The ability to cut out shipping costs, whether on the production end or alltogether, would be a huge win for their business. Imagine being able to ship the same product you do now for $40 less. That could generate alot more sales.
I think you are grossly overestimating the impact that shipping has. The reason for niche markets to use 3D printing is the reduction in capital costs. No $20,000 mold requiring you to sell however many thousands of units before you can begin to turn a profit.
Though given the volume that FFG does on it's main line of stuff molding would still be cheaper and a fuck ton easier on lead times. Anything you want lots of isn't really a great idea for 3D printing.
The other big innovation would be if you can recycle the materials in the home. Like, you need an extra-large screwdriver for a special project but aren't likely to need it again for years. So you print it out, use it, then turn it back into raw materials for your next printing job. Less waste overall.
I went to a seminar by some of the guys working on RepRap. That is one of their milestones. One of their thrusts is giving these to various poor, isolated communities to try and improve their quality of life. Obviously needing the plastic makes that kind of pointless. Last I heard they were working on a starch-based material (so you can grow potatoes, and somehow easily convert that into the printing material), which had the added benefit of being biodegradable.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
Architects.
Architects ought to love this shit once it gets to the point where you can run off a level-by-level model from the signed off drawings for less than $500 a shot.
Well, love that, and being able to dump the models into a 3d concrete printer, and print out buildings.
One thing that I personally found very compelling about the technology is that it does not use cement. The production of cement creates a lot of CO2. The D-Shape process has the possibility to be much more environmentally friendly because the build material does not need to be made by heating limestone and so would create much less carbon dioxide. Since the build material is just sand plus the inorganic binder it could be much better for the planet too.
Its also as strong/stronger than reinforced concrete. So that is pretty bad ass.
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
Architects.
Architects ought to love this shit once it gets to the point where you can run off a level-by-level model from the signed off drawings for less than $500 a shot.
Well, love that, and being able to dump the models into a 3d concrete printer, and print out buildings.
That? That right there is basically straight out of the Jetsons. Seriously, there was actually an episode where a rival company moved into the plot next door and built their entire skyscraper in about a minute using a hovering vehicle that assembled a whole floor at a time.... Of course, hovering is impractical for this outside of a cartoon, but tower-cranes are already self-building, using a sort of mobile spacer scaffold and pre-assembled parts; I can totally see a sort of crawler frame sweeping across an area and laying down concrete and maybe feeding in rebar for support, then clamping on to the newly laid floor, crawling up a bit and starting on the next.
This can have huge implications for table top gaming, like Warhammer 40k, or Warmachine. Even though it's of dubious legality, I can see 3D scans of models being distributed on the Internet, and then summarily traded about for anyone with a 3D printer to reproduce. You could have the Napster of 3D template swapping, and those gaming companies are going to take a huge hit to their bottom lines.
In terms of cost and quality, the sculpts and printers aren't really cheap enough to be a threat. But what about in 3-5 years? Technology will get cheaper, quality will improve. I seriously think it could drive some companies under, and they can't litigate their way to profitability like the MPAA/RIAA does\did.
Hrm. I dunno.
Take a look at trading card games, for example: I could go out and purchase glossy card stock for about 30 bucks, and use my home photo printer that I bought for 12 bucks to print out Magic cards that very few people would be able to tell were not the real thing.
Photo printers & glossy card stock aren't exactly uncommon in households these days, and yet - to my knowledge - Wizards of the Coast hasn't experienced significant sales impact from this technology.
If the miniature companies are smart, they will sell their models digitally at a reasonable price. I think they could avoid a big hit in their profits while possibly increasing exposure for their games (especially if they can offer quality 'pre-painted' versions as well). It would also potentially let them increase the quality and price of the physical product.
Valid points. However, I am not optimistic.
I'm not optimistic, either. I wasn't even thinking about Games Workshop but yeah, they will really be behind the ball on this one.
It would be cool to see GW (or similar TT company) put out a software package for use with 3-d printers (once 3-d printers become more widespread and standardized).
