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We did a survey recently and quite a few of you were unsure exactly what the (Multi-Shell) tag in our file names means!

We will do a video explainer with more information soon, but here is a quick look at some of this month's Multi-Shell elements.

In the main image above you can see the Blue, Yellow and Orange elements - these are the Multi-Shell components in these sculpts.

Every STL we release is made as a "shell" which a 3D printer can interpret as having volume, and slice into layers for printing.

3D printers work just fine with multiple overlapping shells - it is treated as a single solid object.

Where we think it's appropriate/possible to do so, we will often keep certain parts of our sculpts deliberately separate to give Patrons more options with how you use our files for digital kit bashing!

You can use Blender, Mesh Mixer or various other slicer and digital programs to import Multi-Shell files and then break them up and remove or swap components before exporting. 

You can see a quick example of this in the video in this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/sonic-paints-52244662 

Above you can see our Assassins for this month - they have built-in heads with hair flowing over the torsos, but we kept the heads separate - if you remove the head, you'll find a regiments neck ball socket underneath so you can then use any head you like. You could also remove the left-hand sword and the yellow broken rock slab.

You could also try overlapping these heads with some of our other torsos to make entirely new figures.

ABOVE: You can see the elements of the combat drone - we decided, in the end, to upload two versions of the weapons - with and without the armour/shield emitter.

The yellow exhaust jet stack is printed with the smoke, but it is a separate shell so you could remove the smoke, or have the jet at a different angle.

The bodies of the Drone have a triple lens eye which is a shell, you could remove this and kit bash in something else, or have the lenses pointing in a different direction.

BELOW: Executive Multi-Shell Models - you can remove the heads on any model. The security Guard features removable arms and weapon - so you can swap in a different weapon or use the arms and weapon on an entirely different body as a digital overlay

Even the sunglasses on the male executive are removable - the face underneath is fully detailed!

Finally a word about our Supports for potential new Patrons-

Unlike most (all?) other Patreon projects - our supports are always hand made and highly optimised. They are a single shell - so are very quick and easy to remove if you are kit bashing with Pre-Supported parts, and we also optimised our sculpts for minimal supports.

If you are used to seeing miniatures floating on a thick spaghetti mess of supports.. here is what you can expect from our models:

Our supports are extremely lightweight because we optimise our sculpts right from the initial design stage to print and clean up with very little effort and minimal wasted material or damage to the miniature. 

We hope you've found this interesting, thanks for reading and look out for some tutorial videos in the not too distant future!

Thanks


Team Anvil

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Comments

Anonymous

I first tried it out with the Mech you guys made. Honestly it was the easiest way to kitbash that I've ever seen and love seeing more of it.

Steve Howland

Thank you for the multishell!