3D Printing Mins

>>49951382
I give it a decade before people start printing minis on the reg.

>>49951382
Those look horrible

>>49951382
We have the technology but it's still fairly immature. You can get great results at a terrible price - if you've got a good render that's intelligently laid out, you can get a phenomenal print from Shapeways in Frosted Ultra Detail that's as good or better than most of what you used to be able get in pewter - but it's more expensive than Forge World.

Five years ago I would've told you we'd be able to 3d print miniatures in five years, today I'll tell you that it'll be affordable in five years. It's already almost competitive and the ability to print on demand with no significant overhead in the form of masters or molds is great for small run, super-specific bits like shoulder pads and weapons. It's not there, yet, for entire armies.

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>>49951382
>OhItsThisThreadAgain.jpeg

>>49951382
Maybe the Rhinos are okay.

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>>49951382

>Vice
Uh huh.
Please leave

>>49951382
Consumer grade 3d printers aren't even close to good enough yet and if your talking about a company using a commercial printer to do print to order than there's zero advantage over injection molding once you have sufficient production scale. Years, if not decades, away.

>>49953285
>>49951603

>Years, if not decades, away.

Oh you.
3d printing is already capable of producing crisp enough results that miniature companies are 3d printing prototype molds an even master molds.

The problem is that people only look at the 3d printing part.

3d printing 100 space marines at ultra fine detail in the best material is not cost effective.

3D printing a batch with all the parts for a space marine, and then making a silicone mold of those parts to use for casting infinity space marines in resin is already possible and cheap. People just can't be arsed, despite consumer grade silicone already being good enough to use without costy equipment like vacuum chambers and good resing being like 20 bucks for 200+ 28mm minis worth of material. .

>>49953436
It's already cheap to just recast off a commercially bought mini if you have the tools and knowledge to do that. 3d printing doesn't change that. My point isnt that you CANT do this. Just that it's a long way from significantly effecting the market which is the point of OPs article. It has to get to the point of being cheap, convienient, and with sufficiently high quality before that happens.

People didn't stop buying books because they had the internet and printers and technically could print out a book for them to read. It took sufficiently good e-readers and tablets before people started shifting to ebooks.

>>49953436
What you're describing is rapid prototyping and it has existed for thirty years. Games Workshop has had a selective laser sinter in the studio since at least 2004, they use it to turn out... rapid prototypes! Which are then used as the basis for their mass-produced models.

Time has a dollar value associated with it and you will never, ever be able to make it cost effective to pour your own resin when it still takes a minimum of six hours per batch of five models and you may destroy the silicone in the process because you're a fucking amateur. I don't know admit you, maybe you're just contrary but at that point, I'd rather just buy the models from GW - and judging by the fact that more people don't counterfeit models in their basement, so would everyone else.

>>49953436
>question is about 3d printing armies
>lol why not print one model and cast duplicates
Goalposts = moved

Stereolithography is capable of printing on that level, but it's prohibitively expensive.

>>49953640
>Time has a dollar value associated with it and you will never, ever be able to make it cost effective to pour your own resin when it still takes a minimum of six hours per batch of five models
New anon
Assuming that I don't ruin the mould, there's almost zero cost associated with the curing time because I'm not stupid enough to sit around and watch it cure. I'm smart enough to do it before work each day or bed each night and every week I have 25-70 lovely little toys to paint on the weekend. Then I can make more while I'm painting. This is of course assuming I only make one mould of five models.

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Won't it be more expensive to buy a 3d printer than a bunch of minis and paints?

>>49951382
FDM printers are only good for vehicles and terrain (I just finished a bunch of victorian era buildings for my Malifaux table), and even then you will need to do some acetone smoothing to make them look good. For standard miniatures only certain printers like SLA printers can pull off the detail right, and unless you build one yourself they are expensive. Your pic isn't a good example.

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>>49954097
You're still talking about an hour or two a day to prep, pour, release and clean your moulds - six hours isn't just the curing time, it's everything involved in casting the resin - plus the cost of the resin!

