"It may be bleeding edge now, give it time" Topic

Now this is color printing!

youtu.be/4IkvzMJihuY

Its the price, atm. Once this trickles down to become standard, the hobby will change.

+1 Puster. Not yet time to dump your Vallejo paints but hope its sooner than later.

Wow! And price and quality are only going to improve.

Incredible!

It was always only going to be a matter of time, now we just need the price to come down. In the meantime it would be great to see a few full colour wargames figures in a range of scales.

I like how they came at from the 2d printing side (which they used to call just 'Printing"), so they had a different perspective. Just wow.

I'm going to have a lot of fun when those get down to $1,000. USD

"It's not a cheap technology, it's not a fast technology…"

No kidding.

That will take a lot of joy out of the hobby for those of us that enjoy painting.

This will be fantastic!

I'm in!

You can always keep painting if you enjoy it. This technology is incredible.

I don't think it will take away the joy of painting. Some people will paint figures on their screens, then print them (or more likely have them printed by a service). People who love to paint will still paint, and they'll have more choices than others. Fun skills get practiced long after they are necessary. Insert Morris Dancing joke.

Hmmm, I might have to wait a bit before I restart my 6mm collection :~}

Cheers,
John

So at some point you'll see an incredible diorama that in the past would have taken years of practice and work perfecting various techniques to get a great result but it will just be something churned out by a printer with no skill involved. Kind of depressing to be honest

no skill involved

Or maybe no human! Probably not my lifetime but PrintGPT will be here and you'll type "28mm French Grenadier standing firing"

It will be like the old No picture catalogs 😝

Well, it won't be "no skill or talent involved." Someone still has to create a 3D image which will be the model, and that is not trivial. (Go ahead, Average Tabletop Schmoe— get some 3D software and casually generate a convincing Romano-British era Pict warrior… Yeah, right.)

Now one day it might indeed reach Star Trek replicator level, where one says, "Computer, build me an army worthy of Mordor," and out comes a full complement of Uruk-Hai, but no one's going to hold off making traditional miniatures while awaiting that day.

You're right Parvizal, there will be skill involved, but not on the part of the diorama assembler/owner in my example. Kind of like buying a great painting by a talented painter and then scrawling your own signature over his in the lower corner so that everyone thinks you did it. A huge part of why I love this hobby is seeing other people's awesome figs, vehicles, dioramas etc. and marveling at the skill, creativity and hard work that went into them, as well as pushing myself to continually improve my own work and the satisfaction I get from doing something well. But I guess I'm just shaking my fist at the sky, what's going to happen is going to happen.

I dunno— I think people will still be drawn to painting figs and constructing various terrain elements. But a lot of that in the hobby today is necessity, not desire. I paint, but I enjoy having done it more than I enjoy doing it; if I had a way to produce painted figs without the eye strain and time at the same level of cost as I expend today, I'd snatch at it gladly. I'm a gamer, not a modeler or an artist.
But there are many others here who like the challenge of crafting terrain and even figures, and enjoy producing elaborate effects. I don't think that will ever truly go away.
But if it does, all things have a season, and it matters not to me what others in the future do for their own amusement. And on the gaming side, ease of production of table-ready elements will only boost the number of players. We might indeed see a further split among those whose interest is the craft and those whose interest is the game, but that distinction already exists, so I foresee little change.

It is an irony of mankind that we are often proud of things with which we had no hand in creating— the new car, the house, our clothing, the victories of a favored sports team— yet many of these elements of undeserved pride we take for granted and neither condemn in ourselves or in others. That's just human nature.

"taken years of practice and work perfecting various techniques to get a great result but it will just be something churned out by a printer with no skill"

Its called a camera.

"Star Trek replicator level"

There was still plenty of art going on there, painting, sculpting, so on. I even like to think the chief might have gotten around to painting those Alamo figures too.

"36 figure unit of Highlanders"

I'm sorry, but there can only be one.

This should actually be good, as it will widen the line between hobbyists and non.

Its gotten as ridiculous as having a paint chemists board. Hmm…, where's that then?