"3D printing" Topic

Perhaps I'm behind the curve but a few weeks ago I saw a demo of 3D printing. I then looked it up on the internet. The printer is a tower that contains plastic shards. You enter your object into a Cad program, hit print and voila it's produced in 3D. So, why not a sprue with 5 or more figures?

I don't know the price of the shards or the Cad program but the cost of a printer is $10,000 USD and in a few years it will most likely be a lot less expensive. In my ignorance there doesn't appear to be any reason this will not be the future for plastic figure production.

Does anyone have any thoughts or additional information?

Bob Coggins

I have several 3D printed spaceship from Shapeways.

There are some drawbacks:

1. It's harder to produce organic shapes with digital sculpting.

2. No matter how cheap the machine is, it is not well suited for mass production the way proper die tools are.

That being said, it is a new way in which master models are being produced and rescaling the models is quite easy.

On the shapeways site there is a bloke who 3D scanned himself and printed it in colour at about 70mm. Problems are:

1. The surface is rough and pitted;
2. colour is lo res and things need to be 3mm thick;
3. The results are expensive.

People are making 1:2400-1:6000 ships in hi res monochrome and 1:144 planes in mono, but the first laser printer I worked with in 1986 cost $8,000 USD, my 4 colour one cost 400 2 years ago. I reckon your 6mm army with the touch of a button needs a few years, bigger market, and a supply of "clip art".

A lot of good stuff is available already from
the aforementioned Shapeways company:
link

However; the technology isnt 100% quite "there" yet:
link
link

Long story short:
Depending on how a job is loaded in the printer,
one can get a very "fuzzy" model
(an artifact of the process)

There are a couple of 3D printers on the market that only cost $1,000 USD – they were showcased at a tech show recently

Just printing up buildings would be awesome

For masters, there is also a ton of stuff on Sketchup, getting it from the DAE format might be a pain, but there is stuff out there.

However; the technology isnt 100% quite "there" yet:

yeah it is… The issue with shapeways is that the cheaper materials are low-quality resolution as shown in those links.

Shapeways do have a (fair few) better res (e.g. Fine Ultra Detail) materials, but even that isnt a patch on what you can get elsewhere.

Shapeways tends to get touted as the "leading example of what can be done"< and it is far, far, far from that.

What it is is, probably, the leading example of print-on-demand 3D printing…but if you want something of a reasonable grade and finish then there is only one material to consider at Shapeways: Fine Ultra Detail.

2. No matter how cheap the machine is, it is not well suited for mass production the way proper die tools are.

Ultimately, and i do STRESS, ultimately, it is an entirely different methodology to mass production in today's sense.

With 3D printing you are looking at millions/billions of printers in total, with one each at the consumer's house. (and that printer can print *anything* as opposed to a tool that can produce only one thing)

As opposed to a factory producing millions of objects at one location and then dispatching them.

Of course if, as the consumer, you want X hundreds or thousands of each individual item, then it will be a toss-up between the two decided by the technology of the day.

As it stands today that is a far-far off proposition, but, in general, the 3D printer is not (ultimately) aimed at being able to produce hundreds or thousands of one item as a mass-manufacturing device that could compete on its own with a factory production system.

In practice what will happen will fall somewhere between the two extremes I expect.

Dee

I have a question. Can you watch the process through a window?

Well, from what I saw on TV the architect's house addition looked good when painted. The printer was a tower filled with plastic shards with a window. As best I could make out the addition was printed in the center and when completed the architect reached into the shards and pulled out the addition. It remineded me of my Jack Scruby orders. He shiped the figures in a box filled with sawdust which you could reach into to find the figures.

My thought isn't to go into the business of selling tens of thousands of figures but to print up your own figures – say a sprue of 6. So if you printed 50 sprues you'd have 300 original figures. Of course you wouldn't have to own the printer. You could take your disc to an office store which had the printers and print it out. Imagine thousands of indifividually different figures and on the darker side in hundreds of different sizes.

I was thinking of a timeline for this to be practical would be somewhere around 10-15 years, not tomorrow.

Bob Coggins

Bob Coggins

Bob

Subject to the limitations of the medium shapeways is there.

As I hate painting and do 6mm, those limitations make it a couple of years off for me. By that time I would expect a full colour 6mm fig from a printer which costs $2,000 USD +/-.

Yes it might be a bit pricey all up, yes the quality may not be GHQ, but if I need an extra regt of Hussars or a battery of horse artillery for next week's game, I would hope that I could do it in an evening after work.

Grizzlymc,

Thanks for the information. Considering I started with Scrubys in 1960 the future is bright.

Certainly in a few years the price of the hardware will come down. What is not clear to me is the cost of the plastic shards or the Cad program.

So, is it correct that in the future in theory anyone with a computer, and a Cad program could model figures which a 3D printer could produce?

Bob Coggins

So, is it correct that in the future in theory anyone with a computer, and a Cad program could model figures which a 3D printer could produce?

Doing that right now Bob.

CAD packages – use Sketchup, which is completely free.

Dee

Dee,

Thanks. I'd love to be just starting out in the hobby.

Bob Coggins