"Anyone here tried 3D printing yet? " Topic

If so can you share examples?

Also interested to hear your thoughts on how the new technology might affect the hobby. How can manufacturers stay ahead of the curve…could they start selling the plans on a price per print run?

There are already hundreds of designs you can download for free. If the cost/resolution comes down enough I can see some gamers switching over entirely and only buying what they can't find designs for.

It won't be long after that until "design kits" will provide all sorts of bits you put together as needed…

A seismic shift is coming to the industry I think.

It might be, but my passion has as much to do with the painted productions I put on the table and the buildings I build and paint.
I fully expect the hobby to go the way of the triceratops. With no skill required more than printing, you may as well just flex to computer games. So many are anyhow…

With no skill required more than printing, you may as well just flex to computer games.

About the same amount of skill as is required to buy a load of figures and then pay to have them painted by a painting service.

Don't give up, cncbump. I think there's still a future, probably along the lines EC is thinking. I think you speak for tons of us when you mentioned painted productions on tabletops. Wherever the minis come from, most of us still want the minis. I actually am optimistic about this. How many minis are never created because of all of the steps involved with sculpting in greenstuff, scaling down, pressing or casting? Imagine if artists were able to still sculpt a few, but translate a bunch of their ideas and talent into programmed minis for the printer? I may be a hack at painting, but I know with certainty I will NEVER be able to sculpt or even draw minis. Pirating, bootlegging, etc. are problems that plague us now, so that really shouldn't be a doomsday argument against the future of 3d printing. Even if we could print in color, I believe many of us would still choose to prep and paint our own. Just some random thoughts.

I have only a vague idea what 3D printing is, but I image it would be very expensive to buy a "printer"? And would the cost of "printing" a model figure ever be cheaper than buying one from one of the established manufacturers, who can cast hundreds, if not thousands, per mould?

it will certainly change things. Artists still need to design the figures, but buidings and terrain can be easily made with some basic templates. easily the cost of the printer can be less than what many people have spent on armies.

link

Kaptain Kobold at Stronghold Rebuilt has been experimenting with it. He introduces his new printer at link

There are several subsequent posts featuring his handiwork

Prices will continue to drop,and abilities go up,IF people decide they're useful. Remember Laser disks? It took 10 years to sell one million players.IIRC,3 million DVD players sold in their first year. The price dropped from circa $1,000 USD to $400 USD,n $200 USD…now what,fifty bucks for Bluray?

It will be interesting to see what happens.

Seriously – what about the cost of my armies in the 1970s?

And how "inexpensive" are 3D printers? I can get a 15mm/6mm/3mm army pretty cheap currently not to mention skirmish forces in the larger sizes.

I don't think 3D printing has reached the level where the figures come out painted yet. Unless like green and tan army guys…..

And it's nonsense to think that computers will replace miniatures gaming. That's like arguing that peach cobbler will replace apple pie. Two different things.

I've purchased a few "printed" minis.

Generally, the quality was a bit better than I was expecting, though sadly, there was some "stair-stepping" of the layers on some portions of them that need to be dealt with.

Surprised that the tech hasn't improved with big commercial printers at Shapeways to be able to eliminate the striations.

Until that happens, I suspect people will continue to purchase cast minis much more frequently.

I think people have it all wrong,imagine needing 3 bren carriers with crew for a game on Sunday and all you have to do is get the plans downloaded go to a printer firm Friday afternoon collect Saturday morning clean assemble (say four parts) paint and base already early Saturday evening and ready for the game tomorrow all for a very reasonable price that's where it should be in a few years I hope. BTW I love peach cobbler and apple pie and that's the whole truth :) not so?

True Mako, but the rate of progress is impressive. And they are spreading. Our public library has one, as does my daughter's middle school. We even have a "3D Kinkos" where you can "make copies" on their 3D printer for a fee.

Hard plastics and metal will have their place but the tipping point will come.

Think of all the models never made in metal becasue they'd only ever sell 20 copies….

I haven't tried it myself, but I've been impressed with the examples I've seen from companies like printablescenery.com

warwell – those tanks by Kaptain Kobold look great. I'm impressed

If it ever becomes viable to scan a 3D object for printing then it would help. Not everyone can produce a virtual master, but a physical item – think of the crafts industry, make one item, scan and produce a few dozen prints.

I have a 15mm Napoleonic army which I'm painting and building very slowly. It's an obession I have to admit it!

However, I would like to game other periods and scales that I'm less obessive about and I think printing an army in basic colours would be amazing. Buying a painted army or using a painting service is out of my budget.

I think they'll be a place for hand painted figures for a long time yet, but they might evolve into a more artisan status.

Think of all the models never made in metal becasue they'd only ever sell 20 copies….

Which is were I come in! A bunch of my vehicles, like these 3mm-scale M548 cargo carriers, were made by special request. I've only sold a handful, but the people who have bought them have been really pleased to fill that otherwise-hard-to-fill gap in their armies. Since I'm not doing this to make a living, I don't mind doing projects like this.

Interestingly, I made a model for Epic 40K by request and figured I'd only ever sell the one ordered by the requester. Believe it or not, I've sold more than two dozen of these, despite the high price tag.

' I'm not doing this to make a living,' a phrase to send shivers down anyones back who works in the hobby to pay the mortgage…….lol
L

On local forum, several posters who own 3D printers already, mentioned that the machines are perfect for terrain, details of vessels/spaceships/etc, but for 28 mm figures they have seen problems with post production – the layers are visible, and to polish the surface to remove the borders is a difficult task, that might even require additional special equipment.
We had a booth at a polymer expedition recently, and a couple of companies there were presenting 3d printers, so I had time to see how they're working. The bigger the stuff the better it looks – for now. Detail for smaller figures was a bit worse than from molding machines (I got 25 mm "almost Putin" figure, from low grade molding machine, it looks close similar to, say, GW plastics of year 2000.
There's a lot of Kickstarter projects for the stuff, but I'm not convinced yet. If it breaks there's a very small chance that I can find qualified service to repair the machine..

' I'm not doing this to make a living,' a phrase to send shivers down anyones back who works in the hobby to pay the mortgage…….lol
L

There will be a lot of industries – like ours – where a lot of the profits will be driven out by people who do it for its own sake. Sort of like free rules. Or people who subsidize their hobby by making and selling terrain bits and so on.

Where the industry currently is:
On-demand printing is here, via places like Shapeways and home printers, but the quality of the prints is not great, and the cost isn't truly affordable. It can take a lot of work to get a Shapeways model "display" ready, unless you've paid for the high end materials and resolution.

Most miniature manufacturers that use 3d prints have them done on perfactory type machines with very high resolution. the results are usually spectacular (I use them quite a bit) but the costs can also be quite high. a single 15mm tank can cost between $100 USDusd and $400 USDusd depending upon the number of parts and the volume and time it takes to print.

And time is also the crux of the problem. Some minis or parts can take 12-20 hours to print, and if you have the orientation wrong you have to start all over…

So with the cost, it's still more efficient and cost effective to have a single master printed then have copies made in metal or resin.

I personally think that we're a long ways off, at least 10 years, before printers are able to put out something pre-colored that looks display ready, is cost effective, and prints quickly enough to replace "tradition" miniature making methods. And we will still have to weather them, detail them, and put on decals…

Yes laser scanning exists and can be used to generate the 3D model file of the sculpted master that is to be down load to do the printing.

Technology has existed for some time and is making a headway into the hobby.

MG

I bought some 1/6000 scale modern ships from Shapeways. I'm please with how they look. I work for a manufacturing company and we have had a 3D printer that's about the size of a phone booth for about 10 years. The quality isn't there on that one but we are starting to look at replacements so I hoping the new one will be able to do figures.

