release of a brand new set of Catan game pieces, and a fun Halloween activity. I’m going to keep you in suspense just a little longer about the new Catan set (Hint: today’s blog title is a clue), and tell you about our Halloween fun first.

GISH Halloween Hunt

I hope you had a fun Halloween! At 3D Orcs we suspended operations for the weekend to take part in GISH – the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt. If you’ve never heard of it, I encourage you to check it out. Although it’s called a scavenger hunt, it’s more about creating fun things than finding them. There were dozens of items on the list, but we tackled just a few of them while our team mates worked on others. Here are some of our favorites…

We made this charcuterie Ouija board (essentially a themed meat tray) featuring pepperoni and ham.

And this evidence that the “unbread has risen” for the zombe apocalypse.

We also discovered the secret desires of a storm trooper.

And made ourselves into custom Tarot cards.

One of our most challenging tasks was creating this socially distanced trick-or-treat “aid”. It needed to be a Rube Goldberg device that could deliver candy from 10 feet away. The difficulty arose from needing to set up those dang dominoes over 30 times before we got a video where everything worked correctly!

We also enjoyed the new definition of “monster mash” – a classic movie monster made out of mashed potatoes. We were quite happy with our Frankenspud!

Did you do something fun for Halloween? Was your spookiness challenged because of COVID-19? Let us know in the comments below!

It’s Christmas in Catan!

Here’s our new set of Christmas-themed game pieces for Settlers of Catan!

Each set comes with 4 Christmas tree cities, 5 Christmas gift settlements, and 15 sled roads.

And anyone who buys four of these sets gets this FREE snowman robber as a special bonus!

The Catan board looks great decked out for Christmas!

Missed Our Halloween Sets?

Halloween may be over, but you can still get our Halloween-themed game pieces for either Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride.

More Christmas Fun Coming!

Those Christmas Catan pieces are great, but we’re working on more fun Christmas-themed game pieces. Come back next Monday to find out more!

Open for Business!

October 26, 2020 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

We Did It!

Our Etsy shop is now up and running! It was another learning curve, but Etsy does a good job of walking you through the set up process. We launched with four different sets of game pieces available in ten colors.

Our Halloween Sets

I love the design we created for our Halloween-themed Settlers of Catan game pieces! The tombstone cities turned out especially well, and the pumpkin settlements and coffin roads are also fantastic!

We also have some great Halloween-themed Ticket to Ride game pieces, with coffin trains and pumpkin scoring markers.

These pieces all look amazing on the game boards, and are very fun to play with!

We Have Standard Sets Too

While the Halloween sets are our favorites, we also have standard sets for both Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride, for players who may need replacements for lost pieces, or just want to play with fun new colors.

A Peek Behind the Scenes

You may be interested in how we create designs like these. The simple pieces like the standard Catan pieces and Ticket to Ride scoring marker were pretty easy to create in Blender. The coffins and train took a little more work, but were still possible with the basic Blender tools. The pumpkins needed some special techniques, which we learned from this video by YouTuber TutsByKai and then adapted for the look we wanted.

For the tombstone Catan city, we had a vision, but needed some help. We found what we needed on CGTrader, a website full of excellent 3D models. The license terms prevent us from simply downloading models and then printing and selling them as-is, but we’re allowed to use them commercially if we modify them significantly and/or incorporate them into a larger work, and give attribution to the source designer(s). So we built the actual tombstone ourselves, and then added the skull, rat, and stones from models acquired from CGTrader.

New Sets Coming!

With Halloween nearly upon us, we’re already working on designs for our next themed sets, and some of them are almost ready to go! We expect to announce a new set in next week’s blog, but if you’re eager to see it as soon as it’s ready, follow us on Twitter, where we post everything the moment it’s available.

See you next week!

3D Roller Coaster

October 12, 2020 / admin3dorcs / 0 Comments

Welcome

Welcome back to our blog! This week we’ll talk about our 3D roller coaster. No, not a cool toy we printed, but rather the emotional ups and downs of our first week getting to know our new 3D printer.

It began last week with the printer’s arrival and set up. But the real fun started when we turned it on and tried to use it.

Preliminaries

Before we could print anything, we needed to have something to print. Like with a traditional printer where you need to have a document first. So, what to print?

I mentioned last week that our initial focus will be board game accessories. We wanted something simple to start with, so we decided on a road piece from Settlers of Catan. In case you’re not familiar with the game, this is what the piece looks like – just a thin rectangle about an inch long.

The first task was to create a 3D model of it. We had looked at a couple tools for that, and settled on Blender. It’s an incredible tool, especially considering it’s free. Blender can do amazing things far beyond the requirements of 3D printing (animation, rendering with textures, and special effects like smoke, just to name a few). The downside of such a complex tool is that sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to do something relatively straightforward.

Although we’re still early in that learning curve, we managed to come up with our first 3D model.

It turns out you can’t just send a 3D model to the printer. First you need to convert it to a set of instructions the printer can understand. This is called “slicing” (because it slices your model into distinct printable layers), and produces a g-code file. There are several slicers out there, but our printer manufacturer recommended Cura so that’s what we went with.

The final thing we needed to do before printing was prepping the printer. We had set it up, but it still needed the glass print bed to be properly cleaned and leveled. The latter was another challenge, but finally we were ready.

The First Attempts

So with our model created, our g-code file prepared, and the printer ready to go, we initiated our first print!

And this was the result.

Our roller coaster had taken a major drop.

But we kept trying, and learning, and tweaking things here and there.

Another early attempt was at least starting to show some promise.

Picking Up Speed

Eventually we did it! We had created a small plastic stick! Woo hoo!!!

Once we had the hang of it, we were off and running. Soon we had all of the basic Catan pieces.

It was time for something more challenging. We decided on a train piece for Ticket to Ride. There were some minor missteps along the way, and we’re still making small adjustments, but it’s coming along nicely.

The Big Drop

Things were going well, but there were some seemingly minor issues with the first layer of each print. We determined that the problem was with the leveling process we were using, and so we found and followed this helpful leveling video by YouTuber Tesla Filament.

But in doing so we discovered a problem with the way the print bed was physically attached to the printer. I made the required adjustments, re-leveled the bed, and suddenly the filament would no longer adhere to the bed at all.

Perseverance

More than a day passed, full of research, tweaking, and failed print attempts. It was also full of doubts and questioning whether this whole endeavour was actually viable.

In the end though, we persevered. A trip to Home Depot for some washers to use as spacers and an increasing understanding of the printer’s leveling interface were enough to get the prints to start working again.

With a growing string of successful prints we are once again confident that we can make this work!

Our experience with 3D printing brings to mind how the early days of the automobile must have been, once they were readily available but you still needed to be comfortable with a wrench if you wanted them to work.

Next Steps

Now that we’re up and running again, we’re back on track to opening the Etsy shop. With a little luck, that will be the topic of next Monday’s blog. Plus, we’re working on an exciting new seasonally relevant product design!