And I don't care how good you think you are, you will damage your moulds. Ever get a Forge World model with little blue bits in the deep recesses? Congratulations, you ruined their mould. Maybe they were able to get another pour or three out of it but those details are lost forever because you took them home. Moulds degrade over time and with use; and more or less frequently, depending on how careful you are and how complex a cast it is, you will need to cut new ones from your master model.

But for the sake of argument, let's say you're really, really good and it takes you only an hour every day to cast your resin and that you never, ever have to dick around replacing your moulds which don't wear out.

Furthermore, you're a basement-dwelling NEET who could only command minimum wage if he even had a job (which you don't, since you have the time to cast your own models every day). But let's say that you fought for fifteen and won, because you deserve $15.00/hour for entertaining over-privileged nine-year-olds at the Game Stop or whatever it is that passes for work these days! Good job, jobless NEET.

By the end of the week, your free models have cost you $105. Pic related.

I'm gonna ignore the talk of making molds because it's dumb and who cares. It's a separate skill from 3D modeling and printing. If you wanna do things in quantity, then you can 3D print an expensive hi-rez master or sprue and then make a mold from that master but holy fuck, companies have been doing that for over a decade now.

Nah, I'm talking about living the dream of downloading files from the internet and then printing out models that are hi-rez enough to be on-par with quality pewter or resin castings.
There are printers that can do that right now, but they're way the fuck outside of the price range of the average consumer. As the tech develops more, that price point will lower, though. There are already several businesses that specialize in rapid-prototyping with 3D printers, where a company sends them the digital assets and the prototyping co. send them back the prints. Once the tech gets cheaper, I figure you'll see more of these companies, or at the very least, a drop in their price point to where the average motherfucker can justify it.

I don't think it's likely to kick the shit out of mainstream producers, at least not right away. Though they will bitch and moan. I think it'll be a fantastic avenue for getting weird and niche shit though, and will create a minor renaissance for the garage kit scene.
I've seen a lot of nerds arguing about what the exact dimensions of the millennium falcon should be, and this'll let them make their ideal film-accurate whatevers. 3D modeling is a much more widely-available skill these days than fine-detail miniature sculpting.

>>49951382
>All the pictured figs were 3D printed.
You think we didn't notice? They look like dogshit.

If you think those minis are okay then why wouldn't you just use paper cut-outs or something?

>>49953436
>3D printing a batch with all the parts for a space marine, and then making a silicone mold of those parts to use for casting infinity space marines in resin is already possible and cheap. People just can't be arsed, despite consumer grade silicone already being good enough to use without costy equipment like vacuum chambers and good resing being like 20 bucks for 200+ 28mm minis worth of material. .
This is the problem - people think that 3D printing is a magic wand where they just hit a button and minis start to fall out of the machine.

Right now casting is cheaper and easier than 3D printing but all of the 3D-print fags don't do it because it's work.

Working with 3d printers right now is finicky as hell. Its way easier to just recast like chinaman does. Not to mention even low end consumer hi rez printers are about 4k, and they still break and have failed prints all the time. Also resin for said printers is about 150 dollars a gallon. 3d printing is great for making masters but production runs at this stage would be retarded.

>>49955528
3d printing IS a magic wand - but just like a magic wand, it's expensive and it'll blow up if you use it wrong.

Again, the technology is immature and about five years away from being economical in large scales.

>>49951382
Here we go again. Must be that time of the month..

>>49951382
Jesus Christ, those prints are awful. Did they come out of somebody's Makerbot?

>>49954823
The post to which I replied claimed it wasn't cost effective based on time and you've largely failed to address time at all. Instead you diverged into resin costs which, like an anon before me said about another issue, is a case of moving the goal posts.

Don't know where you're getting your cost of $105 from, don't know how many models you're thinking that is for. You've pulled some number out of thin air and evidently expect me and anyone else reading to blindly accept it.

Silicone $15 per lb.
Pint of polyester resin is about 3 bucks and that's just a little bit more than needed for five models even with the volumetric shrinkage I would have accounted for when making the master.
Release agent about a buck per ounce in a spray can.
Or, to avoid the styrene hazard from polyester I can use polyeurethane resin and air release for about $6 per pint.

Even having to make a mould for every single casting doesn't add up to $105. If you're trying to include time spent working on moulds at an hourly wages equivalent to a paid job I think you're rather missing the point of time spent engaging in hobbies. I wasn't going to be working anyway so any activity would have cost money, might as well be on something fun.

