I had that bright idea one gloomy morning : I'll do something very original.
and I picked a Settlers of Catan in 3D. Put your sunglasses on; it IS a bright idea :



ah well. The tiles :
1- make a nice hex base in blender3D and pay lots of money to rapid prototype it
2- make a silicon mold of the hex base, cast lots of it in PU resin
3- use the hex casts as bases for the sculpts in industrial clay
4- make silicon molds of the sculpts
5- make casts
6- paint

easy, but not as much as thought.

the minis :
use stinking beige stuff (wood repair) on soldered metal frame, and sculpt.
mold, cast (lots of discard here) paint.

easy, but not too much

Good job!

-DK

I like it. Want to make me one?

Had a bit of sunlight today, took some close-ups :







edit : trying to add the pics to the Game Gallery

This looks fantastic!
Even better then original!
Great job, you are really great!

Congratulations! Since now there are both miniatures and dice, you have made Settlers of Catan an Ameritrash game

You don't plan to change the default wooden pieces with miniatures though, do you?

Ameritrash/Euro = unwanted taxonomy



I most certainly am doing exactly just this

So I have some time on my hands :
This work has been going on for almost a year now, I had to put it away for some time while I moved back to France. The purpose was to make it a nicer version of the official 10th year edition, and a more complete. I plan to make both Seafarers and Cities & Knights, along with the great river, the great caravan, the fishermen and the volcano. plus the 5-6 expansions of course, both the tiles and the miniatures.
For now, I have just enough tiles for a complete base game. I'll start to explain waht in fact came later, the tiles.
My first problem was the hexagons. I wanted my hexagons to line up nicely when finished, and I wanted slots for the towns and roads I also needed some way to separate the tiles by the expansions they belong to. The costly solution I came up with was to use rapid prototyping. It's a technology that allows for producing prototypes form 3D files. So I grabbed a free copy of Blender and made this:



One can notice the slots in the raised part in the center of the tile, to hold the roads and settlements/cities/metropolis/knights

The back of the tile:



the underside I imaged small slots around the hex to stick rubber pads. I hate when the board is knocked and I thought it was a nice idea for a premium edition. the hex slot in the center was made to insert those :



those are the name hexes. more on those later.

So I took my phone and tried to locate the cheapest rapid prototyper of Japan where I lived at the time. the cheapest was $100. Sent the file and 3 days later :

Then I made a two parts silicon mold the regular way. put your model on clay, build walls of lego, pour silicone, wait 12h at least. remove the clay, apply wax, pour silicone again, wait again.
when you removed the lego, and the model, you get that :

I then started casting hexes, first one was this :

when I had enough of those, I started modelling on top. I like industrial clay for this kind of job, hard enough to hold detail and never hardens completely so you can always come back and perfect the model. you can pour hot water to soften details, or you can put it in the fridge and carve it when frozen for super sharp edges.

this is the forest.
what I did first was to make stamps out of old bits of plastic. I did grass, trees, stones, trunks, etc. It helps a lot to speed up things.
The forest I made in three parts: applied clay for the grass, and stamp the pattern on it (I made a cylinder stamp for the grass) make a thick plate of clay, stick it on the grass, and apply the trunks stamps -also a cylinder- then make balls of clay, stuck them on the trunks plate and stamp.

next I'll try to find pics to show the molding process

Looks sweet, Karim. But does the robber have trouble standing up on some of those hexes?

Thanks. hehe you do spot potential glitches don't you? In fact, I managed to sculpt a sweet spot on each tile to put the chits and the robber. The big issue would be to play with C&K and have both the robber and the merchant on one tile... a mess.

So, I've got time to sit down, and I wafted through my pics of the WIP of my 3D catan, and only found enough pics for this guy :



My purpose with my 3d catan was to make a plethoric one : base game, cities and knights, seafarers and their 5-6p expansions, plus the great river, the caravan, the vulcano and the fishermen. The above guy is the strong knight for C&K.

It is a tricky business to mold, because of the sword. I didn't want to have two mold for one guy, so I tried this:



you'll notice the depression behind his head. this is the tricky part.



The first part of the silicon mold has cured.



the two-parts mold



he's not alone (but not enough yet.)

I must admit that I've got quite a bit of losses with this method, and I would have loved to buy a vacuum chamber.

I keep it short on purpose, I don't know how many people are interested in the how-to anyway.