TriHex - Tabletop Terrain Tiles

Intro

My pathfinder game always used 2d battlemaps for their combat, but being two-dimensional it never really got the lay of the land across. So for a long time I wanted to visualize the enviroment in a more detailed way. With regular dungeon tiles there was too much printing and painting involved while also not beeing as versatile.

So after a couple prototypes I came up with this tri-hexagonal tile design. I quite like it and I think some of you might too.

I was inspired for this design by the people of Terragon Terrain. They created an awesome kickstarter, but have as of now not started sale for the general market. This is why I decided to make a DIY-variant.

Check them out at https://terragons.com/

Features:

- free spinning ball magnets for easy allignment - dual sides for double the terrain type with half the magnets - low as possible filament cost - convinient body-lid structure for easy printing and possible disassembly I diced to group the hexes in tiles of three to conserve on magnets while also making keeping most of the usability. 33% less magnets makes these alot cheaper than printing single hexes. If you are looking to drive the cost down further you could decide to replace some of the magnets with ballbearings. Keep in mind that this probably will cost you the ability to tile them any direction you want. I'll do some tests in the future but I got no steel bearings right now.

Why hexes?

Mostly because i like hexagonal shapes

As with all things, there are advantages and disadvatages. They do tile nicely and create strong magnetic bonds, the shapes are alot more natural aswell. And while many popular TTRPG systems make use of an inch wide grid, most systems can be converted to a hexagonal system without much effort. Pathfinder for example works great with hexes since movement and aoe-spells work much simpler. Interiors are a bit funky tho (I suggest your campaign-setting never invented 90° angles :D).

In the end it, I guess it comes to personal preferance.

Bill of Material

Each TriHex-tile is made of a body, a lid and 12 magnetic balls.

I personally ordered 3mm magnetic balls, because they were significantly cheaper where I live. If I would do it again I'd go for 5mm magnets. They feel much nicer when placing together and also stack better vertically.

For a single tile (with my printer settings) you'll need:

- 12 magnets - 5,7g of filament for the body - 3,6g of filament for the top For 75 tiles you'll need:

- 900 magnets - ~ 450g filament for the body parts - ~ 270g filament for the top parts - roughly 45h worth of printing time Printing

I usually put ten of them on my buildplate and let the printer rip it. Set layer heigt to 0,2mm. Wall thicknesses are optimized to only take two 0,45mm perimeters. I would recommend to disable the gap filling feature. You can also disable the infill, since there barely is anything and the parts bridge just fine.

- 0,2mm layer height - 0,45mm extrusion width - no gap filling - no infill The gap between the press fit connection of the body and the lid is 0,06mm. For my printer and material this works really nice. The parts click together and wont come loose.

If your machine cant keep the tolerances, feel free to comment and I'll upload a couple different gap sizes.

I think this is all I have for now.

If you decide to try this, please post a make. I would love to see your creations and the stories you decide to use these tiles for. If you have constructive feedback, please let me know how to improve these.