Why isn't 3d printing that big in the miniatures community...

>500 dollars
>quality printer
No.

Name one use that a 3D printer is necessary for that would be fulfilled daily, taking in mind time of printing, the cost of materials, the time to obtain the 3D model, and the time compared to just going to the store and buying it (plastic spoons for example).

I'm sick and fucking tired of people hyping the shit out of 3D printing because I've been listening to it for almost a fucking decade. It's like those transhumanists who are basically religious and waiting for the not!rapture singularity. "When is it going to happen guys?" "Soon™".

It's no different than the Nuclear Fusion hype train, or the 3D movie hype train. "It's going to change the world man, just give it ten more years".

GW are fine, 3d printing is getting cheaper but will always be prohibitively expensive compared to casting for anything otyer than one of protypes or masters. Which is already done in the industry.

Plus thats completely ignoring the big hurdle in having too digitaly sculpt any mini you want too print. Its great for custom minis. Not good if you just want some cheap minis.

3d printers are no more of a threat too miniature companies than inkjet printers were too books.

Dildos

>Implying most people use their scanners/printers on a daily basis
>Implying I'm not going to use it to build replacement pieces to things that I occasionally break
>Implying a cottage industry won't crop up where people distribute the patterns for clever designs/things that people will buy for the low low price of $1.99
>Implying I'm not just going to use it to build the Lego pieces I need

3D printing has so many wide ranging uses, hell we can print food now. Imagine being able to just program in a week's worth of good food, have it printed for the instant you get home from work and not have to bother cooking anything? That's not too far off. You could print replacement buttons for shirts, figurines, hell you could probably print replacement parts for various tech things. It's not something you'll use every day but the sheer convenience of it is astronomical. Online retailers like Amazon will likely be getting on that before long too and selling schematics for various daily use items. Novelty factor is selling right now but its uses are far ranging. Imagine medical tech that would be used daily in hospitals being easily restocked in-house, or being able to send patients home with supplies they could print from home instead of needing to get out and risk getting hurt after surgery. It's like VR - a specific niche is selling it but its uses are applicable to almost any industry which is what will ultimately let it survive beyond its initial niche audience.

Plus it's a huge step toward Star Trek replicators which is cool as shit.

>Get back to me when it can print something equal or better than these for a 2,500 pt army in a period under several months.
I'm predicting 6-7 years. It's only been 9 years since the iPhone first came out and we've already seen such a colossal evolution within the smartphone industry it's almost unreal. 3D printing tech is evolving constantly. It's not out of the realm of possibility that we'll be able to print in ultra fine detail at a rapid pace in the early to mid 20s.

We can do that now. The printers that do so are just unreasonably expensive for home use.
Home printers will catch up too an extent. But likely never match.
Like the difference between your home inkjet and a printhops large scale laser printer.

>he doesn't own a printing press

>It's only been 9 years since the iPhone first came out and we've already seen such a colossal evolution within the smartphone industry
Have we, though?
Pic related is what we had 9 years before the first iPhone. Are you seriously trying to tell me you're more impressed by the differences between different generations of iPhones than you are with the differences between these phones and smartphones in general?

>There's always threads bitching and whining about GW prices, with zero thought taken into account that maybe they're expensive because it's a tiny market coupled with bad business strategy and constantly producing new molds for new molds that eats up your budget fucking fast. GW aren't competent, they could make efforts to reduce prices, but those model prices aren't inflated as badly as shaving razors.

But GW is expensive compared to other miniatures wargames, and even ones like Infinity that have a higher model to dollar ratio still require you to have less models than 40k.

More expensive doesn't mean over priced or worse value.

Yes my 40k army does cost 3 times as much as my warmachine one. But i have 5 times as many minis for it so theres nothing to complain about.

Standard resolution is 1920x1080 at bare minimum these days, and some phones often go for 1440p or higher. The original iphone had a 480p display and a 2MP camera, not even a front facing one either. These days you've got phones shooting 4k video, battery life has essentially doubled, and the original didn't even have an app store. Between the launch version and the 6 plus, it went from 412MHz to 1.4GHz chips and RAM increased from 128MB to 1GB. Many phones have even higher end chipsets and more RAM. The most storage you could get at launch was 16GB and now that's practically cheap as shit. And hell, 2G vs 4G LTE.

