What’s Veeky Forums‘s stance on 3D printing? Y’know, for minis and terrain and whatnot

You can buy flexible filament for FDM printers now, but you would have to somehow eliminate the layer lines from the inside of the mold. You'd be limited to resin as a casting material, too.

The final product is really bad. If you want to make your own models better sculpt them with your own hands, 3D print right now is not good enough to make detailed miniatures.

Seems reasonable to me, as long as you get a resin one. Maybe my standards are low, I dunno.

Resin's totally reasonable; lots of minis/model manufacturers use them to make masters. They come with a cost, though; resin needs a dedicated workspace for cleaning/curing, and the resin itself is toxic.

I know. A buddy of mine has one, but filament printers are just ass. I don't want to faff around with the printed miniature and I want it to look good. So I'll wait a few more years for more disposable income and splurge big for a good resin printer

Local library had a 3D printer, i got minis for $0.20-30/pop usually. I supplied the scans frod Thingverse (?) And they did the rest. Minis, space ships, etc

>knows anything about that?

/diy/ has a 3D printing general with links plus a few specialized threads all the time.

Among many other things, home or hobby printing is currently limited by:
- Materials used to print
- Vibration during printing
- Accuracy/tolerances
- Print speeds

You could print a mold, as suggests, you just can't print one which would withstand a pour with the materials available to home/hobby printers.

Vat photopolymerization / stereolithography machines produce some very good minis. Probably the best finish I've seen.

Depends on the printing style, doesn't it?

The minis are fine for stuff like D&D but the filament printers leave lines on the miniature
plus they take hours to make one mini to print an army would take days to finish still a good buy for terrain tho

3d printing is still in its infancy right now. Unless you own one of those industrial 3d printers and high quality materials, you're gurenteed to get vague plastic blobs covered in lines

>gurenteed

I’ve heard this stuff is pretty good for terrain?

Anybody know if you can do 2nd floors with it? Because that’d be amazing. Walls and objects are great, but multiple layers would really seal the deal.

It depends on the type of 3D printer you have. FDM printers are only good for terrain, while SLA printers can do actual minis well. It can be cheap too, with Wanhao Duplicator 7's able to do SLA printing very well and cheaply.

You can. Either print with supports, a cooling fan, or in multiple pieces. One dude I play with uses a castle that he 3D printed with multiple floors of the interior all detailed.

Oh hell yeah. I don’t figure there’s some kind of reliable resource for finding multi-layered terrain? Because I’ve been googling and I haven’t found much other than one or two little modules, neither of which really have any variation beyond just repeating the first layer and stacking it on top. I would hope for things like catwalks, terraces, bridges, other things where it’s a layer held up by pillars that only covers a portion of the room and you can walk under it, et cetera.

nah man you gotta learn to just make shit out of cardboard and paper mache and foam

why

Great for making masters. Otherwise, 3D-printed models are either expensive or complete garbage. There's no balance of quality and price and the whole market is pretty black and white.
The worst part is the cult following, 3D-printing attracts the worst kind of fanatics who either shit up everyting with their prophecies of GW dying soon or shove their horrible deformed "models" into your face in desperate attempts to show how great 3D printing is.

I have a few bigger things I picked up from Shapeways. Turrets, chimera tops and the like,and some minis on order. Qualitys not that bad, but it's not exactly cheap.

Thingiverse and Yeggi are the big free file search sites. You will find some stuff there. Otherwise you will have to pay for stuff from printablescenery.com or Fat Dragon Games.

Making masters? I must be an idiot because I have no clue what you’re talking about.

I feel like long term doing a bunch of terrain and some big monsters would be way cheaper than just buying them all. 28mm tiny miniatures would be really basic shapes, but doing bigger and/or less important stuff, the tiny details wouldn’t really matter. I’d think players (or at least mine) would be thrilled just to have tons of new 3D environments to explore instead of the same couple dozen pieces. Not having to pretend what clearly a Dungeon is a sci-fi cantina is engine room would be pretty cool.

Maybe I’m overestimating even the basic simple level of quality, or the price per piece. Who knows.

Master figure is used to make master mold

Master mold is used to make production figure

Production figure used to make mass production mold

28 mm isn't tiny, it's a common scale in wargaming.

Unless you expect to spend several thousand dollars on terrain and monsters and don't value your time at all because you'll have to expend significantly more time to make those tabletop ready, it's not about getting your shit cheaper. It's about getting the exact shit you want.

You can get a lot of designs these days, especially when it comes to terrain. I wouldn't say that getting exactly what you want is a problem these days. The guys I play D&D with love the stuff that I print because previously we were using a white board with some tape on it. Now we have plastic dungeon tiles which make things look much cooler. It's definitely worth it with the right group.

How much did you spend on your stuff?

I work at my college's help desk, we have a free 3d printing service. If you don't mind your minis being the size of your hand, you can get some pretty nice designs. That said, we blew like a quarter of our budget buying a rack of them.

It can work if you know how to print models properly, but most people chose the wrong settings and end up with hideous blocky messes that look like they were sculpted using Minecraft.

