Kowloon walled City Miniature Part 2: Test prints & greeble detailing

In the previous post we went over the History of Kowloon and the early stage plans made to recreate this city, other things included how blockouts were made & the process of detailing building windows in both software and print.

This post  will to go into further detail about the use of greeble kits and how building test prints were planned out , other details will include how progress of each building was tracked and lastly how I planned out a few test paints.

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stuff to also check out:
Walled City Timelapse: Base modeling

Building facade detailing
With the information I had about the building dimensions I was ready to add detail to the buildings, since there was a lot of models to go through i've decided to use the same kitbash method used for the booleaned windows, there were two sets of greebles I made where in the first set I would add detail to the building facades which helped with adding variety to each building, then the second set was used to add rooftop details to each model.

How did I keep track of each building?
Since there was a ton of buildings to detail out I decided to go through each building in passes, the first pass would be tor add building facade detail and make sure the models jutting out of the buildings would not intersect with the neighboring buildings, once everything looked good I would move on to the next and so on.

Red: Not started
Orange: Half way done with rooftop & Facade greebles
Blue: completed with boolean details included

The second pass is adding rooftop detail to each building, using the models from the rooftop kit I was able to place various types of detail within each model, this pass would also included editing building geometry to add some custom stairway & tunnel detail, I did this in some spots to make some buildings look visually distinct.

The last pass consisted of the Boolean detail I mentioned in the first blog post, with this process I used a kit of existing Boolean pieces to add the final bits of window detail. The way I would make sure detail show in prints was to run it through a slicer program and look for the details that didn't appear and from there make some adjustments.

With these passes sharing the same .blend file I decided to color code these models so there wasn't any mix up, doing so gave me a visual idea on what buildings still needed work or which ones were completed, this was extremely helpful in deciding which buildings I should work on next and sped up the workflow for these buildings.

Example use of material setup:

Test painting Buildings:
When I approached test painting these model I had no idea what I was doing & pretty much experimented with paints/washes, seeing the Kowloon park version of the Diorama gave me a good foundation for the look I wanted to achieve, the model itself had an old aged metal look to it with some of the dust highlighting parts of the rooftop detail.

Then made a short list things I wanted to achieve with painting:
-highlight the details of the print
-find a way to highlight the edges and creases of rooftops
-keep track of a paint workflow that can be created with each print

This helped with setting a goal in mind when experimenting with each model, at the end I found a few different primers & paint washes to work with and got started on some buildings

I used 2 coats of base white primer and let them dry 24 hours in between coats. afterwards I would use a few coats of paint washes to bring out the general detail of windows & ledges, then use a watered down brown paint to highlight the bottom corners, afterward use another water downed paint of black to darken spots I felt were not showing through.

Hopefully this breakdown gives a better insight on where the project is at, for now this is 2 part of a 3 part breakdown & part 3 should come out when this model is finished, printing out the finished models have been going smooth so far with a speed of 1-2 prints per day with a total of 71 models to fully print out. thanks for checking out this post & hope to share more information once things are wrapped up!

Check out pt 1: Kowloon walled City Miniature Part 1: Project info & Early blockouts

Want to learn more about this city?
https://tomorrow.city/a/kowloon-walled-city-and-population-density
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcSBOUpgngM