Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Tycho wrote:

What pretty much everyone always overlooks here is the input. You can't stand in front of a printer and say "Make me a Mortis Engine". It's not the Star Trek food computer. You have to have solid input which means understanding undercuts and draft lines if you're molding/casting the result. It means understanding how to make something water-tight and knowing your thicknesses and what the tolerances of your printer and substrate are. All of that is just on top of having the actual talent to be able to produce a good sculpt.

Some have said "Well then I'll just go to a service like Turbo Squid." Good luck with that. It's rare to find a model on that service that works for a basic animation. Let alone an actual print. Others have said "I'll get a 3D scanner too". Despite having been out longer than 3d printers, 3D scanners are still a ways off from being affordable at the consumer level and even the high-end ones produce results that need to be cleaned up in a 3D program.

This and this again. I dabble in 3D modeling, and while I find it fairly easy to do hard bodies like buildings, vehicles, and objects (depending on complexity of curves, obviously), soft bodies like people and clothing are bloody hard. People will probably start printing their own bits, which already has a 3rd party market, long before they start printing their own troops.

Also, on the Turbo Squid comment, I agree -- to use a Turbo Squid model in your own stuff you're either paying boatloads for it to work properly and look good, or you're spending time touching it up and adjusting it to fit your own project (especially where polycount is an issue, but it generally isn't in 3D printing), which requires some of the knowledge to build the 3D models in the first place.

Finally, I'm glad you didn't mention cost of software to model in -- yes, Maya, Z-brush, Mudbox, etc. are expensive, but Google SketchUp, Blender, and Sculptris are free-fifty-free, and can produce print-quality models.