"Just think plastics took a whole new twist..." Topic

Imagine 'printing' out a whole army…

link

Very interesting! I think most folks realize that we are only on the very cusp of what 3d printing has to offer. It's only going to get better, faster and more affordable. What I'm both looking forward to and a bit afraid of is the 3d printers that will either print in multicolor or print color over the finished model.

Imagine being able to print out pre-painted miniatures.
It's coming….

It's already here.

Try googling "color 3d printing". You'll see some amazing stuff on youtube.

Given how fragile, and non-detailed in small scales 3D printing is, I think that will take a while to accomplish.

Wow!

Just reinforces the fact that I am a moron.

In 10 or 15mm, being able to "print" multiple stands at a time and have them colored would be HUGE. Even if it was as Simple as Black gaiters, White trousers and Blue (or Red or Green or White) Jackets and Black Shako.

Imagine what it will do for the tourist trinket industry.

There will absolutely be the day where GW either dies, or sells 3d models of their figures that you can print yourself for a paltry $12,000. USD =)

In all seriousness, it looks amazing and I am excited to see where this technology takes our hobby.

Where I think it would be great to print out full colour miniatures and have yourself a complete army in a very short time frame I also think that it will be the death of the hobby.

The "hobby" itself is not just playing games. The majority of it is the research, gathering and preparation of your troops. With the advent of affordable colour 3D printing, that's about 90% of the hobby eliminated.

May as well play board-games exclusively (or Blucher).

I love the researching, and I think it would still be necessary in order to built correct armies, but as someone who has had 96 Russians on his painting table since before Christmas, I could do with a bit of pre-painted help!

As Sabre6 said, just the basics would be fine, and then even I could do the rest.

"I also think that it will be the death of the hobby"

I disagree, but then my definition of the hobby is different. I love playing games but hate all the prep work, especially painting. Anything that simplifies the prep work at reasonable cost would allow me to play more games!

@warwell: You and me both. There is more than one definition of what the "hobby" is, and my version of the hobby doesn't have anything to do with painting figures.

How exactly is this "Discussion Groups and Wargaming Forums" material? Should have been maybe "Wargaming in General" or "The Industry".

CLIP will not be the process that produces multi-colored figures, since it uses a mono-chromatic reservoir of resin. You could theoretically get multi-colored objects by using multiple reservoirs, but the colors would still be restricted to horizontal layers. More on the process and a live demonstration here:

link

When multi-colored figures become possible (by some process other than CLIP) they won't be any threat to the hobby of figure painting, any more than the availability of store-bought bread eliminated the home-baked variety. People who enjoy painting figures will keep painting figures. It might kill off the commercial figure painting industry, though.

And, no one gets to define anyone else's hobbies. Wargaming, or possibly "The Greater World of Adventure Gaming" is not so much a large, multifaceted hobby (as the "Broad Church" folks would have it) as it is a messy concatenation of interrelated and overlapping hobbies, from which each individual chooses the aspects that appeal to them and then declares the remainder to be "not real wargaming".