Phones have come a LONG way. In many areas they've improved by multiple orders of magnitude. That's just a comparison of iPhones, too. They may look roughly the same but the way they perform couldn't be further from each other.

That is not quite how that argument works...
You get a C+ for effort.

>Imagine being able to just program in a week's worth of good food, have it printed for the instant you get home from work and not have to bother cooking anything? That's not too far off.
I find that extremely doubtful. Food is an extremely complicated subject; beyond the raw nutritional content, there are innumerable intricacies to texture, scent, taste, and structure that affect the palatablity of a dish, many of which are dependent on the manner of cooking to produce the required chemical reactions involved. Any 3D printed food would need to reproduce so many of those chemical interactions in such a similar way that any actual advantage over cooking it normally would likely be lost, since many of those reactions simply cannot be accelerated and still produce the desired result.
Not to mention the fact that in order to 3D print food, you would need to manufacture a printing material that contains all the necessary compounds found in food. Putting aside the (impossible) difficulty of designing an organic print medium that extruded well, doesn't clog the print head, remains stable in storage without spoiling but is also reactive enough to be printed and set, there's the fundamental problem that many of the compounds in food can't be mixed ahead of time, either due to differing storage requirements (dairy fats left at room temperature will curdle and are prone to spoilage, while starches will crystallize more readily at lower temperatures, so how are you going to store your cheese and crackers print goop?) or chemical reactivity.
And after all THAT, you somehow need to figure out a way to isolate and refine all these fundamental building blocks of food into this wondrous print material that nets out to being cheaper than producing it normally.

Don't get me wrong, now; I'm a big proponent of 3D printing for many purposes. But food production is not one of them. Closest thing we're likely to see in this century is novelty molds to fill with squeeze cheese.

Then if not for good food, what about food for distribution in poverty-ridden locales such as in Africa, India, and super rural or ghetto locations in developed countries? It might not be fantastically great tasting but I'd imagine it would be a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Honestly I'm unsure. At first it looks like the first generation was massively more dramatic than the most recent 9 years but think about the apps

>I can use it as a credit card in most shops these days
>I can stream movies from my phone onto my tv
>I can set up wifi hotspots on the move with enough data and speed to easily download movies and tv shows
>I can hold the camera up to Chinese words or sentences and it translates them instantly
>I can effectively hold a lengthy conversation with people speaking a language I don't know a single word of
>I can use my phone to control my thermostat and lighting
>It charges wirelessly
>It was bundled with a free VR headset
>It's waterproof
>It has a heart rate sensor and fingerprint reader

Dude lego requires mega precise casting. You're not going to be able to 3d print it effectively You can do edge pieces and custom stuff that lego don't print and you'll only have one or two of but the reason lego is so expensive is the deviation in lengths is super strict to make sure it slots together.

Short of 3d printing materials other than plastic we're not going to see a big uptake. Maybe when it can do foodsafe plastic, sturdy mountings and metal pieces with interlaced materials and a high print quality we might see an uptake in it. But even then we'll need to see new desktops packaged with printers just like they were in the 90-00s

It would have the same problem it currently has. Corrupt bureaucrats redirecting shipments from poor villages to the ports to sell them back to the west.
We could eliminate starvation altogether if we could solve this problem, we already have sufficient food in the world to feed everyone but the majority of it goes to the west to rot on stockpiles or sit in a warehouse so people can manipulate the futures market. In fact most of Africas societal problems could be fixed if the continent came back under ownership of the developed countries.

Reason 1:
3D-Printing technology is still in its infancy when it comes to non-commercial or personal use, meaning quality is bad and price is high.
Reason 2:
This directly follows from Reason 1, but I will state it for clarity: People are not willing to spend money on overpriced steaming piles of shit models unless it has serious brand-recognition (like GW)
Reason 3:
3D-Printing copyright material, even for non-commercial and/or personal use is probably and infringement upon the rights of the copyright holder, and especially in the case of GW's Greater Daemon Lawyer HQ choice. Hence there is a risk associated with doing it, and you will be a criminal if you do so (probably).
Reason 4:
Someone will have to make high-quality 3d models specifically for printing, free of charge, or very low priced, to be used in this way, and risking themselves when using copyrighted material. Hence both buyer and seller are at risk.
Reason 5:
Fuck GW

people have been saying it would be ready in 2 years since the late 2000's.... sorry chief I don't think you know what "commercially viable" means!

