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Hello everyone. I’m thinking about getting back into Warhammer Fantasy/9th age and am trying to figure out the most fun/cost effective way to go about it. I’m wondering how much the resin would cost to print a full size army with a good printer like the Saturn S?
The problem is "army" is a highly variable term. Just 2K points; a full varied roster of choices; multiple builds or one etc...
Furthermore some armies are more model heavy than others, so an elite style army won't use as much resin as horde army.
The other thing is fails and learning curve, you can easily lose a bottle of resin if you hit a lot of errors when learning. All kinds of things from learning exposure to supports to realising about temperature etc...
Plus don't forget ontop of the printer you need safety gear and processing gear - IPA, curing setup, gloves, mask, goggles etc..... Which can all add up to quite a fair bit, though many of them are one time costs.
Finally the type of resin you use can have a huge impact. There are cheap resins and there are very expensive resins. Properties and performance varies across the range. For models you could be looking at anything £30 and up for a bottle/bag of resin.
In general I'd say for 1 single army a 3D printer probably isn't much different in price than buying the models. At least assuming you're buying current models, for old world going secondhand could raise the costs these days (limited supply, esp if you want unpainted, doubly so if you want unbuilt). Though there's a few armies still sold by GW (eg Skaven and Lizardmen and honestly almost all of the Dark Elf line) and there's always Kings of War and such for other fantasy models for rank and file games.
That said if you want to get into 3D printing its fantastic. I wouldn't think of it as "cheaper" instead think of it as gaining access to alternative models whilst also being a hobby in its own right. There is a skill to learn and things you have to work out to get the best out of a 3D printer. It's very rewarding and the results are fantastic.
ps if I were getting a printer now for efficient army printing. Saturn 2 or Phrozen Mighty 8k. Both are 8K resolution printers with similar build plates - the Saturn 2 is the cheaper by far and would be a fantastic printer.
Printer £250 for a decent smaller format one
Stls between £50-£100 probably to get a full army range
Resin £60 for two bottles that should print 100 models or more even allowing for some fails
Protective kit £50 for disposable gloves and a decent face mask
Some kind of post processing stuff such as pickle jars and strainers and suchlike £30
UV curing kit £30 (optional if you have a handy windowsill)
Probably talking £500 overall to print a whole fantasy army, which is probably comparable to getting plastics. However the second army will only cost resin amd whatever stls you fancy, and it opens the door to ultra cheap scenery as there are so many free options for fantasy buildings and gubbins.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and paper towels… lots of paper towels…
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/08/24 19:27:20
Please excuse any spelling errors. I use a tablet frequently and software keyboards are a pain!
If the army you want is currently or soon to be done by a patreon or Kickstarter you can get a whole army for almost nothing.
However if the army you want is already done or there's no one doing it fresh right now, then the STLs can be a fairly decent chunk of cash. Granted each one you buy you can print as many times as you want and many stores go on 50% or so sales and you can often get just as good if you support their patreon (so if you're getting a lot of STLs at once, backing a stores patreon for one month can easily save you a lot).
As an aside right now there's a sale on My Mini Factory where most are offering around 50% off so now would be a pretty sweet time to jump on board.
One thought, small format printers are great, but big things like dragons (wings) and tanks can be more difficult to print; sometimes requiring more post-printing work to glue them together and then clean up the joins. A Saturn sized printer would certainly be far better (its one reason I want one - to print dragon wings in one part and tanks in a sane span of time).
Overread wrote: I wouldn't think of it as "cheaper" instead think of it as gaining access to alternative models whilst also being a hobby in its own right.
I got into printing because I like cool sculpts and the coolest sculpts I was seeing were very rarely being made by traditional companies. And now I spend a lot more every month on sculpts I probably will never print, let alone paint, than I used to on minis
Anyway, I think it's fair to say that your first fully printed army will more or less cost what a traditional army would cost, between the printer and sculpts and resin and IPA and feth ups. But your second army, well, that's another story
Speaking of printing for WHFB/T9A, be sure to check out Lost Kingdom (https://www.lostkingdomminiatures.com/en/) and Last Sword (https://lastsword.com/shop-digitalfiles-miniatures/), which are very cool and designed for those uses. Then there are many Patreon-based sculptors who are great for WHFB or KOW - Titan Forge, Artisan Guild, Clay Beast Creation, One Page Rules to list a very few who design with rank-n-flank in mind. Obviously you can use plenty of the more RPG-centric stuff as well, thanks to being able to adjust the scale digitally or slice things up or whatever you need to make it work for a more mass battle wargame.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/08/24 19:58:41
I've not backed Lost Kingdom but I do want their lizardmen, however the one or two models I've got from them through promotional exchanges* had some sculpting errors** that I was surprised to see from a firm that long in the market.
