Triarch Praetorian Snake Tails in 3D

Pretty much since I started collecting Necrons, I had the idea of making Triarch Praetorians into snake men instead of people with glowy butt-balls.

Glowy Butt Balls? Really GW?

As usual, people had this idea before I did. There's another person who did this, and please take a look. It's easily one of the best Necron armies ever made.

That is definitely the direction I wanted to go in. I looked into different ways to make this work, including buying PVC pipes of different diameters to bead around a brass rod, using tape to build up a taper, nothing came close to the texture I wanted. I wanted to create snake tails that resemble the texture and feel of Wraith tails:

So I started learning how to model things in Blender, to eventually have them 3D printed!

Here's what I made. This is a fully straight tail, about 6cm long with a ~1cm blade at the tip, tapering from 5mm down to 2mm.

And here is the armature I can use to bend the model above. Blender even has an engine that will make the entire tail bend naturally based on these 4 control points you see on the side.

And here is one of the tails, put on a 32mm base for reference. I was afraid that the tails are going to be too long, but they ended up being a bit too short. Oh well, not a big deal I think.

And finally, here's all 10! I sent the order to Shapeways already. These tails will run me about $30 with shipping, printed in some high def material. Hopefully they turn out ok. It will be a few weeks before they're done and delivered.

EDIT: They are done! Here's how they turned out.