"3D printed buildings" Topic

All picked from Thingyverse

A mansion and a restaurant

A barn

A church

and a factory

Thingiverse is a great resource. I've printed a number of buildings from there, ranging from 3mm to 28mm, plus have re-scaled a fair number also to fill out variety in buildings on the table. Lots of buildings by fans for a number of miniature lines no longer in print such as Epic 40K.

very nice..
How long ??

Russ Dunaway

3D printers are a long way from making an indent on miniatures, Russ, especially smaller scales. There are strength issues inherent in the X-Y-Z axis of printing, limitations on how long it takes to print an item and cleaning issues (threads, fuzz, spots, etc.).

3D printing users are akin to early PC buyers. It is not a finished, idiot proof appliance, but one that the user has to dedicate many hours and practice to actually create something, with a fairly high failure rate early on. Granted, that once you get over the learning curve, it is pretty smooth sailing, but I still spend days every few months resetting and calibrating my printer, experiencing maintenance issues and struggling with the various issues that filament can have on what you intended to print.

The larger the object wanted, the easier (and longer it takes) to do. Right now terrain is pretty much a straight forward print job, but it takes many hours, even days to print a large object, subject to possible bad files, electricity outages, noise while operating, jams, broken filament, etc., but when it does work right, you get gems like the above.

Thanks Dan, this is exactly my feeling. I'll just add that you can somewhat take care of (short) electricity outages with an ondulator : I've learned painfully why it matters!

The longest one was the church : it took 3 days to print everything at a fairly low resolution. The factory, restaurant and château took around 2 days each : they're much simpler, and were printed at a higher resolution. The barn took around a day.

I can't speak to filament-based 3D printing but resins and 3D resin printers have come on leaps and bounds. The quality and resolution of prints is amazing. Here are some resin-printed 6mm British riflemen from the Napoleonic Period:

And a closer view, which shows that the quality of my painting is more of a limitation than the 3D prints themselves:

Robert

Monk. Those look nice, but for a 10er you could have just gotten the same thing in the mail?
What about getting the entire OB for the battle of Leipzig????
At this point it seems to me that 3d printing on this level is still a hobby unto itself?

Russ Dunaway

Russ, the full range of riflemen cost me less than £1.00 GBP As for a major battle, it is not a problem to print off thousands of figures:

Painting them all is another matter… But that is true for metal figures too. Colour 3D printing is already possible but not outside industrial applications so far, from an affordability perspective as a 'hobby' user.

Robert

Those are amazing, Monk. May I ask which model of 3d printer you use?

I use a FormLabs Form 3 printer but you can get the same quality prints from an Elegoo Mars Pro 2 for example.

Robert

Ok, thanks. I'll have a look at those.