It's good for vehicles and such,, especially if you smooth it put with acetone vapour. Resin printers are required for more detailed things though. You can find several of those on Kickstarter. I mostly print terrain with mine. It adds tons of options to the hobby, and I wouldn't count it out especially as DIY printers can be very cheap.

>Criminal for doing so
Not if you don't use GW'S exact designs. Just use something very similar. There are many companies who make 40K proxies and beyond chapter house (Which won in court) non of them have had to deal with legal problems. For example I use a Titan Forge Vrock as a Lord of Change.

Why bother with the printer then? You could just ship tubes of nutrient paste. Places that are short on food also tend to be short on electricity, too. Poverty stricken areas, deep rural communities, disaster zones; none are likely to have a power supply for a printer handy, and they'd be more grateful if the printer's space on the plane had instead been filled with more food. It's better than nothing, sure, but that doesn't mean it's better than the alternatives, especially when they require far less effort.

Printed food just has too many design requirements and demands just to reach parity with normal methods. Why would you go through all that trouble just for the novelty of printing food? You could have just taped a can of eazy-cheez to a cam and had it "print" a drawing on your cracker. It's about that useful.

>You're not going to be able to 3d print it effectively

Yeah, but you can build stuff in Lego Digital Designer, export it to LeoCAD, export it as obj. Upload it to Microsoft's model repair service, download it, then print it.

Although it would be a solid object, like you'd glued all the lego bricks together.

>Totally missing the point of having Lego

And it has a leasing fee of 40 grand a year. You'll have to sell a lot of knockoff marines to pay for that

Because the cheapest 3D printer that can make reasonably high quality 28mm miniatures that don't require loads of cleanup and repair is over $2000, and you still have to pay for the material. Plus, 3D printing is really slow so it'll take months or years to print its value worth of, say, Tactical Marines and require babysitting the entire time. And this is all assuming you have a clean scan of all the sprues you want to copy.

You're much better off just buying all the models you want, taking molds of the sprues, and then reselling the originals while casting all of the minis you want.

There are 3d printing services for 28mm figures as we speak. But they are generally expensive and lack fine details.

There's a lot of promise though. You can print and share your own designs. Can't wait for the technology to become more widespread.

GW is more expensive, but this is partly due to GW pushing "you need 2,000 points at minimum" and retards going along with it. 40k is now an objectively shit wargame with how unbalanced it is at large point levels, and it's also much cheaper it you just play at 1,000 points or lower. You only need an HQ and two troops, and it works better that way too because you cut out Lords of War bullshit.

Additionally, GW is more expensive because of their niche market and constant production of new miniatures (the more new models you make, you're constantly making new molds, and that shit is expensive as hell, easily into 20k USD IIRC), and their sci fi/fantasy market, bad treatment of consumers, and new models all day 'erry day is fucking them over.

Meanwhile you have companies like Perry Miniatures, who can afford to make SUPER CHEAP multi part plastic knights because as part of the historical market, their consumer base is basically anybody who needs knights of that scale for any historical wargame. Their market is potentially way bigger.

tl;dr 40k was always meant to be like 1000 points or lower, everything above that is a retarded marketing push by GW to get more money, and virtually every fucking moron bought it instead of laughing them off and playing what is a SKIRMISH game rule set on a skirmish scale.

toptenreviews.com/computers/scanners/best-3d-scanners/

GW's min business is sorta fucked. Some of those are expensive, but some of them are cheap. If you are hateful about already spending a few thousand on the hobby, the entry fee of a printer and scanner is not too terrible.

yo dawg. In 1998 our phones were just a bit more kicking than the POS tier things you are showing.

The Siemens S10 had a full color screen.

You also fail to take into account the PDAs.

youtube.com/watch?v=T7j2pzBofYU

Fuck. This was the future...

It's still cheaper to buy even GW prices than to get a crazy high end printer and lots of blanks.

Still, the day IS coming.

That quote is taken out of context. I'm pretty sure you don't want a computer that takes up an entire room and feeds you binary printed on receipt paper in your home.

It's abysmally depressing how stupid and moronic people in general are, let alone on this board.