I'm going to take
>Furthermore, you're a basement-dwelling NEET
as a general continuation of
>But for the sake of argument
It's far too easy, and often quite irrational, to take ambiguous statements personally. As I have done nothing to warrant an attack I don't see the point in trying to take it as one. If you meant it as a personal attack you need to take more care. Don't swap between general and specific uses of "you", "your" "you're" etc as it makes the subject impossible to determine.

My mommy, who of course is braiding my pigtails as I type, says I'm a good boy for trying to play nicely with the other children. She also says I live in a cellar not a basement and that one day I will be worth $15 per hour. Good news all round.

>>49959379
Except he very clearly spells out that if you assume it takes you an hour to set up or break down your casting, and if that time is worth $15.00 per hour, in a week it costs you $105 in labor, alone.

I understood it just fine. I think maybe you're just a twat.

>>49954517
The cheapest can be had for around $100 in materials. But you need a 3d printer to make it. Cost of material for printing is comparable to homemade alloy casting (and considerably less toxic). But quality is still not quite near the industrial casting. You could get 0.2mm precision last time I checked, may be 0.1 now, but you'll still see the layered texture on surface.

>>49953436
>people can't be arsed to take the effort to copy and paste all the marines they want
that's why so few people bother to recast and why as few people will bother with a process more fiddly and expensive than recasting

>>49959433
That time isn't worth $15 an hour though. This is leisure time so it's worth $0 an hour

>>49951382
I can already hear the paints being thickened in anticipation

>>49959642
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've never actually cast resin before because there's nothing leisurely about it. I've done it and I'd legit pay somebody fifteen dollars an hour so that I don't have to do it, again. Here's a helpful analogy.

People that like to build model kits are like people that enjoy cooking. There are all sorts of wonderful ingredients that you can buy right off the shelf and, with a little talent and technique, you can make something wonderful.

People that like to sculpt are like the people that like to pack their own sausage. Is it really necessary? Not really. Are your sausages better than the ones you buy at the store? Maybe, maybe not, it's really just a matter of taste. Can you do your own thing to suit your taste no matter what anyone else is selling? Yes, absolutely.

People that cast entire armies in resin from silicone molds are like people that like to butcher their own meat. That's work. It's long, hard, thankless work and your end result isn't any better than a cut you'd get at the supermarket. Sure, you can tell yourself it's better butt it's really not - but, hey, at least you aren't beholden to Grocery Workshop to provide all your meat ready to cook, like some plebe.

>>49951382

I doubt it, people can make bread in their house pretty easily but they choose to buy it from the shop for convenience.

>>49951382
Looks like shit. Article even says it took him 40 hours not including the rejects. Article is terrible as well. Poorly put together and repeats the same things over: GW will be extinct because plebs cant actually go to a club and be accepted

>>49951382
Nice details. Those are 6mm right?

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>>49960832
>6mm

>>49961024
The level of detail in the OP is what is acceptable for a modern 6mm mini.

To your question, so you can actually paint an army in less than 5 years and play an army scale battle in an afternoon.

>>49961024
>not knowing the joys of 6mm

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>>49953640
>thinking your saving time and money buying from GW.
Have you not heard about the Chinese re-casters yet? GW's prices are so ridiculous that these re-casters have moved on from just copping FW stuff to making resin copies of GW's plastics. No doubt GW can pump mini's out cheaper then anyone working out of their garage, but you'll never see those savings.

>>49951553
You just need to acetone vapor them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2lm6FuaAWI

>>49961802
the problem there is you'll destroy any fine details as well.

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>>49951382

A buddie of mine got a cheap variant of a 3d printer, kind of cool really.
And probably a lot more companies than GW will soon start to fear the ease of which these machines makes it in to the regular household.
But nerds as we are, all we can see is the progress on a plastic miniature company, thats not even that large when you look at the grand scale of things.
The miniature market is a fly on the wall compared to the table top games industry, and that section of the hobby spectrum isn't large to begin with, so you can just imagine how small and thin our audience actually is.
But unfortunately, brain damaged kids that has no insight of running a business, thinks "well, they are all about profit!", well of course they are you stupid fuck! If they weren't, I wouldn't call them a company to begin with!

