As the channel's name has probably given it away, Jon from Miniature Hobbyist is your typical YouTuber you'll go to for 3D print miniature making and painting stuff. With more than five hundred videos of his creations, he's constantly experimenting with new products, new painting techniques, and new ideas.
In this article, Jon is trying out something new for the first time, and we are here to witness it.
This is the part where Jon is turning his miniature BIG!
Sonic Mega 8K — It's Humongous!
When offered the Sonic Mega 8K to review and play around with, Jon could not be more excited and immediately agreed to it. However, he realized soon after that he should've done some research on how big this printer really was before giving it a go.
As a comparison, he took a couple build plates from other printers and put them side by side next to the Sonic Mega 8K's build plate. Right away, you'll notice just how big the build plate on the Sonic Mega 8K is. With a size more than three times bigger than his typical 3D printer, Jon mentioned that you can definitely print anything with this gigantic beast. From a mask, body armor, shoulder pad, or just any cosplay piece, this large size 3D printer is definitely the one to go with.
Jon mentioned that measuring the space in your place before committing to such a printer is super important. As a guy who is printing and painting only from a desk in his living room, without any proper studio, warehouses, or even a garage, this large size 3D printer easily took up lots of his space, especially with the double door design that he's flabbergasted with. He thinks it's an absolutely gorgeous-looking beast that'll require quite a lot of room to work with.
3D Print Miniature Got Big
To test out this marvelously large 3D printer, Jon decided to one-up his own miniature game by creating his first ever big 3D print miniature. Jon chose a space marines warhammer 40k inspired-Fat Fuck Collectibles model by SlipGateCentral and scale it up. Thanks to the size of the Sonic Mega 8K, he could easily fit all the parts of his space marines inspired model into a single build plate. A project that would typically take three to four build plates on other small 3D printers can now be done in just a single Sonic Mega 8K build plate.
Once he got into the 3D printing part, he realized that just like the big build plate, the Sonic Mega 8K is also equipped with a humongous resin vat. It took him one and a half bottles of Aqua-Gray 8K Resin just to fill out the max line on this large size printer. Next, with a USB stick plugged in, he was ready to print.
Due to the size of the model and how the Sonic Mega 8K was optimized for a safe and stable print, it ended up taking John 14 hours of printing time—which he found pretty shocking but is understandable considering the massive size and its 8K print quality.
To wash the models, Jon used a small container as his usual setup since there was not much room for him to work within his small flat.
Upon removing the support, Jon realized that simply scaling up the model had also increased the size of its supports pretty significantly, making it rather hard to remove and clean up. Some warm water definitely helped him remove the supports, but he was still left with a few broken parts and terrible support marks. But as he was printing with a big printer, it's expected to have thicker supports supporting the models to ensure a successful print.
To assemble the models, Jon used an old good super glue and made sure everything was snugged in before he moved to painting.
Dry Brush Painting Technique
As this Space Marines Warhammer 40K-inspired model turns out pretty big, Jon decided that giving it a simple metallic chrome dry brush would be the way to go.
First, he attached his model to a base, then covered the entire model with a black primer to smooth out everything and cover any broken support marks.
Jon used his textured dry brush palette to remove any extra paint from his brush and started brushing the model gently to give it a cool bronze highlight. One downside of dry brushing is that you'll feel like you wasted so many paints trying to get it off the brush before you get into painting the models, but it's definitely the part where you need to trust the process.
As you can see, the final result of the model is really cool. At such size, it could easily be your desktop decoration instead of your typical tabletop gaming character. In addition, the bronze dry brush on the black primer added an extra detail to the model, making it look expensive and super cool.
If you're interested in turning your favorite 3D print miniature character into a large desktop decoration, definitely consider the Sonic Mega 8K so you can print them all in one plate and effectively save time.
What do you think about Jon's big Warhammer 40K-inspired space marine model by Fat Fucks? Let us know your thoughts in the comment below, and watch the video below to see the Sonic Mega 8K in action!
