Journey into 3d Design for Battlefleet Gothic

It has been a while since I have updated my blog as I have been spending my time by delving into the world of 3d design and trying my hand at creating ships for Battlefleet Gothic.

I have opened up a cults3d shop where almost all of my designs are available for FREE https://cults3d.com/en/users/Fusion_Shipyards/3d-models

The program I have been using just runs from your web browser www.tinkercad.com and has been brilliant for an amateur like me to get to grips with 3d design as it feels a bit like digital lego. Get this cube, merge it with this sphere, cut a section off and so on. Very easy!

I first got started with downloading free STL files I found on cults3d and thingverse (mostly italianmoose designs), importing them into tinkercad and cutting them up and splicing together to essentially digitally kitbash!

After a while I got confident with making my own shapes and then started adding my own shapes to these digital designs. Using this method I was able to make some ships that I am really quite proud of.

Now I am at the stage where all of my designs are fully original but this comes with the drawback that you can't simply fit things together at random to see what looks good. It is a much slower process.

Below is my journey from digital kitbasher to designer, enjoy as you see my designs incorporate more and more original parts and I get more adventurous with being able to manipulate shapes. Next up will be learning how to use a proper cad program like Fusion 360.

First design - Trafalgar class cruiser

For my very first ship I really wanted a ship with multiple decks of guns, basically a Napolonic 1st rate ship in space. To do this I spliced together ships from Italianmoose and Kelier. The prow was from a light cruiser that I heavily deformed.

Here you can see the parts exploded out, which gives you an idea of how things can be put together.

Second design Nord class frigate

I tried my hand at an escort. I always wanted liked the idea of the Havoc escort so set my hand at making something similar, which I quite liked.

Exploded design

Barracuda class light cruiser

Now this one was a happy accident as I was showing my brother how you can use tinkercad on the phone but a stray fingerswipe caused the prow to massively stretch out. I thought to myself that this looked pretty neat and so I further developed it into a light cruiser. I was able to produce two variants with lances out the prow and then with the lances removed.. ta-da, it is now a torpedo variant!

It was at this stage where I really started into looking at making my own shapes, which at this stage were just used to combine and enhance the model.

Exploded design

First attempt at original design - Bomber Tab

I decided to try my hand at creating something using wholly original components and kicked off with this little bomber/fighter for use in BFG. I was fairly happy with this as a first foray using basic shapes.

Exploded design

Glaive class frigate

Looking at the ships I had designed so far, I thought that I should probably finish off the imperial roster. This ship is a firestorm proxy. These were very quick and easy to do as I mostly just needed to tweak the existing Nord escort i had done previously.

I couldn't quite decide on the best prow design so decided to produce a single and twin barreled version.

Exploded design

Kurkri class torpedo escort

This ship is a Cobra proxy. Again I couldn't quite decide on what prow variant I preferred but luckily it was easy enough to make all three as they are all variations on a theme.

Exploded design

SPACE DWARVES

Right, now we get onto the GOOD stuff. Original design cruisers!

I wanted to make something really unique but within my (and tinkercad's) cababilities. Squats seemed like the obvious choice as I didn't like the original GW models and being Space Dwarves their stuff could be quite angular.

I played around with various shapes but quickly settled on a triangular prow. The Space Dwarf faction only really has two cruisers.. One big and one small. I really struggled to get on with the larger cruiser despite there being some fun little things like the fighter launch bay. In the end I abandoned the larger cruiser hull and with solely with the light cruiser hull, which would then be developed into light/regular.

The original ideas for light and regular cruisers

Fun fighter launch bay.

Space Dwarf Cruiser

So working from this start I developed this cruiser, which went through a number of iterations as on my original release I forgot to add in some lance batteries. I try to make the ship as WYSIWYG and accurate to the rules as possible. So this cruiser has the 6+ armoured prow, prow cutting beam, s6 side weapon batteries, twin lance turrets, side firing torpedos and front shooting weapons batteries.

Close up shot of the lance batteries and side firing torpedoes

Bridge section with AA guns dotted around.

I saw a tip on the BFG Discord about only designing half a cruiser and then replicating it for the other half.. I couldn't believe I had not thought of this!

Unfortunately I can't provide an exploded version of this design due to the way tinkercad works when creating from scratch and not importing pre-completed bits. When I try to "ungroup" the shapes then well.. I get this horrible mes, but at least you can see somewhat how it is done within tinkercad. You make a basic shape and then use another basic shape to cut and rehsape.

Squat Light Cruiser

I was really happy with the regular cruiser and for the light cruiser I thought.. why not make it more "squat" ? That is to say that I squished it down a little and removed modules

For this ship I included a cheeky little torpedo launcher sticking out from the top as there wasn't space for aside mounded one like on the regular cruiser.

In the lore, this cruiser is meant to be a mining vessel, so with that in mind I added in a cheeky little mining robot that you can see on the underside.

Gun platforms

I had a commission from somebody to try and replicate the old forge world gun platforms as accurately as possible. This was really hard as the pictures available on the internet are tiny and grainy. I think I got there in the end as the originals were made up of basic shapes.. perfect!

Lance, gun and torpedo platforms

Exploded view

Squat Torpedo Escort.

Really proud of this one as I think it has come out quite nicely. The ship can be used as a warp cutter from the "book of the void 2" ship compendium.

The ship is equipped with a powerful prow boost mechanism that increases the speed by 5cm for every blast marker it travels over and consumes.

I have included three variants to this design.

1) Regular version

2) Red-Alert inspired version

3) ICBM missile tube version

Squat mining ship

This was a bit complex as I was stuck for a while with creative block. What I ended up was extremely chunky.. perhaps too much for an escort ship, but I like it. The ship is meant to suck up blast markers and then use them to power up the central cutting beam/lance.