Last Sword make some really neat stuff. I was originally backing them just for their lizardmen, but recently shifted to backing all their stuff from patreon.
Heck look at this beauty on their webstore (released much earlier on patreon).
Spoiler:
*a lot of patreons "swap" one or two models with each other as a means of cross marketing
**Quite a lot of hollows in the model. This is a problem because any region that can pool wet resin which can't be washed out (because its a sealed hole) will store that wet resin and at some point that resin will react with the cured resin and split the model open. This can take weeks/months to manifest.
If you didn't have the printer, what models would you be buying and how big of an army?
In terms of raw resin, I haven't tried to see how far my resin goes. Certainly the first bottle didn't go very far due to fails, cleaning the vat, and losing some while trying to poor it back into the bottle. Looking at youtubers who have tested it, one video got about 30 models from a bottle but they were quite large and detailed and a mix of cavalry and infantry. Another got 70 models, a couple of large models but also a lot of basic Empire-looking dudes that look like they didn't need many supports and probably didn't take much resin to print. So that's probably roughly the range you can expect from a single bottle (after you've got everything dialled in and aren't losing lots of resin to fails and excessive cleaning).
But yeah, then you have to add your FEPs, cleaning materials, PPE (gloves, masks, mask cartridges). There's probably also some electricity costs in there, I've never bothered hooking mine up to a power meter to check but a review of the Mono X commented that it used 75W, which depending on how much you pay for electricity might be a couple of dollars over the course of an entire army. If you're printing somewhere cold like your shed then you may want to set up some sort of heating system which might add to the power costs.
The cost of STLs can range from free to cheap to reasonably expensive. Some STLs cost more than it would be to buy a similar physical model, of course you can print multiple of them once you have the STL, but it all adds up. I've been doing some 15mm stuff and Forest Dragon charges $60-70 for an army. A Cromarty 10mm scale Lizardmen army is £50. If you jump on Last Sword, you might be looking at 5 euro for a small character up to 20 euro for enough STLs to make a regiment. You could easily spend a few hundred dollars to get a whole army's worth of STLs, but that would be on the upper end.
But then my Epic 40k stuff and Battlefleet Gothic, I've gotten pretty much all of it for free so far, and some I've made myself (or more likely edited existing files to better suit my needs).
I'd say my initial set up costs were more than I was expecting, and I probably spent more than what I'd call a typical army on just the initial setup. But after that it gets a lot cheaper, but still costs something.
For me personally, if I could buy an army instead of printing it and the price wasn't too insane, I'd just buy it. I bought the printer for stuff I can't just buy off the shelf, either because it's not been made or is now OOP.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2022/08/25 03:58:59
I think "To get models cheaper" is the wrong reason to get into 3D printing.
For one it is not as cheap as you might think as there are hidden costs and it might take some time 'til you have refined the processes so that it is really hassle free printing.
Sometimes it might just be easier and faster to go out, buy and assemble the model, than finding an STL get aggravated about the supports and/or missing details and printing it in 6 hours (depending on size) just to print it again because of whatever.
If money saved is the only reward you get from 3D printing I would probably leave it alone.
My experience is per 1k bottle, running anywhere from $25-$35 you would get between 50-75 standard models. If they are bulky, maybe a little less. This means they will be on the high average about .70 each and on the low average .33 each for standard infantry-type. Your mileage may differ...
If you already have the printer and you do not factor this into the cost (and do not factor in any costs for the STLs - you can find many free, but the awesome sculpts will cost money, either buying outright or via an artists Patreon), then it would certainly be fairly economical; however, as others have said factoring in everything you may not be saving much at all and adding the complexity, and the frequent headache, of 3D printing. IMHO, I would not give it up for the world for the flexibility and sheer pleasure it gives me to print my own stuff!!
Boss Salvage wrote: Speaking of how much you can get from one bottle, this might be instructive:
This dude is a pretty recent printer who got into it for mini printing, including wargame scale.
That's actually the dude I had in mind when I said "Another got 70 models, a couple of large models but also a lot of basic Empire-looking dudes that look like they didn't need many supports and probably didn't take much resin to print."
Supports do add up, if you have models that are designed to not need many they'll take a lot less resin. The guy who only got 30 looked to be printing a lot of very detailed models that likely needed a lot of supports.
I just printed MKIII Marines with Chain Bajonet. They need a lot of supports. About 4 Sets of 24 models each per bottle. The slicer says there should still be 20% in the bottle. They are not, because you lose some with spill and clinging in nooks and crannies. You might get another 10 out of the rest.
4 Predators need also about a bottle of resin.
Of course only if you have a good run and it's not too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold, the build plate is parallel and the fep sheet clean and tight and the gods honour the sacrifice of whatever you thought was fitting
Cadre Coronal Afterglow w1;d0;l0 