A modest 3-d modeling package with premade models that could be posed/equipped in the modeler allowing a player to customize his force more extensively then they could when they buy a box, with substantially fewer waste bits that get tossed in a box for years.
The initial purchase could come with a limited printing license allowing the user to print ~1000 points.
After that's used, you buy a license to print new models, either by model count or by point count (similar to assorted funbux used by F2P MMOs).
The real problem is that it would limit the exposure for the games by damaging the game stores that sell them. But the printer didn't kill the publishing industry, I don't think the 3-d printer would kill the TT gaming industry.
Of course, this all relies on GW being with the times enough for it to be possible, which given their constant "Fuck you's" to online retailers, seems unlikely.
I think a lot of people are skipping a step. Before 3D printers get cheap enough and easy enough to use for the masses I think we'll see kiosk pop up in stores. Most people I run into at work can barely use their cell phone or navigate windows enough to get online still. I expect there to be a lag before 3D printing is user friendly enough for more than techies. So I imagine the game store itself investing in a 3d Printer soon for in store use, or seeing a 3D printer kiosk at Wal-mart next to the DIY photo kiosk. Perhaps in the mall as a novelty for most and practical for a few.
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acidlacedpenguinInstitutionalizedSafe in jail.Registered Userregular
I was wondering how many people in this thread have experience with an actual 3D printer, and also how much discussion is essentially assumptions/hopes for the future and how much is rooted in what can realistically be done with them right now.
We have a Dimension 1200 at the school where I work. I haven't had a lot of chances to mess with it myself, but I have used its software and seen what it can do.
You can print literally anything that can be represented in 3D space. Anything that needs to be suspended in midair is worked out by the program and supported by a secondary material that dissolves in water. You could print a sphere floating inside another hollow sphere, and it would just make a support pillar holding up the internal sphere...though then you'd have to figure out how to get that support material out.
The program that generates the 3D prints is pretty sophisticated, it will calculate the perfect rotation for the model that requires a minimum of support material. If you print a cylinder sitting on its flat side, it won't need to use any supports. You have the option to print the model at any rotation though, so you could lay the cylinder on its side and the program would generate a semicircle of supports to hold it in place. You could even turn it diagonally and floating an inch off the ground, and the program would adjust for it, but this is not ideal or cost effective.
Right now the three biggest problems with the technology are the cost of print cartridges, the print resolution (the ridges left by steps in the Z axis), and the time required to make anything.
The Dimension uses ABSPlus model and support material. You need one cartridge of each and it costs about $400 for the pair. I don't know exactly how much that works out to in terms of cost per model, but from what I gathered from the rep that taught us about the machine, it's generally not going to save a lot of money to print objects rather than buy them. For example, I don't know if any of you ever buy miniatures, but if a typical booster costs $15-$20 for 8 pre-painted miniatures, you're probably spending a comparable amount in mold material to make that same set of miniatures, accounting for the fact that what you're getting isn't painted or sanded down.
I say "sanded down" because (as was pointed out on the previous page) models come out looking similar to this:
But the ridges are still there. I suppose it depends on how picky you are. They can be sanded down but this is tricky on highly detailed small models like gaming miniatures.
This is why it's sometimes advantageous to rotate the model in a way that uses more support material. X/Y resolution is very good but ridges occur on the Z axis, so you can rotate your model to choose the direction that the ridges appear in, reducing their impact on the structure or making it easier to sand.
Finally, they really do require long amounts of time to print anything. Essentially if we want to make anything bigger than a few cubic cm/inches we're better off to leave it overnight. It's not like you can say "oh hey, I don't have enough silverware for everyone, guess I'll go print up some more." You'd be waiting at least two hours.
All of this will improve with time, just wanted to temper some expectations a little.
I think a lot of people are skipping a step. Before 3D printers get cheap enough and easy enough to use for the masses I think we'll see kiosk pop up in stores.
With current technology the kiosk would probably be able to make 2-4 prints per day at the most and you'd either be hanging around the store for hours or trusting the store employees to remove it when it's done and hold it for you. With stores expecting to make a profit, it would probably cost a little more than what it would to simply buy the object in the first place, so use would be limited to custom parts.
