As you might have seen in the past, I’m a huge fan of Combat Octopus‘s modular figures for Ultramodern Wargaming. Each month you get a set of four figures, each split into multiple pieces (usually head, torso, legs and arms) and with multiple weapon options per pose. For example, the image below shows one of the recent NAWE sets, with the figure in question having two torso options and five weapon options (AR15, Masada, SCAR-H and MK46, with a HK416 that was made available after release).

With each set usually sharing the same connection type at the waist, with a bit of work you can combine the different torsos with different legs giving you (potentially) 16 combinations to start from. Combine this with the gun options, previous kits often sharing compatibility with bodies and even (with some fudging) weapons, you can suddenly find yourself building a lot of interesting figures just from kitbashing. Not to mention the Molle implementation CO has worked on, giving you even more options to make your figures fit whatever you are assembling them for.

However, I can appreciate that modular figures can have a slightly higher barrier to entry compared to filling a build plate full of figures ready to go. If you use the files as is, once they are off the supports, there is some time spent sanding down any imperfections from the 3D printing process, making sure everything fits and then glueing it together while hoping an errant hand doesn’t cause all the glue joints to break and requiring a reprint. It’s a little different from the experience of many other STL sets online where (while losing out on the options of modularity) it is far quicker to get them from downloaded to basecoated to the table. There is also a little bit of choice paralysis – with so many possibilities, it can feel a little bit like hard work to decide exactly what you want. This is doubled when you pick up some of the units with the Molle pouches as now you have to work out a tactical loadout, get the parts printed, don’t lose them during the cleanup stage and then align them on the model. Which for me, is a problem.

I’ve said in the past I’m a cack-handed goblin child when it comes to fine detail tasks (there is a reason my painting is very much designed to get figures to the tabletop and not picking out fine detail) so the idea of manually placing pouches on a 28mm model physically seems a bit like a bad idea. To be fair, most of the pouches are reasonable enough for a careful hand and good set of hobby tweezers but my hands are far from careful.

Now, these points may, at first glance, appear pretty negative. In reality, I actually adore the unique modularity that Combat Octopus brings to the 3D printing space and without it many of the ideas for the ChargeReal would not have happened – being able to mix and match pieces together, to effectively prototype what an army could look like, is great fun. It’s also great to have such a big bits box for Ultramodern Wargaming, with heads, bodies, legs and weapons all coming together to play around with. So for this reason, I went looking for alternative solutions to how best to assemble these great modular sets.

To steal a famous Infomercial line, “There has got to be a better way!”. Luckily there is – putting the unsupported files into Blender and assembling the figures there. For a long time, I actively tried to avoid doing things digitally (for one specific reason you’ll see later) but in the end decided to bite the bullet and get to work.

Blender is an open-source free application used for animation and 3D modelling. It’s something I’ve encountered in the day job back when I first joined the industry and at that point was pretty ropey. Luckily one of the advantages of open-source software is that it usually trends to improving as time goes on (especially if its premium competitor has seat costs for single licence in the quadruple digits) so Blender 4 is a pretty handy piece of kit (after much kicking and screaming). It does have its little quirks and there are plenty of features you won’t need for digital kitbashing (never touch the animation tab), but luckily YouTube is packed full of tutorials to take you over the basics and a quick search will give you an answer to most questions.

Something else that helps is that when you import the Combat Octopus STLs into the program, they are already located at the correct positions over the origin point. This means to get the basic figure, you just have to import the STLs, toggle off the parts you don’t want and then export the selected files as a new STL (making sure to mark “only export selection” to prevent it just dumbing random items into mid-air). as you can see above, when you first load them all in there is a little bit of a collision taking place between the options (in this case both with the torso and the guns), but you can toggle visibility of pieces using the Blender interface.

Once you have things under control by hiding everything you don’t want, you can start building up the figure you do want. Seeing as I’m using one of the NAWE guys in this case, this includes those tiny pouches. The advantage of assembling these in Blender is:

1. Much smaller chance of losing a part under the desk when it pings off the supports.
2. Much easier to create multiple pouches and play around with the positioning.
3. The ability to sink the pouches into the underlying model to make sure they fit properly – hard to do when colliding two physical objects, very easy when merging two models together. This also works with pushing pouches closer together without having to break the file out.
4. The ability to rescale and merge pouches, either to improve their positioning or setup something new – for example, I’ve made a triple 7.62mm pouch simply by placing two of the twin pouches with one mag overlapping. Other uses include rescaling generic pouches to stand in for MG ammo pouches.

