"Create Your Own Minis Kickstarter 28mm" Topic

French company has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a "design your own" 3D modelling service. Includes SciFi/Near Future and Fantasy figures, all Human so far but Orcs as a stretch goal as are Fantasy Football and SteamPunk elements.

link

They have a website with an ever widening selection of 3D renders of bodies/heads/equipment/armour etc that you can pick and mix to create your own figures. Then choose a pose and save for printing.

createyourminis.com

You can play around with designs on the website with a limited selection of the available renders to get an idea of how the thing works….great fun even if you don't want to get involved in the KS.

My first attempt at a Near Future/Cyberpunk Rigger type character:

Obviously still early days for this type of technology/functionality (witness the belt kit placing and the strapless pack) but at $7 USD per figure (or less for the larger pledges) well worth taking a look at.

to much money per mini by half or more. good luck.

$7 USD for a Carmen Electra figure sounds reasonable to me, though I suspect her fee for posing as desired may run a bit more than that.

neat idea, will be scary where they could be in a few years. Could go to a GW store and they could "print" the miniatures that you wanted to buy, no need for bits.

Printing will still never get pass the cost efficiency and time savings that normal casting currently can do. 3D printing however is an excellent way to get a final miniature master finished and ready for casting. Or to possibly get a custom part printed ( though a sculptor can do it just as well)

I love 3D technology it has a lot of potential but I do no see Redroom any time in the good future that we would see casting replaced by printing it just takes to long to print a good detailed quality piece for it to be able to meet any form of stocking demand.

However the technology has huge potential for so many things in our hobby that it is worth keeping an eye on.

The company is French, the project is being run in CAD, yet postage estimates are in EUR all the same… That is rather confusing and might be something to ask about in the comments section. As to the prices, I don't see how these minis are expensive exactly, but p&p is typically rather steep (French p&p tends to be).

France is not available as a country option, so they had to locate their project at a valid place. Currencywise the Netherlands would have been better, but perhaps they did not know anybody there had connection to Canada…

For me postage is indeed a killer for the low perk option, and for the higher perks I would like to have a sample in hand before I invest. Well, hopefully they will make it :-)

I think that we will see this technology taken to the point that there will be no need for "stock". From "pre designed" components such as these and a super rapid printer it will all be done on demand. Kind like the advances in the latter years of (pre digital) roll film developing.

It is the materials science of plastics/resins for rapid printing that needs to catch up. The 3D modelling side is pretty much there already.

It is the materials science of plastics/resins for rapid printing that needs to catch up. The 3D modelling side is pretty much there already.

True. I find painting 3D miniatures a very slow process due to the material. I wonder what printer they are using.

Yeah, I doodled around with it. I think the big areas are making variants on a standard model …

… or a specific one-off …

But it kept coming back to the price-point. For less than a third of the cost, I can get the parts to make these as conversions. I think there would have to be a ability to upload a special part that doesn't exist anywhere (rather than collect some generic parts together) to get me past that.

To be fair to them, they did say their interface (and the options available) would be increased by the time it went live, however the KS failed, so I'll guess we see if they relaunch.

As a role-player, it was worth backing for me. $7 USD CAD did not seem extortionate at all for one-off character figures. Maybe if I'd been looking to populate a battalion then I'd feel differently.

Whatever your feelings on this particular project, I do think that custom 3D printing will, to some degree, figure as part of our hobby in the future. As with all these technologies, the speed and quality always encreases, usually as cost goes down! I remember when a black and white dot matrix printer was £400.00 GBP!

I'm willing to bet that within a couple years, we'll start seeing some more forward-thinking Hobby Shop owners run the risk of short-term high-cost investment for possible longer-term profits… Let's see how long before we can go into a shop, pay a small fee for say 15-minute slots on the in-store computer w/ attached 3-D printer, design our own figure with their CAD program -- like these guys were trying to start -- then for an additional fee, print as few or as many of the figure we just designed! We may even have the option to "create an account" to which we can save the figure… unless we WANTED to have it be truly OOAK…

…IP legislation is gonna be a bitch!

Not really. There are tons of precedents where the providers of computers and Internet access are not legally responsible for illegal actions taken by people using those capabilities. Free wifi at commercial establishments and public workstations at airports and libraries being the big examples. There are requirements for earnest effort, but really no moreso than, say the library's responsibility to ensure patrons aren't blatantly using the tables and chairs for illegal purposes.

Did this ever re-launch?