Now my totally free, probably wrong prediction of the future. There will always be companies selling figures like we have now but once the printers are available at a cost/quality point, Miniature companies will sell you only the 3D drawing of the figure you want that you will only be able to print X amount of times. You want more figures, give the company their money and they give you a software key to print more figures.

I have a MakerBot Replicator 2.0

You can print some very nice things, but the don't approach anywhere near what I can make with an plastic injection molder. That being said I think it's great to create one-off items you would rather not buy.

And you can see an archer comparison to one of my first arches to get molded and another archer that about a 2.5 up (blame metric for that, or praise it)

Example: Flames of war sized Landing Craft

Example: Archer 28mm and 2.54 up

I would like to create some more stuff for Normandy landing, mostly bunkers.

" but I image it would be very expensive to buy a "printer"?"

Mine was $500 USD (Australian), bought in an Aldi supermarket. True, it's a cheap one, and better, more expensive, models are available, but they will only get cheaper as well. Materials cost isn't too great – a 1kg roll of filament is $35 USD (Australian) or less, and you could print a lot of figures for that.

Biggest issues with the particular printer and software I have is resolution (I print with 0.1mm layers, and you get some stepping/layering on the figures) and time of printing (it can take a few hours to print a decent-sized building model).

"those tanks by Kaptain Kobold look great. I'm impressed"

I should stress that all I did was download the models and print them. They are not my designs :)

Biggest issue with tanks on my printer is getting it to do the guns. I still haven't worked out the best setting for them yet. But faulty guns can be replaced by wire or plastic rod.

The landing boat looks great. The archer less so. Still, this a tech in its infancy so things are developing pretty quickly.

With respect to colour 3D printing, you can do that, at least from Shapeways in some materials. I recently picked up painted planets and moons (Saturn inwards) for spaceship gaming. Out of scale for even fleet scale gaming, but look cool and fit in a hex – Saturn even comes with rings.

I also got coloured WWI airbase targets, the German one seen here:
link

Well… kids are building printers now. They go to 'E-cycle' centers for scraps. They tear apart Fax machines and old ink printers to get the parts: the software to run the printers is available online and dropped into special hard drive pins. Cost… $30. USD

The kids where I work even made a plastic recycling machine (from scrap, usually old TRS 80s) so that they are supplied w/ all the plastic they need to make.. whatever they want.

When they saw my new laser cut model terrain from 4Ground they responded, "Cool… we can make this stuff, you know." …. I said I was going to buy a Laser Burner soon and they responded, "Mr T, we can make you a Laser Burner and w/ Cad we can design whatever we want for terrain. In fact, we should require new members to supply terrain from the Engineering Lab before joining our Games Club, and it can be left at the school for following students to enjoy after we leave." Just… wow.

Yes….. I think the industry is going to be a tad different in 10 years….. 20?

In the meantime…. I'm still hosting Friday night table top game at the school (it's a boarding school so they're there all Winter): Wild West, a Quinton Terantino (sp) themed skirmish game, 'Epic Space Battle' w/ our own 3D space armadas, … etc etc … Oh, did I forget to mention: they prefer to create their own rules for their own games…. They've even made their own dice. Not bad for a generation 'fixated' on the computer too much, huh?

Remember: they're making models for themselves… each kid wants their own space ship to be different: original. And they're teenagers: they have the time to make this stuff! And they're only making it for themselves.

Looking forward to see what happens in the next 20 years!!

I work with additive manufacturing for naval applications. What is really amazing are part designs that cannot be easily manufactured with other techiques. The ability to fabricate radii that you cannot machine, interior hollows, custom parts to replace things that were built 50 years ago, high precision / low volume things, etc. It is already reshaping how we do lots of things and continue to transform both new construction and maintenance for most industries.

Friend bought a 350$ model and plastic spool for material. At least at that price point you dont get good enough detail for 28mm figures.