If we're talking standard FDM printing, then no, they will never get to the same level of quality as cast or molded minis; they can create fairly passable terrain, but you are always balancing the level of achievable detail with the time it takes to print and you'll always have layer lines to contend with.

The alternative for home manufacturing is SLA/DLP resin printing, but this has a much higher buy in and maintenance and material cost. The level of detail is considerably higher and can be quicker than FDM (time is entirely dependent on the number of layers rather than the volume. A full print bed takes the same time as a mostly empty print bed for the same height, so fill 'er up), to the point that you can't see layer lines without optics.
The process is very messy though and requires chemical clean up and post curing. The resin also stinks and is toxic.

The thing is though is that none of these machines are plug and play and none of them are fire and forget. Much like you couldn't give a random Joe a wood shop and expect him to have the skill to make furniture, let alone just press a button and have something come out the end.
There's also the issue of the models. Every model has to be made in 3D. So unless they are commissioning custom models or are happy with only ever using premades, they are going to have to learn 3D modelling. For these reasons, 3D printing will never take off as an everyday consumer thing.

As for their place on the table top. Sure, why not? You might not get far bringing a 3D printed army into a GW or FLGS, but there's no reason why they don't have a place in private groups; and if you have the skill or can get the models commissioned they're great for TTRPGs. Just realise that they're not going to revolutionise anything in their current form, they're a niche; much like wood working, they are a tool and they do require skill.

You’re probably right, it just seems like terrain for 28mm TTRPGs is pretty expensive, especially if you want enough pieces to really mix and match, or new ones to create unique places and encounters. Whereas a 3D printer (I’d assume, or, it SEEMS like) you can print as much as you want for cheap, and get new terrain types all the time. Right?

>Whereas a 3D printer (I’d assume, or, it SEEMS like) you can print as much as you want for cheap, and get new terrain types all the time. Right?
Yes to a point. The cheapest 3d printer is going to cost $130 if you get it on sale (you're looking at about $330 for a good chinese printer). The quality will be crap out of the box, you'll spend a very long time getting it up to decent quality. The material is fairly cheap, but it won't print more exotic materials without more time and money (not that you need it if you're just printing for the table top). The problem is that it will take a very long time to get a large number of terrain parts. For example the piece in my image, on its own at .1mm layer height (good but not best quality) will take nearly 3 and a half hours to print... for one regular dungeon tile. You could print the one piece and then make a mold and cast many, but that's more money and you're reducing the long term need for the printer. Will you then still have a use for it after you printed a few minis and terrain? There's an argument to be made for just commissioning a 3rd party to print one of each piece and then cast your own. The initial cost will be quite high to get those initial prints but you'll save yourself time and a lot of effort.

3D printing is definitely cheaper than buying on a per part basis (the part in the image would cost £0.31 in material), but the big BIG BIIIIGGG stumbling block is time and labour

Not really. Nothing consumer-grade will be usable.

I use my for tokens and shit, and bits of terrains. Its especially nice for making little bits that I can glue a tack to the bottom of and stick into a map Ive got pinned to a cork-board. Really gives you a nice map to lay flat with a bunch of the points of interest popping out.

For the printer itself I bought a Prusa i3 kit for $300. I eventually spent $30 for a better hotend though. Filament costs vary, but I generally go with 1kg AMZ3d spools for $20 each, and I have bought three in the printer's lifetime. If I were doing this again I would probably just go with a Monoprice prebuilt printer for not too much more.

Pretty much. You can spit out as much terrain as you ever want with a FDM 3D printer. The best part is that there actually are tons of free models for 3D dungeon tiles online, so getting what you want isn't a problem. Time depends on what you are going for, but at .2mm it should come out pretty quickly. The Fat Dragon Games printing guide recommends about .15mm.

There's a lot of misinformation out there from people who think 3d printing never got past filament extruders from 5 years ago.

The issue as I see it is you're basically still looking at a huge commitment of time just hunting down or creating models, and you have to be a miniature printing junkie to justify the cost.

This user knows what he's talking about. Read and heed what he has said.

For terrain and regular board games? Yea sure, the details on today's average "home" printer is sufficient for this kind of work.

For models in actual miniature wargames? Hell no, not a chance. The quality is what you pay for, and 3d printing just isn't there yet, not by a long shot! Besides, people have been doing home-casts for decades, not to mention making other people make your casts for you (if you're a lazy bum like me).
I just don't see it happening. People on Veeky Forums has been talking about 3d printing for a good 5 years now that "any day now..." Is going to happen, but it just doesn't.

>there's no market for it.
Yet. There was no market for cell phones either, but people still use them daily.

Frankly if you can do 3D models at good enough level of skill it probably would be more reasonable to machine a small metal form for resin casting. Or even something softer than metal.

Anyone here know where I can find some Nilfgaardian soldiers to 3d print in 28mm. Cannot seem to find any just googling

There are fairly affordable SLA printers that can do actual models these days. But for FDM printers terrain is the most that can be done.