Actually I'm not even sure how a kiosk would work, given the need for CAD/3D modeling experience. Bring in your disc with Google Sketchup models? Choose one of their premade figurines that has a base with whatever text you want?
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Well, if it's a kiosk at, say GW, and they can improve printing times as you said, then it eliminates their need to store stock. They can just have a touch screen or whatever going through their games, then armies, then units or whatever, and have a variety of poses or models of units.
@UncleSporky : That was a great, informative post, thanks.
I think everyone here is aware that the tech is several years, at minimum, away from being viable for what we are talking about. I first learned of 3D printing when Fingerprints launched. It seems to me like the tech has really caught on in the last few years, along with a surge in small-scale manufacturing so there is definitely motivation to improve the tech.
How are the masters created? From what I read, they use 3D printers to create the mold and then cast traditionally. If they sand the mold carefully then they could easily produce high quality, smooth models, but that's not the same thing as directly printing a model.
EDIT: I could be wrong about that though. Their blog posts make it sound like they print directly, though it's not very specific.
That is a very good quality master if it was 3D printed without any modification.
I'd love to see open source miniature models. For use in D&D and Warhammer and such. Of course the detail will have to get better for home printers, but yeah, cool stuff.
I like to think of the future though, and what the op was talking about with post scarcity. With a power source like helium 3 fusion, and advanced 3D printers it's very easy to imagine a post scarcity future. The growing pains from Americas capitalism to a future that only has jobs for maybe 1 million people will require some forward looking leaders.
We are seeing the very early stages of this with cheap manufacturing and delivery sources (like amazon). When the day comes that even the oldest Grandparents know that you should just buy stuff with the click of a button and it shows up at your door for less than any brick and mortar store....what's going to happen?
If the miniature companies are smart, they will sell their models digitally at a reasonable price. I think they could avoid a big hit in their profits while possibly increasing exposure for their games (especially if they can offer quality 'pre-painted' versions as well). It would also potentially let them increase the quality and price of the physical product.
Valid points. However, I am not optimistic.
For example, knowing what I know about Games Workshop, I can't see them using such a forward thinking, business savvy profitability model. First we have to assume they'll embrace the technology to begin with, which is probably not going to happen. I can't see GW taking a pass on possible QA for their models to another device sitting in some guys home. Also, 3D printing is cheaper on the consumer. No matter what way you slice it, companies want to make more money, not less of it, and GW isn't going to drop their prices one bit. Also, once you've printed the object, you can just scan and re-print it. Once that cat's out of the bag, how do you keep revenue coming in?
But assuming they do, I imagine they'd offer up DRM covered sculpts that import to a 3D printer, that can't be copied, and maybe give limited prints before the files self destruct, or become inert. After that, you buy a new file or it activates once you give them more money, so you can print out some toy mans.
I'm not even going to pretend Games Workshop would do this, so instead, I'm going to talk about Privateer Press. It was shown earlier that the quality of 3D printed models is nowhere near the quality of models you buy. So the enthusiast will likely always buy the high quality models. All 3D printing does is let people play around with armies in the same fashion that using proxies does. I bet people would end up buying more if they could "preview" the models so to speak using 3D printing. I sincerely doubt it result in actual lost sales under the same reasoning I don't think software or music piracy results in lost sales. These people were never going to be buying the product in the first place.
But still, you get a better product when you buy it from the company VS printing it yourself. Also, think of all the model variants companies could release straight to printers! Ok, so somebody buys an infantry model. But they don't want all their infantrymen to be in the same pose do they? So maybe they buy 3 or 4 more infantry men models. Maybe you buy the parts for the models individually so you can print off arms and legs and torsos and glue them together yourself. Maybe you pay to subscribe to the companies 3D printing models that get released every month. A company could release a lot more models and variants when they don't have to go through all the trouble of molding, casting and shipping.