He printed a 1:100 scale Tiger 2 off a free online blue print. The detail wasnt amazing, but at that scale the imperfections started fading into the background and it looked potentially servicable as something to put on the table for a "wargames standard" paint job.

Then he printed some 6 inch stone wall sections listed for D&D…. they looked perfectly serviceable as terrain with a bit of sanding here and there. This was a few weeks ago, but I believe we mathed it out and he could print 30 linear feet of roughly 28mm appropriate stonewall for 25 bucks worth of plastic.

As mentioned above, I think we will see the shake up in the terrain portion of the industry first and eventually it may trickle down with technology increases and better resolution printers to figures.

3D has its own message board already – worth a look

TMP link

Not long ago I received a catalogue from a mail order outfit called B&H Foto & Electronics Corp. in New York City. They carry several models of 3-D printers and 3-D scanners. For the printers, prices range from $339.00 USD all the way to $2,900.00 USD. Some are capable of printing in 2 colors, but I did not see any that could do full color printing (if that even exists yet). Their website address is: BandH.com.

I design and sell multiple lines of models via Shapeways, and have spent a few hundred bucks on assorted models for myself. It's a great way to get niche models in quantity. The ability to rip 3D files from computer games and have them printed is also unique. I don't sell any of those, as I refuse to sell any 3D-printed product I did not CAD for ethical reasons.

The ability to rip 3D files from computer games and have them printed is also unique.

In what way is this unique?

The Resin printers like the B9 Creator is looking great.

b9c.com

I've been playing with 3d printing over the last year or so and recently wrote an article about my experiences on my blog:
link

@glazed over
Gareth – that is an excellent blog post, thank you

watchfulistudio.com
Uses 3D sculpting to create 28mm master, then has that turned into a normal rubber mold

Their results are excellent – I have a Chinese lead pile waiting to be dug up in 3000 years …

John

Maybe the real first impact on the hobby is to make a lot of special high resolution figures that can be turned into metal spin casting molds. It would get around the expense and time of artists working with green stuff.

My son and I have being 3D printing for some years. We have had a home printer for two years. It has printed some hundreds of 1/144 armoured vehicals in modern and SI FI and innumerable space ships. Alex as AOTRS Shipyards has done a few SI-FI infantry in 12mm but curently they have to be done commecially at Shapeways as they are too complex and small to work on a home printer as the supports and the thing you want are too close to the same size. The fuss about stepping and the the surface finish is bizzare. This is a model issue not a wargame issue. From 4 ft away, typical wargame range, there is no discerable patern. I for one do not stare at a figure from 6" while playing a game. Far too many "wargame" models have excessive detail for wargaming which costs money I would rather not spend. Viva 3D printing!

It may be possible to print 1/72 figures on a home printer but our artistic skill are challenged by even the credible poseing of figures. Hopefully the round robin topic will show some diffrent printer results in a while.

3D printing for masters is a whole diffrent game using vastly more expensive printers. Look at Dropzone (no connection) for what can be achived with time effort and a good printer in creating masters.

I want to get into it, but dont know where to begin

Shakepear,
Start by getting some CADDS Software and drawing models. Sketchup, Turbocad, Blender (free). If you can draw solid models and enjoy it, you can get the odd print done at Shapeways if its small. If you then have the bug look at a printer.

It works like a charm if you have the right printer (renting time on a real high end printer is epensive!). We used it for cannon barrels and wheels, but everything needs still some final touch, unless you do it the Games Workshop way.

You need a really good printer to make high-quality wargames minis.

The B9 Creator is about the cheapest one you can get that has the resolution you need, unless someone has built a better one since the last time I looked.

The real killer on a 3d printer is run time and materials. If you have a state-of-the-art $10 USDk printer that will be junk in 2 years (like any other computer hardware), it will cost $0.57 USD an hour for machine depreciation, not counting electricity use, the tech's salary, or the materials.

