I got the idea at some point that I wanted to make a scene from the invasion of denmark in 1940. The so called Unternehmen Weserübung. It was a very short affair. The danish troops was vastly outnumbered and outgunned, but managed to do considerable damage to the invading germans. In the context of the war it was a very small engagement, hardly even a battle , but by danish standards it was still something.
I want to make and print some of the vehicles and troops involved in order to make a small diorama, and since the Sd.Kfz 222 has always been one of my favourites I decided to start with that.
I started off with finding some blueprints on the web and used these as background in the modelling window in blender. Usually you can get by with only these since most vehicles are fairly straight forward, but the 222 has alot of weird angles and it caused me some trouble to get them to match up .
The texturing was easy on the other hand. This isnt strictly necessary when you are going to print something because the colours are going to be lost anyway but since I was planning on making a few rendered images of it anyway I went ahead. I chose the camouflage scheme from the northafrican campaign since i really like desert camouflage and since the scheme used on the ones in denmark was a bit boring, just a dark greygreen.
When modelling for prints you need to be caraful with some things. all surfaces must be closed and every part must have a volume and a thickness . Further , you have to take printdirection intoaccount so i ended up taking the entire thing apart and laying it out as on a modelling sprue.
This of cause means that it requires a bit of assembly but I have always enjoyed building scalemodels so this is not so different.
finally , just for my own pleasure, I made a turntable animation of it with a disassembly to show of the undercarriage.
There is still lots of work to do on this. I made a preliminary print and apart from being a bit small (i went for around 1/54) which would theoretically fit with warhammer miniatures but I think I should go for something closer to 1/34 to make sure I get all the details perfect.
I still havent planned out the diorama or made any of the other vehicles or troops. It takes a long time to do these things and unfortunately I have limited time for it. But I will get there and I will be sure to post about it here on Steemit.
Thats all for now. Thanks for taking time to read this.
