3-D printing homemade miniatures?

Alrighty, so... This is probably the most relevant mini I can provide. I did basically no work optimising the print for this thing and I could get it to come out this well.

On something relatively devoid of fine features like a typical spaceship, this is what you could expect to get out the ass-end of the printer. This thing is 30mm tall, IMO with the exception of the gun on top it'd still be fine at half that size, but the 4-5mm version of it I printed was, while recognisable, simply too small and fragile to survive being extracted from all the supports I had to print around it to get the thing to print at all.

For a spaceship, the general shape of their designs (Relatively few fine surface details, can be exaggerated easily as necessary, IE no faces or any bullshit like that) is pretty easy to print. You would want to make your large vessels quite large if you wanted to have fighters or whatever since IMO you'll pretty much always fuck up printing anything that isn't a simple geometric shape if you go below 5mm in size.

A *major* issue printing for SPESS though, is that 3D printers do not like overhangs. Like, even printing arms onto models is a struggle. You get around this by modelling in supports, and there are automatic support generators out there like I used for pic related that easily snap off. But anything more than 45 degrees from vertical is going to start fucking up if it's more than 2mm from a support, which means that a plane-in-space design where the base is flat-ish, but not flat enough that it is directly in contact with the print bed, is going to look pretty awful. So you may need to split your model into parts and glue, similar to firestorm armada models. You won't be able to model fancy interlocks as a novice so I hope you like joining flat planes together.

More expensive printers would certainly allow for better detail than mine, but not by a lot. To my understanding, the vertical resolution limit for notionally private 3D printing systems is like, half of the vertical resolution limit for mine. So not like MILES better. This determines how fine the "print lines" I was talking about that you can see in are, and correspondingly how easily distinguishable small details are amidst those print lines.

The weird, gloopy, spaghettifying effect that you get from overhangs on models is pretty much never going to cease if you print with PLA or ABS though, I'm not aware of any printers that can just do away with this.

I would warn that while these print lines aren't obvious at a distance and seem pretty minor, even after several coats of paint (The painted model in the photo is 2 spray undercoats + 2 fairly thick overcoats by my own shitty painting skills) they never really go away entirely.

Now hopefully from these images you can pick out something fairly important, which is that bricklike, or regular geometric shapes just fuck up a lot less intrinsically than complicated shit like sicaran tank treads etc.

Do you want them to be better and cheaper? Then yes.
Do you want them sooner? Then no.

But on the plus side, once I had made a miniature, I could literally just re-pose the thing and immediately print another with very little extra effort.

For what it's worth, the wings on those MP Evas are IMO probably the single hardest detail I have managed to get to *work*. They have feathers and everything. They are pretty close to being optimised to be the shittiest possible thing to print on a 3D printer because they are composed of arrays of constant overhang in an area of pretty fine surface detail.

Their current state is honestly pretty well developed. Unlike if you'd asked this question in 2010, *massive* improvement in home scale 3D printers is pretty unlikely within the next 10 years.

For sure there are lots of new 3D print techs in development but it's all industrial scale stuff. Right now the private consumer scene is focused on upgrading the existing models to add new printable materials etc. rather than providing an entirely new base system to work with.

I'm sorry but those look absolutely atrocious.

Thanks for the help man, what sort of programs would you recommend using for such things (if I were to get the Printrbot Play that is)?

Well, you have your answer then. With a $400 printer, you can do better than these, but not by much. With a $1000 printer, you'll still never match the model quality of literally anyone we buy models from these days. IMO the entire draw is customisability, make whatever the fuck you want. I modelled everything there myself except for the Marauder.

Alright so, a lot of people swear by Repetier, but IMO Repetier is for fags who want to 3D print a new doorstop. I use blender to alter and create models, but seriously just use what you know. As long as it can export to .stl, you're fine.

Cura is what I use as a slicer interface to drive the printer itself. It accepts .stl's, and generates the motor instructions necessary to print them. You adjust things like print speed, print temperature etc. as necessary. Its WAY easier to use than basically anything else. Use the 15.X series, not the 2.X series which is newer but for some reason fuggen borked, doesn't support a lot of printers and has some awkward interface changes.

Print settings: As a rule of thumb, smaller, finer detailed shit should be printed at a slower speed and a slightly lower temperature. The Play has a max speed of like 150mm/s or some shit, but never use this unless you're printing a doorstop. I found that 25mm/s and 207-208C was appropriate for printing PLA models at tabletop scale.You need to take a good look at your need for supports and add them manually and automatically as necessary.

I noticed some places like Shapeways have really detailed small models. Do they use really good printers?

So would 3d models like these work? Love Homeworld and would love to have some models of them to totally not fly around my desk playing with them.
sketchfab.com/mrhohenheim/collections/homeworld-2

Most of those type of printing services have printers that cost several thousands of dollars, if not more.

Short answer, yes.

Long answer, they use fundamentally different 3d printing technologies to the extruder based stuff you can reasonably operate as a hobbyist. Laser sintering etc.

Its all stuff that is more expensive to buy into and MUCH more expensive to operate (The effective cost per model of the shit I just posted was like 60c).

I can't really speak for how easy to use it is, but Shapeways' shittiest printers would be like $2.8k buyin.

So basically if I don't want to pay $3k for a printer but still want good quality models, Id have to buy them from third parties?

To get a good print quality you'd probably need to print most of them in two halves each to prevent overhangs and anchor them to the print bed, but yes I can confirm that using blender I can import .obj's and turf them back out as printable .stl's.

They're geometrically pretty simple so they should look okay on a good print. Do keep in mind that most of the detail in homeworld is in the textures not the model though, even for cap-ships. Depends how good a painter you are.

The Mothership would actually be much easier to print at a smaller scale because they you could just sit it on its engines and noone would notice it was totally flat at the back.

I'd literally go print one of these for you right now to show off but the Printer is a bit fucked at the moment, waiting for parts to get it fixed in a week or two.

In short, totally viable.

I just had a quick look around and someone has done this. Their mothership was heartbreakingly awful but they had a pretty good Vaygr Destroyer and Sajuuk.

Yes, and if you buy them from third parties you can't infringe copyright (Meaning you need to build the model from scratch), unlike printing them yourself where you are free to steal as much intellectual property and videogame 3d models as you want since no money is changing hands.

I also noticed on Shapeways a number of pre-made models that I know are based off of copyrigted works, but just named something slightly different. I'm guessing I would not be infringing on copyright as I did not provide the model?

One last question, where's a good site to find free models to download for 3d printing and such? I am not a very good 3d modeler yet.

Thingiverse. It's incredible. Everything's .stl so it can go straight into most slicers. You'll still need to make minor adjustments to most of their shit to satisfy your own printer's particular idiosyncrasies though. Even stuff which is purportedly ready to print you usually need to quickly eyeball because there'll be shit like a sprue where one of the parts is 1mm above the print bed (Which will cause it to fail every time but isn't immediately obvious).

Sketchfab is okay. You need to put in a little bit more effort to get their models to work.

Yeah its a bit of a weird frontier and people can get away with a lot right now, but not literally anything. I'm just warning that they cannot legally speaking sell you a copyrighted work, it *has* to be a knockoff so they have plausible deniability.

I'm just surprise how lazy there are in concealing some of the stuff. (Epik Spess Mahrines)