You need to know what you actually want. Personally I think Lion in the Stars is incorrect. Wargames figures are looked at from typicaly 4 ft while playing. The fusion deposition prnters are perfectly acceptable at this range.

If you want models for show then maybe a cheap printer is not suitable. Our printer Replicator 2 is nearly 3 years old and still works fine. It has been maintined by us and costs about £1.00 GBP to run. Material is proably £0.30 GBP for a 1/144 and ususally about £1.00 GBP for say 15mm as the thickness is not increased for say 15mm.

Look ar the post "would you buy this tank". Excellent wargames models. Excessive detail is just overkill to me.

I doubt that anyone who games with minis will stop doing so and go straight to PC gaming. It's the spectacle and the socialising that make it fun. Plus I just like painting and handling minis. PC gaming is a lonely pursuit.

What is really exciting about this is the possibility that actual things could be scanned in, and then shrunk to whatever scale. For historical reasons I collect 54mm / 1:32 stuff, and often there is something I need – Japanese WW2 trucks, for example – that don't exist. All I need is a scan of a real one, or a file of such a truck made for 20mm gamers, or a 1/35 scale model, and then I just scan it in and print it out with the scale corrected to true 1/32, like you can already do with cardboard scenery.

That would be terrific and would also abolish scale incompatibility generally. A Call To Arms do nominally 1/32 Napoleonics in which the British Guards are all seven feet tall compared to the French line, and are themselves pygmies compared to Italeri 1/32. This entire issue would just disappear.

Another really cool feature might be colour compatibility of your terrain. On the front page here a few days ago was a gaming mat you can buy which is basically grass, desert etc photoprinted onto cloth or mouse-mat material. It is completely flat but the obvious issue is will your existing buildings look odd? Not if you can sample its colour palette and print buildings, hills, roads etc. to match.

Interesting times. I don't see this killing existing methods, like digital cameras killed film, BluRay killed DVD killed VHS killed BetaMax, or CD killed vinyl and was then itself killed by MP3. There are always niche users who see the superiority of the old technology, but the old – however good – always loses out to the convenient-to-use.

3D scanning still has issues; it's still not at the "just scan it in" stage. Even with commercial-quality scanning, it still requires cleanup of the model after scanning to produce a decent printable model.

However, you're correct in that once you _have_ the 3D model, scale is largely irrelevant -- barring issues with resolution, you can print the same 3D model at 6mm, 15mm, 28mm, or 54mm scales.

Color is still in its infancy. There are a couple of 3D printer designs, like the Rova4D, that feed five filaments -- cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white -- into a single hot end to mix custom colors, but the core technology is lacking; the STL file format only has geometry information (just points and triangles connecting those points), so color and material information has to be stuck on the side by hand. What 3D printing needs is an updated object file format that allows specification of both color and material to take advantage of the multifilament and color-mixing hardware that is becoming available.

@srmalloy

However, you're correct in that once you _have_ the 3D model, scale is largely irrelevant -- barring issues with resolution, you can print the same 3D model at 6mm, 15mm, 28mm, or 54mm scales.

Actually, not really. I get this question so often on the Shipyards "can you make this and this model this scale?"

It's just not as simple as taking the model and going "x2" or "x0.5."

Why? Minimum wall thickness, depth of surface detail, proportional thickness of small parts.

At 144th scale, lots of parts – e.g. machine guns, headlights, the thickness of the tracks – HAVE to be made at the minimum wall thickness of 1mm or the model just won't work. This means that those parts over necessarily over-sized for the scale.

(Also worth noting that even if you have a material that will print to less than a mm, you ar almost certainly in the realm where the thing will be incredibley fragile.)

If you scale that to 25mm, you then have machine guns that are 2mm thick and thus very obviouisly far too large. So you have to change the thickness of those parts back to 1mm (or whatever the ture size is if it's more than 1mm).

