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Since the reprap hit the market, most miniature forums have been discussing how the hobby can be furthered with the technology.
Various threads here on dakka have been shat upon saying that the 3d printers aren't good enough, but yet the site shapeways is full to the brim of models and third party parts to fill the need, heck there's even simple engine models on there.
so lads, lassies, is this the tipping point? (edit: its a run of the mill minotaur, not a co-bleeepin-righted work of something else)

cheap, unlimited figurines for our wargaming fetish.

contention?
Is this feasible, have we reached the tipping point? where do we go from here?

The pictures are of the render right? What does the real think look like? But yes, it looks good.

Howard A Treesong wrote:The pictures are of the render right? What does the real think look like? But yes, it looks good.

the pics w. black bg is a photographed 3d print.

In which cases, wow.

There's some real opportunities here to make niche interest items that would be unprofitable with standard metal/plastic casting. For instance I see someone has made a star trek type craft. There are loads of variants of these and I imagine that a company would struggle to do a standard production run of them. Yet here, someone makes a render and they can be produced as one-offs, meaning that even if only a very few customers want them, they can have them. Most models need a demand of hundreds or thousands before it it worthwhile sculpting and creating moulds for them, especially if there is licencing involved.

As I understand it, the current issue with 3d printing is the piece that comes out of the printer still needs a large amount of work to file/sand to make it into a production ready piece. Meaning that you upload the "sculpt" and print it out. The piece you receive is not a finished piece. You then need to file/sand the piece down and fix any other minor imperfections before it's ready for a mould.

As it stands, this example doesn't clarify if the issues is addressed because there's no way to know if the piece has been worked on between the printing and photo.

xcasex wrote:the pics w. black bg is a photographed 3d print.

It looks an awful lot like a render to me. The lighting on the base is all wrong for a physical model.

The issue with 3D printing has never really been that it couldn't work well enough for miniatures, but simply that printers with a fine enough resolution were too expensive.

Like any new technology, that changes as the tech gets more established. Once upon a time, laser printers were out of reach of most home offices. Now, you can them up ridiculously cheap. 3D printers will follow the same trend... They'll keep getting better, and cheaper, and more readily available.

There are quite a few miniatures companies out there already using 3D printing for their master models. I don't think we're too many years away from being able to print miniatures on demand.

neat!

I'd use anything that worked!