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Saw a Space Marine printed on one of these last night:

http://printm3d.com

Could not tell the difference between it and an authentic GW mini. Detailed chestplate, grenades had the proper lines, bolter had appropriate details, etc. Going back to get pics this weekend.

The guy who made it told me cleaning the surface after the print was the hardest part and involved X-Acto knife kung-fu. Each mini cost about $0.10 a piece, after accounting for a few misprints, and he used a material called ABS.

He also printed some Orks in translucent purple. They were not as impressive, but it may have been because none of them were painted.

Anyhow... might be getting one of these.

I don't think Dakka is too keen on threads discussing active IP infringement.

Though, one thing it would be nice for is homebrew units and units for which rules exist but models don't.

I mean, it's a cool concept. But for the most part it's pretty easy to print out novels and books that are high quality but in general people don't really do that. But hopefully it gets to a tipping point where maybe GW will drop their prices.

Let's assume that you want to print legal stuff instead, and continue this conversation.
3d printing is really cool for terrain and civilian vehicles etc.

But I can't get my head around the cost of it. Printing seems to be dirt cheap if you have one. I don't have one and all the printer services are not even in the same price range. Things will cost 30€ instead of 0.3€ . Is there any better way to get your stuff printed ?

Ignoring that this sort of IP infringement is illegal in most of the developed world...

In all fairness, prints DON'T cost $0.10 per dude. They require a horrendous amount of clean up work and definitely don't match GW production detail straight out of the box. My time is worth something. I don't want to have to do "X-Acto knife kung-fu". Instead of spending X hours printing and cleaning 10 marines, I'd rather get a part time job and simply buy a Tactical Squad box.

I think current technology is great for printing "rough" terrain, like rubble, or bombed-out walls and stuff. I'd like a 3D printer just for that.

I'm skeptical, though I'm a rank amateur at 3d modeling/printing. I've got that same printer and I haven't been able to get any detail on infantry scale to come out correctly. I use it for vehicle parts and terrain.

Assuming we're talking about legal 3D printing then...

It is very likely the future of gaming models. As it stands now though it's a bit pricey and time consuming to get high quality models. Sure if you have a brilliant $10K super 3D printer it's probably great.

Cheap 3D printers from Amazon? Probably not so much. It's brilliant tech and will eventually be a staple in every house-hold. A super high definition 3D printer is capable of amazing results, but that's well beyond the average household's ability.

Personally I would only do 3d printing for large projects like Titans and fortresses, as others have said it takes too much time for very little detail to print infantry models.

On a side note, do you think the faculty would noticed if I accidently programmed the uni's engineering department's state of the art 3d printer to print parts of an emperor class titan... Accidently...

https://www.engadget.com/2016/02/01/study-shows-some-3d-printing-fumes-can-be-harmful/

Post this here, and let you make judgement calls like adults.

I might get a 3d-printer at some point in the future, but only if I can justify using it for work. Which is more likely than you might think, seeing how I'm an architect and I like building my own models.

It is however highly unlikely I'll ever use it to acquire bootleg GW miniatures. From what I've seen so far, I'm more in the terrain and civilian vehicles camp, because the surfaces you get with 3d-printing at the moment are simply too grainy and crude, and the clean-up is likely to erase vital details.

And either way, it's still too much work and I'd rather pay for a better outset, when I want to assemble a miniature.

All in all, with the expected cost of a 3d-printer, you will need to use it a lot before you've "saved" any money, not to mention before your machine is made obsolete by better versions.

"$0.10 per dude" doesn't account for the price of this $4000 3D printer setup or the time in creating the digital assets. While there maybe some models that more efficiently justify that cost you are talking about printing a lot of models.

I think the truly custom model making opportunities are great and the satisfaction of that has a value in itself but saving money isn't something this helps with.

Yep, though, I can see myself skirting the edge ...I would totally like to print up wreaks and wounded.

If you bought a printer... And then designed your model...

All into the system.

