3D printing for miniatures gaming

[bigglesworth]

Is possibly one of the most interesting ideas I've heard about for the hobby in a long time.

As far as I'm aware, a 3D printer of reasonable print quality is about $2000. Shapeways offers printing of various things at various prices, comparable to those of some miniature manufacturers. Here's an example of a 3D print:



And a Last Exile vanship from Shapeways:


Now I know xkcd has a lot of people up on technical business like 3D printing. What do you think?

[Okita]

From my understanding, it's still kind of prohibitively expensive to print out figurines. I think the cheap way to go about doing it would be to just have a couple of generic figurines in a single color but honestly, I suspect that sort of market already exists (when not overpriced by say Games Workshop or WoTC).

I think though that eventually people will have open-sourced games where you can 3-D print the pieces you want/need. Hell, 3-D printing means never having to worry too much about lost pieces ever again.

I also think you'll get more bang out of it using the printing now to make your own customized character but most of the costs in that is probably due to design, as opposed to production (if you kept it monochromatic and not too large). That market exists too come to think of it (like those people who will print your WoW character).

[skeptical scientist]

Here is someone who sculpted and printed his own Typhon for the game Hordes. Sadly, it's a derivative work under copyright law, so it's illegal for him to share his model for others to print.
Render:


Print:

He says in the thread that it cost him $150 to have it printed. The original Typhon model costs $50 from the manufacturer, although to be fair, the official version is a bit smaller. So if they produced this model, it would probably be in the $50-$75 range, meaning the 3-d printed version costs 2-3x as much as the cast version, if you're paying someone else to do it. So if some company produces the minis you want, and sells enough of them to justify making molds and doing casting, it would be much cheaper to buy them cast rather than printed.

3-d printing really only makes sense if you're a digital sculptor who wants to make a one-off for yourself, or a small run for some friends, as opposed to a company putting out a larger line. Based on the prices I've seen for minis online, I suspect that even a limited edition run of a few hundred is much cheaper to cast than it would be to print. Multiple miniatures companies (including Privateer Press and Games Workshop) do use digital sculpting/3d printing in order to design their minis, but they always cast them rather than printing them once the design is finished.

[Izawwlgood]

So, the bio lab I TA'd for had a 3D printer that they used for printing off pymol models of proteins. It was my understanding that each print out cost approximately 20 bucks in materials, but that the cost in materials was A ) going down, and B ) there were 'cheap' materials that were approximately half as expensive and simply slightly less durable.

My observations of the printed model that I had commissioned for my boss is that the rounded edges are tricky. This may be a property of the printer my school bought, or of the resolution of the pymol model I downloaded. An advertised example they print off is an outer wheel interlocked to an inner wheel with ball bearings in between them, and everything on it was smooth as smooth could be.

Personally I think it'd be really neat for a company to release a license for printing off x number of models (especially if you throw up slightly customizable models!), and allow game stores to print them at slightly above materials cost. Given the ease of modularity (demon wings? shoulder cannon? big fucking broadsword? dual pistols?) a CAD or similar file would have, it seems like a lot of money could be had.

[skeptical scientist]

Personally I think it'd be really neat for a company to release a license for printing off x number of models (especially if you throw up slightly customizable models!), and allow game stores to print them at slightly above materials cost. Given the ease of modularity (demon wings? shoulder cannon? big fucking broadsword? dual pistols?) a CAD or similar file would have, it seems like a lot of money could be had.

Well, the game store probably can't afford to print them at slightly above materials cost, as they need to pay for the 3-d printer, their rent, employees, etc., and still make a profit. Game stores are notoriously unprofitable as-is (nearly all of my favorite game stores are now closed; the only one that is still open is less than a year old). Based on the discounts you can get from shopping at online retailers, I suspect that brick and mortar game stores charge around double what they pay the distributor, so 50% of the customer's price goes directly to the store. That means they would also have to charge around double the materials cost (plus licensing fee) for models they print. Remember, their customers generally have $x/month to spend on games, and every dollar they spend on 3-d printed models is one less dollar they spend on other games. If the store is making significantly fewer cents on the dollar for 3-d printed models, that's a very bad deal for the store. So you should assume the same percentage retailer mark-up either way.

At that point, I suspect a plastic kit offering all the customizability you describe in a single kit (such as a lot of GW plastic kits which can be assembled with multiple weapon/gear options, or the PP heavy warjack kits which can be assembled into one of 3-4 different warjacks) would still be cheaper to produce than printing out just one option. It also allows the customer to magnetize the various options in order to swap between them, or to save the extra pieces to use in future projects.

[EdgarJPublius]

The Makerbot Thing-O-Matic is only 1,100 dollars for a full kit. The Reprap Prusa Mendel can be a bit cheaper, sometimes as low as 5-600 dollars fully assembled, and even cheaper if you source your own parts.

Both of these options have good 'stock' capabilities, and are cheaply modifiable for very high resolution printing (mostly software/configuration tweaks).

The print material for both is inexpensive ABS filament which costs about 40-50 dollars per Kg. In my experience, a typical gaming miniature should cost no more than a dollar in material and thirty to forty-five minutes of machine time.

However, these machines aren't really capable of 'supported' printing (where soluble support material is used to allow for complex shapes and over-hangs to be printed) without extensive modification. You could do something like the tank in the first image easily, but the vanship and Typhon prints would need to be printed in parts and assembled.

There are a few 'hobbyist' grade machines capable of multi-material printing, such as the Makerbot Replicator (1,800 dollars or so). These make printing with support material much easier (though currently this still a new technique for these machines, so it's not fully supported in the software. I expect that in a few months it won't be a problem). It's a bit more expensive and time consuming (water soluble PVA support material is about twice as expensive as ABS) but still considerably easier and cheaper than using nylon or some hideously expensive resin techniques (I don't think nylon is that much more expensive than ABS, but it take longer to print with and is a bit more finicky. Resin is generally very easy to print with, but is like a minimum of 100x as expensive as ABS and isn't nearly as tough as either Nylon or ABS).

[bigglesworth]

Considering the usual method of assembling your miniatures, there shouldn't be any problem with having to attach different parts together. The big idea is to have original/personalised miniatures I think, rather than making it easier or cheaper necessarily. Additionally, the correct materials to compare the feedstock types with is soft pewter, resin or polystyrene rather than toy-grade materials.