So yes, the doom approaches, and yes, a hobby thats already dying (due to not being able to get fresh blood fast enough), will die even faster. And I'm not just talking GW here, I'm talking every damn miniature company you know about! And then we wont be able to enjoy this exiting and fun hobby ever again.

I wanted to print figures of Investigators from Arkham Horror, but couldn't find 3d-models.

My girlfriend works for Vice and it's such a bizarre and mind boggling organisation.

On the one hand they have legitimate journalists doing real stories who want to work for reuters and do investigative journalism, in the past the North Korea Documentary, Liberia things like that and on the other hand you have these twink numales and bloated neon haired tumblrinas doing...

>Why straight men need to start kissing each other
>12 examples of how your white privilege hurts POC on a daily basis
>There's a good chance you raped a previous partner without knowing it

>>49954664
I'm really considering a 3d printer for terrain and 15mm tanks.
A dude I follow on youtube used steel wool to smooth out his prints instead of acetone. Can you show some pics of your prints?

>>49961719
Again, moving the goal posts. We're not talking about buying from Chinese counterfeiters, we're talking about why you don't counterfeit the models, yourself. Yes, you can save a ton of money by buying oriental knockoffs. The same applies to literally any product, with varying degrees of quality. The wily Chinaman knows what he's doing, he does it professionally with professional equipment - or do you think that it's just some guy in his garage cranking out hundreds of castings for pennies on the dollar?

It is still cheaper to buy a fifty dollar box of ten Space Marines than it is for an amateur to try and cast those Space Marines at home. Even assuming that you break even on the cost of materials (which, given the potential for waste in silicone, resin and release agent, is unlikely if you aren't already an experienced moldmaker), the cost of your time, alone, sinks any potential savings. Yeah, you can be like >>49959642 and claim that your leisure time is free (it's not, but whatever), but that time is still in competition with OTHER leisure activities - the time you sirens trying to get one decent cast out of a mold is time that you aren't building, painting or playing with your models; it's time but spent reading or writing, watching television, going to the movies, watching or participating in sports, or basically anything else that is more desirable than the miniature equivalent of ditch-digging. "Sorry, guys, I can't game tonight because I have to re-pour the silicone for my awful recast miniatures that all look like ass because, like >>49953436, I thought I didn't need a centrifuge or a vacuum chamber to de-gas my fucking resin."

So, yes, please, by all means buy your models from based Chinaman. I'm sure you and your money will be very happy together. Just don't pretend that's the same thing as casting your own.

>>49960424
Yep. His point seems to be that only "the invested" will spend hundreds of dollars on minis but loads of people will spend hundreds of dollars on a 3D printer and maintain it in order to spend tens of hours printing a handful of shitty models.

>>49965026
The hell kind of point is that?

>>49965026

The investment is the hobby. The minis are a side benefit.

Early on they answered the question. Ten years ago, this didn't exist. Five years ago, 3d printed minis were expensive and crappy.

Today, they're expensive but competitive. In five years they'll be high quality and low price. In ten years, that'll be the way that the industry does limited edition and special characters.

In 20 years, we might see the whole industry doing it this way. Forget poseable polystyrene models you assemble. You'll pose them in software and then print each trooper with the options you want. Probably pre-painted via software as well.

That's just the march of technology. Everything is unfeasible and unlikely until it happens. Only in retrospect is technological upheaval inevitable.

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>>49961024
>Not wanting to play Epic 40k

>>49967062
I wouldn't play Epic with OP's models.

>>49967062
3D printing is especially shit for epic - everything ends up as a blob.

What's especially telling about these threads is that they're always started by some dipshit that doesn't have a 3D printer.

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>>49971155

Cool story bro

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>>49967313

How about this?

>>49951382
>All the pictured figs were 3D printed

Ya don't say...

That said, the technology is always advancing. We may well see a time when you buy a pattern for your 3d printer rather than actual miniatures.
That may well signal the end of a certain china man...

why are 3D printers so expensive still?

=(

>>49971480
lol at that fake ass penny

>>49971494
That is clearly a superior print to OP's.