It ain't gonna be cheap to make a model. Need to make hundreds upon hundreds to breaks even.

What I would really like to see is the parts this guy is claiming were printed. I know it's not his and what not. But to make a decision of purchasing a 3d printer to make anything from custom bits to kitbash with GW models or terrain or whatever I would want to see the process.

What do these things look like when they come off the heating plate?

What kind of clean up do they need?

Show me a couple steps of painting so I can see how smooth the paint is when applied.

The resolution keeps getting better and better and I have no doubt that some printers out there are capable of making infantry (maybe not for less then $1k yet... maybe this one is capable... hard to say), but I need to see it in action first so I understand what I am paying for.

I love kitbashes. I would absolutely design some of my own nids. I would even make a few new poses for Nid infantry so that my gaunts and gants were not all left leg down or right leg down. Still use GW heads and weapon arms but just to get some damn variety in there.

I would also love to produce some Necron Warrior legs that didn't look like they were popping a squat without all the work of chopping, repositioning, glue, green stuff...

You don't need to be making models wholesale to get some really good use out of one of these.

In fairness I've seen models printed with this type of printer and they are as good if you know how to clean them properly. I've gotten FW models where the cast had print lines from the printed production master that were bigger than what I've seen off of one of these printers.

 aka_mythos wrote:
In fairness I've seen models printed with this type of printer and they are as good if you know how to clean them properly. I've gotten FW models where the cast had print lines from the printed production master that were bigger than what I've seen off of one of these printers.

So what is "how to clean them properly"? What amount of extra work are we talking?

Like all 3D printing there is an extensive layer of support material that must be trimmed carefully. The whole model is washed in a bath of denatured alcohol, then rinsed and allowed to dry. Denatured alcohol can then be selectively applied in areas with residual print lines. Between that and sanding a number days later experience dictates how well print lines are eliminated without obliterating details. Sanding occurs a number of days after the printing to guarantee the resin has completely cured.

Support material can be no different then clipping from a spru or cleaning up a resin model. No issue there. But the layer lines...

Yup. Not worth it yet. Some of the professional machines have the resolution needed to make fine detailed mini parts, but the resolution just isn't quite there yet at the 3-500 price point. Il wait another couple years.

Support material is more extensive than a sprue.

 aka_mythos wrote:
Support material is more extensive than a sprue.

Depends on if your printing the model in one piece of slicing it properly. You could build multi part 3d models that get sliced in half for each piece and printed mid section down.

A scything Talon arm could very easily be 2 parts. 1/2 the outside of the arm the other the inside with the "ball" to go into the shoulder socket. A smidge of glue and a little clean up and it's no different from the seams you get in the plastic molds as is.

Cut the models up logically and there may be no support material.

I think it's fair to say we are in the Dot Matrix days of 3D home printing. Give it about 10-15 years and we may have affordable home printers that can do acceptable tabletop quality, and high-end printers that can spit out commercial quality.

I've ordered a few things from Shapeways, and they turned out quite nice, but I haven't seen anything home printed that would make me go out and get a 3D printer just yet.

I think 10-15 is extreme considering the progress made in the last year. I would be shocked if it's more than 3.

 oldzoggy wrote:
Let's assume that you want to print legal stuff instead, and continue this conversation.
3d printing is really cool for terrain and civilian vehicles etc.

But I can't get my head around the cost of it. Printing seems to be dirt cheap if you have one. I don't have one and all the printer services are not even in the same price range. Things will cost 30€ instead of 0.3€ . Is there any better way to get your stuff printed ?

There's different kinds of 3d printing techniques. The consumer printers for home usually print by depositing layers of molten material (usually a type of plastic) to create a 3d model. It's the cheapest printing method but still yields the crudest results, prints have visible and tangible 'ridges' between deposited layers.

Industrial print shops and commercial services tend to use laser sintering (where a laser is used to fuse very fine dust into layers) or a method where light is used to selectively solidify a liquid resin. Both these methods are more expensive and customers are also charged for overhead like maintenance, failed prints, personnel costs, machine time (high detail prints can keep a printer busy all night for something the size of a 28mm mini) etc.

