ShipShaper: Falconeer Chronicles includes direct mesh export tools designed to turn your custom naval designs into physical models. Created by solo developer Tomas Sala, this sandbox builder lets players bypass traditional CAD software to sculpt hulls, place superstructures, and export geometry straight to common slicing formats.
Exporting a vessel from ShipShaper to a physical build plate requires understanding which file formats carry vertex colors, how slicers handle game geometry, and which thin structural elements require manual adjustment before printing.
Supported Export Formats in ShipShaper
ShipShaper provides three core 3D export options directly from the in-game export menu: STL, 3MF, and FBX. Each format serves distinct manufacturing or development workflows.
| File Format | Primary Use Case | Supports Color Data | Key Technical Considerations |
|---|---|---|---|
| STL | Standard mono-material 3D printing | No | Default format across almost all FDM and resin slicers. Generates raw surface geometry. |
| 3MF | Multicolor 3D printers | Yes (Vertex Colors) | Preserves sharp color boundaries defined in-game; ideal for multi-filament systems. |
| FBX | Game engines and 3D modeling tools | Yes (Vertex Colors + Emissive) | Game-ready format intended for Unity, Unreal Engine, or Blender integration. |
Because ShipShaper uses vertex coloring across its mesh generation rather than unwrapped UV texture maps, 3MF files allow multicolor printers to read distinct surface boundaries directly. For external 3D software like Unity, developers can read native vessel palettes by connecting a vertex color node into the diffuse channel of their shader.
Preparing Ships for Physical Slicing
While ShipShaper automatically calculates solid hull forms and adds volume to several surface components, game meshes frequently contain delicate decorative parts that present challenges for standard 3D printers.
Developer Tomas Sala and community testers have confirmed several preparation rules that should be addressed inside your slicing software:
- Inspect and Strip Sails: Paper-thin cloth geometry like sails cannot be printed reliably on standard hobbyist printers. Plan to remove sails in your slicer or assemble custom rigid rigging if needed.
- Examine Thin Rigging and Stays: Fine ropes can collapse during filament extrusion or snap during support removal. While updates added volumetric geometry to ropes and ladders, delicate rigging wires often need to be deleted or thickened.
- Verify Hollow Weapon Barrels: Small-scale miniature prints (such as 5 cm to 10 cm tabletop gaming pieces) feature guns with hollow barrel tips that can cause slicing errors or structural failure at micro scales.
- Inspect Floating Geometry: While major patches resolved floating turrets and anchored props lower onto the hull, always scrub through your slicer's layer preview to confirm that floating bridges, observation platforms, or sponsons have continuous physical connections down to the build plate.
- Adjust Slicer Tolerance for Poly Counts: Exported models contain individual polygon components that can cause lag or performance drops when loaded into slicer software.
FDM vs. Resin Printing Considerations
The choice between FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) filament printing and resin (SLA) printing significantly affects the final quality of a ShipShaper vessel.
Filament (FDM) Printing
Players testing FDM printers with standard 0.4 mm nozzles and 0.08 mm layer heights have reported that fine decorative details—such as window recesses, floodlights, signal lamps, and steering wheels detached from solid railings—often fail to resolve cleanly. Furthermore, large hulls may exceed the physical dimensions of standard build volumes, requiring you to split the hull into multiple sections prior to printing.
Resin (SLA) Printing
High-resolution resin printing handles ShipShaper's intricate deck details, ladders, and cowls far more effectively. Official showcases produced in collaboration with external resin studios (such as gggames.nl) demonstrated that cleaned resin models capture crisp superstructure profiles. Even official weekly community competitions originally offering physical prints discovered that community creations grew so detailed that home print setups struggled with structural integrity, leading the organizers to replace physical model prizes with printed postcards and physical loot.
Commercial Licensing and Usage Rights
ShipShaper includes a free commercial license covering designs generated within the software. According to the developer, any model you build and export belongs entirely to you. You are legally permitted to:
- Print and sell physical tabletop miniatures, display pieces, or board game ships.
- Import FBX models directly into independent commercial game projects made in Unity or Unreal Engine.
- Export vessels directly into the companion game Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles or upcoming sailing titles in the Falconeer universe.
- Share and download community vessels via the Steam Workshop.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do I find the export option in ShipShaper?
The export tool is accessible from the main ship creation workshop menu. Selecting the export button brings up file format selections for STL, 3MF, and FBX.
Does ShipShaper support scale adjustments inside the game?
ShipShaper exports raw mesh data without rigid real-world scale definitions. Exact physical dimensions (such as target millimeter scaling for tabletop gaming) must be set within your third-party slicer software before generating print toolpaths.
Why do my exported ships lack UV texture maps in Blender?
ShipShaper relies on procedurally generated vertex colors rather than traditional 2D UV texture layouts. When importing FBX files into external software like Blender or Unity, you must configure materials to read the vertex color channel directly.