If you scale it DOWN to 6mm, not only will those parts just not then work (because they are les than half the size), you ALSO get the problem whereby the surface detail will be too shallow to be a) properly visible and b) below the level where it will print well. As what was a confortable 0.3-0.5mm at 144 is now 0.15-0.25 at 6mm.

(The reverse is not quiter as true on scaling up, as the details will be more prominent in height, but at least prinatable and visible.)

Scaling down also brings in problem where parts are either massively oversized – or you have to just omit them altogether (like MG turrets at 6mm, which would just be way too small – or the same absoilute size at at 144th, because they're already at the minimum mechanical thickness.)

(And this is all on top of having, for commercial places like Shapeways, having to rehollow out the model to a sutiable wall-thickness.)

Practical example: BMP-3 at 144th, and a quick-and-dirty (i.e. free) job I did for someone who desparaetly wanted a 72nd version.

Notice how much thicker the tracks appear on the second model? That's because that was a straight scale-up (x2) and rehollow, so they're 2mm thick.

Now, compare the IMR-2 at 144 and 100th (15mm), which I did a proper job on (which took *four hours*).

(Renders shown here, since you can acually see the proportional thicknesses.)

144

Note again the track thickness and the thickness of the bars on top of the arm, and all the mine-ploughs et al at the front.

(To see a good comparison, do a "view image" on the two images and flip between the tabs. Because these renders show at the same absolute size, you can see the proportional differences perfectly.)

So, yeah. Scaling is not at all straight forward with a complex model. It's easier to scale up than to scale down (since you primarily have to deal with aesthetic issue) – scaling down also brings in mechanical issue as well).

Now, there are printers that can do extremely fine detail. UshCha found a chap at a model railway convention who had printed, I think it was a 20mm or something figure, a train conductor, who had a band in his hand that oprinted at 0.3mm thick. While the detail is amazing, it cost about a fiver – and the chap said that the printer was just not capable of printing anything as big as a 144th scale tank.

(That's another thing to bear in mind – the practical print area of a 3D printer is often not, in reality, the same as the area of the build plate/tank/whathaveyou. The Replicator 2 we use has a huge uild plate, but if you build anything large thn about 10-15mm, it tends to pull free of the plate when the plastic contracts as it cools. This is even an issue with commerical printers over very big models.)

3D scanning still has issues; it's still not at the "just scan it in" stage. Even with commercial-quality scanning, it still requires cleanup of the model after scanning to produce a decent printable model.

To expand on what srmallot said: As part of a recent commission, I happened across and interesting paper which a gentleman was doing a university project to 3D scan a real tank, with the intention of making a 3D mesh for printing.

It took days, created a cloud of several million points (and it was still only effectively doing about one point every 5mm, so you would need a similar level of resoluton to do a scan of a model tank to get to something like one dot per 0.1-0.2mm (less than that and you may as well not bother). They also had to contend with not only the weather, but not being able to do it while the grass was being mowed (so forget it when next doors is doing his lawn or listening to loud music or something). And then they had to tidy up the model – since even the scanning technology used by places like Rolls Royce needs to have someone specfically tell it "that's an edge" before it'll actually make a proper line.

So yes, if you have a university-level scanner and are or are prepared to spend the hours to become an expert CAD modeller, you may be able to scan a model tank to print your own copies.

What you will NOT be able to do, not now, probably not ever before Star Trek magic technology, is use a 3D scanner and printer like a photocopier, just bung it in and press one button and job done.

That just ain't happening, I'm afraid. It's not a tricorder connected to a replicator.

The terminology is misleading, really; people hear "scanner" and "printer" and assume that it's akin to to printer/scanner connected to your PC; it really isn't anything like that simple. Your really not looking at the equivilent of a white-good device like a fridge or TV or something, it's much more like a car or something (or learning to cook as opposed to just using the microwave); you have to learn to use it.