Sintering and resin are the two only printing techniques that come remotely close to printing wargaming quality mini's. Consumer printers simply don't have an acceptable level of detail yet and take hours of post processing.

I have just bitten the bullet and ordered a Prusa Mk2, to print off fantasy scenery.
Looking through the materials list and settings available, there are loads of ways to print off a model, even with a single printer.
Resolution affects print time (a titan would take weeks to print. Get a part-time job instead). Halve the resolution and you double the time.
Some filament types can be sanded easily, and others are washed to smooth the lines away.
At roughly £20 to £40 per kilo of material, that is the raw cost of a model. Add in some for support frames and such, and the rest is mostly time spent settings up, binning duff prints, and cleaning up.

I have all this to come, and people who own one will correct me, but up-front costs should even out after a while, what with more than models getting printed.

A friend bought a 3D printer for about 800€ (not only for the hobby, of course - that would be too expensive ^^). Online he found several predesigned equivalents of GW-structures, like the Aegis or other battlefield-equipment. The main problem here is, that there is not enough space in there to print huge buildings, so you would have to print bigger models in several sections and glue it together.
Another "problem" is the inbuild scanner that can not scan those details GW is producing (and of course will have problems with painted parts...). So just scanning GW-Models would not work anyway. ^^ If you design those models by yourself, the printer works perfectly fine with some really nice details.

Print-bed size was a big decider for me. Resolution and filament types were the others.

I'm not aware of any filament based system with the print resolution to print quality miniatures. Laser SLA are the only systems I've seen with enough resolution.

 Kriswall wrote:
Ignoring that this sort of IP infringement is illegal in most of the developed world...

In all fairness, prints DON'T cost $0.10 per dude. They require a horrendous amount of clean up work and definitely don't match GW production detail straight out of the box. My time is worth something. I don't want to have to do "X-Acto knife kung-fu". Instead of spending X hours printing and cleaning 10 marines, I'd rather get a part time job and simply buy a Tactical Squad box.

In most parts of the developed world, this sort of IP infringement is illegal when you produce a product for sale. But it's not illegal to produce something for personal use, which makes it more like a work of art. That's why people don't go to jail for drawing Space Marines.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 aka_mythos wrote:
"$0.10 per dude" doesn't account for the price of this $4000 3D printer setup or the time in creating the digital assets. While there maybe some models that more efficiently justify that cost you are talking about printing a lot of models.

I think the truly custom model making opportunities are great and the satisfaction of that has a value in itself but saving money isn't something this helps with.

The printer cost $300, and the materials cost $29 for a spool. The $0.10 comes from the amount of materials used, which includes the cost of misprints.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 pumaman1 wrote:
https://www.engadget.com/2016/02/01/study-shows-some-3d-printing-fumes-can-be-harmful/

Post this here, and let you make judgement calls like adults.

This is FUD. The fumes are no different from the emulsion process typesetters used to use with Compuserve Editwriters to print text, before desktop publishing became a thing. It makes the room smell a little funny, but it clears up quickly when you are not printing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lance845 wrote:

 aka_mythos wrote:
In fairness I've seen models printed with this type of printer and they are as good if you know how to clean them properly. I've gotten FW models where the cast had print lines from the printed production master that were bigger than what I've seen off of one of these printers.

So what is "how to clean them properly"? What amount of extra work are we talking?

Good question. There's a mini on the front page of the website that shows the level of detail you can get out of the box.

The unpainted shoulder pads I saw had little lines over the smooth surface, which he was able to buff out with sandpaper. Some of the edges were not that sharp, so he was going around the edges to make them more crisp. I also saw him run the Xacto over the rivets in the grenades to give them deep lines, and dig into the skulls on the chestplate to make the armor more detailed.

Anyone who remembers the original Space Marines boxed set will recall having to do about the same with the beaky sprues.