And speaking of pouches, it’s worth showing just how many Combat Octopus has made over the years. Between the PMC packs (Pack 1 and Pack 2), the Eastern Octopods, the CBRN troops, the NAWE Octopods (Pack 1 and Pack 2), the Marksmen releases (available on the Patreon in July and August 2024) and the KSK set (and it’s reinforcements), there are plenty of mag pouches, rucksacks, utility pouches, radios and even sidearms to play around with. The only comment is you’ll probably need to upscale the KSK items slightly to match the size of the rest of the figures (it worked out to roughly 1.05 scale). This massive selection means you have plenty of pieces to toy around with, letting you gear up your figures as much (or as little) as you want.

It’s not just pouches you can play with – you can also import whole other sets. By combining the kneeling legs from this month’s marksman release (which also appeared at the right height above the origin to match the torsos, thanks CO) with the LMG gunner from the second PMC set, you can setup a whole other style of figure. Not all these pieces together perfectly – there is a slight gap at the back of the model between the torso and some clipping at the front. Luckily with Blender, it’s relatively easy to add an extra piece of geometry to plug the gap while the clipping isn’t bad enough to cause a problem.

So far, so easily done in a physical format. However, without some very skilled scalpel surgery, it’s much harder to do things such as changing out optics on the weapons. As you can see above, I’ve replaced two optics on two different figures with the almighty Eotech (the one on the left removed the Torrey Pines thermal optic while the one on the right took over from a Spectre DR). This required using the Almight Cutting Cube – a cube made in Blender that can be reshaped and moved around to cut chunks of the model away with the Boolean operators that Blender includes. I ended up cutting out a large chunk around the optic (including the rail below) although with a little more work, a more surgical removal could limit how much of the model you need to rebuild. If you look carefully, you can see on the render some of the damaged rail sections that had to be rebuild. However, these is zoomed in massively – when working with STLs, it’s important to remember that no matter how much detail you can see in the editor, the end product is going to be roughly 32mm tall. You can get away with a cut and shut job on your personal edits as only you will know about it (unless you a blog and tell people about it).

An important not about this “feature” of 3D kitbashing – this modification of existing STLs is a little bit of a grey area. Many sellers will include in their terms of a service an agreement not to edit or modify the files provided. What isn’t grey is that under no circumstances should you be distributing any files you’ve edited to other people or attempting to utilise them in figures you then later sell. There are definitely a few people on Cults3d who are breaking this particularly rule.

Once you’re happy with setting the figures up, and loaded with pouches, custom model tweaks and making sure nothing is clipping through each other that shouldn’t, then you can export it (again making sure to only export the selected items) and you’ll be ready to actually get it printed.

Which leads me to my dirty secret – despite having two resin printers, I actually don’t support my own figures very often, relying heavily on pre-supported files. However, we all have to put our big boy pants on, suck it up and learn how to support your down pieces. Now, I make it seem like it’s hard but genuinely to begin with, most of the work can be done via your slicer’s auto-support function. This helps to give you some rough ideas of what needs supporting and over time you’ll start to identify problem points that even the auto-supports might miss. I’m still heavily in the auto-support phase but it’s all just a matter of practise. These guys took me a few attempts to print successfully with no print errors – auto-supports managed to avoid most of the complete failures but there were a few flat elbows and damaged pouches that forced a reprint for the sake of quality.

Assuming it all goes well, you’ll end up with a set of single piece personalised figures, all ready for you to pop the head into place (assuming you didn’t add them at the earlier stage and export the model as one piece). This ended up being a much quicker way for me to work and I’m overall much happier with the final result. Now I just need to paint them and get them on the table!

Overall, I think that moving forward I’ll be doing all my modelling of the Combat Octopus figures using the PC – it’s just so much simpler and far less likely to run into problems. Blender isn’t the only way to do this – other people have used Windows 3D Builder that comes pre-installed or the classic MeshMixer. What remains the same however are the great starting point – Combat Octopus is yet to release a set I haven’t looked at and found something useful from. It’s hard to make a bits box for Ultramodern gaming but thanks to 3D printing and the modular design, the sets act almost like a toybox, full of exciting parts to play with. Even if you don’t go as quite far as I have, the last few sets have setup the ability to make a set of figures ideal for many Western style forces specifically by combining the PMCs, NAWEs and Marksmen together.

Of course, once you start digitally kit-bashing, it won’t be long before you’re eyeing the sculpting tab. Maybe you just need to fill a gap, or add a moustache or upgrade a few guns with a new optic. I know I’m already looking at doing some tweaks while assembling my Shyluz forces for the ChargeReal – if it goes well, who knows what I might get up to moving forward.

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