WIP: Abandoned Amusement Park Part 2

Hi everyone, I’m still hard at work on bits and pieces of my abandoned amusement park set. You can learn more about the back story here.

My first post outlines my week one progress from finding the most perfect kits at a local flea market, to beginning to design my own little details for 3D printing.

Here’s what I’ve accomplished in week 2 (8/21 – 27):

8/21/2016

More designs! I now have park benches, dining chairs, small round dining tables, large planters/pots, a train platfrom, a fountain, an entryway arch, train track segments, barricades, a restroom facility, a food stand and various sidewalk segments. I designed these using TinkerCAD which is a simple web-based designer. It’s been working just fine for these tiny objects as I’m trying to keep them simple and thus relatively geometric. I’ll admit I don’t have the greatest handle of 3D design just yet, but I’m doing okay with the geometric based designs. What will really make this set stand out is lots of detail, so these pieces will add some realism. That is, as long as they print okay. If not, it’s back to the drawing board.

I also began 3D printing  and painting (no grime added yet) some of the designs. First up was the park benches, then fountain, pots (most of the top rungs broke off, but they’re still little pots, just less detailed ones), restroom facility (I will need to make signs to attach) and food stand (the printer had a bit of trouble with this one as there’s very little support between the bast and roof, and I knew it would, but the little strings it left, while I could clean them up, might be an okay effect for an abandoned look). The benches, and I think the chairs and tables may be a tiny bit too large. For the moment, I think they’ll still work fine, as there won’t be any figures to compare the size to, but as I get the whole park set up I’ll decide if these need to be adjusted.

If you want the dimensions or .stl files for any of these let me know. I’ll probably bulk load them onto my Thingaverse account in the next few days.

While waiting on items to print, I cut wire mesh (used for clay modeling) down to size for a chain link fence to surround the park and block off the maintenance area. I then added a dirt and rust wash.

8/22/16

I printed the restroom, food and entryway signs that I sized/made in photoshop the day before. Regular print on regular paper to be cut out and glued onto the plastic pieces.

The tables printed unsuccessfully so it’s back to the drawing board on that design.

I printed the food booth and chairs and gave the restroom, food booth and chairs their first coat of paint

8/23/16

I have to print the platform in 2 parts. The ramp is printed, but there’s still the main rectangle section. It’s been printed, but the printer got misaligned while printing, so I’ll need to try again.

I attached the signs on the food booth and restroom.

8/24/16

Added the dirt and rust coats to the benches, chairs, pots, misc. storage, bathroom and restaurant.

8/26 – 28 I was out of town, and making preparations to go out of town on the 25th, so no real progress on those days

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Things are moving, or seem to be, a little slower now. Each 3d printed aspect can take 2 to 6 hours to print, and the bigger the piece the longer the print takes. So some nights involve simply hitting print and biding time. Hopefully I’ll be able to find more ride kits soon at a decent price. There are many available, but for much higher than I’d like to pay. In the next week or two I plan to get a board for the base of the whole set and start tentatively setting things up.