But if you don't really mind about quality, casting your own minis is pretty easy. Just get some silicon rubber and buy one original model. Then you can make as many as you want, and better quality than the 3d printed version I saw on the previous page. 3D printing is going to be very exciting for small businesses, and 3D printer generation 5 or whatever will be interesting for home users, but I don't see it making big inroads at home for a while. It's just not good enough and too complex. Think about whether or not your mother would give it a try.
I'd love to see open source miniature models. For use in D&D and Warhammer and such. Of course the detail will have to get better for home printers, but yeah, cool stuff.
I like to think of the future though, and what the op was talking about with post scarcity. With a power source like helium 3 fusion, and advanced 3D printers it's very easy to imagine a post scarcity future. The growing pains from Americas capitalism to a future that only has jobs for maybe 1 million people will require some forward looking leaders.
We are seeing the very early stages of this with cheap manufacturing and delivery sources (like amazon). When the day comes that even the oldest Grandparents know that you should just buy stuff with the click of a button and it shows up at your door for less than any brick and mortar store....what's going to happen?
We're already seeing that transition today with electronic items replacing their physical equivalents, it's a big reason why this recovery is being so hard. We're nowhere near post scarcity, but we are getting close to post scarcity for labor.
I'd love to see open source miniature models. For use in D&D and Warhammer and such. Of course the detail will have to get better for home printers, but yeah, cool stuff.
I think it'll be a real nightmare for GW. There are already places like Chapterhouse Studios that make pieces obviously intended to be used for GW models or outright looking like GW models.
GW has a lawsuit against Chapterhouse right now since Chapterhouse actually markets their stuff as "Infantry and Shoulder Pad Bits compatible with Space Marine® models" and so on, but there are other companies that just make things like "Sci-Fi Templar Knights" like Scibor calls their stuff.
This isn't a Space Wolf Rune Priest, it's a Celtic SF Lord.
I was wondering how many people in this thread have experience with an actual 3D printer, and also how much discussion is essentially assumptions/hopes for the future and how much is rooted in what can realistically be done with them right now.
We have a Dimension 1200 at the school where I work. I haven't had a lot of chances to mess with it myself, but I have used its software and seen what it can do.
I've used one of these a number of times, they're incredibly handy. I've also used one of Stratasys's other products: the Fortus 360. That one can print at around double the z-resolution of the Dimension 1200, and it's insanely fast. That, and it can print polycarbonate. I haven't used a MakerBot yet, but I do see one on a regular basis and I'm familiar with its general pitfalls and difficulties.
Oh! Something else: Objet's UV resin inkjet style printers can do z-resolutions of 16 microns, but they're proportionately slower and more expensive (unless I'm mistaken). I won't get to use one of those for a bit yet, maybe during my senior project if it's applicable.
3D scanners need to grow along side 3D printers for the true impact to hit home use.
I use a free program developed by Autodesk called Photofly. It works by taking a series of standard digital camera photos uploaded to a server, compares the shapes and edges detected in the image and builds a 3D model based on the image data. It then generates a texture which lays on the point cloud, and sends it back to you to download and manipulate. I've found it a bit tricky to use, but I've gotten better at it with practice (it's picky about how close each photo should be from the next). I'm hoping to use it to export point clouds of a few larger objects into some CAD programs for some costuming projects.
Oh! Something else: Objet's UV resin inkjet style printers can do z-resolutions of 16 microns, but they're proportionately slower and more expensive (unless I'm mistaken). I won't get to use one of those for a bit yet, maybe during my senior project if it's applicable.
About $.23 cents a gram, support material approximately half that. It is slower to build but the Z axis resolution is actually it's best axis for resolution.
So I'm torn between the Thing-o-matic and the RepRap Mendel.
The main thing the Thing-o-matic has going for it is the continuous printing capability (the flip table), which seems like it would be more immediately practical. Although it seems like it's easier to buy pre-built Mendel's.
How are the masters created? From what I read, they use 3D printers to create the mold and then cast traditionally. If they sand the mold carefully then they could easily produce high quality, smooth models, but that's not the same thing as directly printing a model.
EDIT: I could be wrong about that though. Their blog posts make it sound like they print directly, though it's not very specific.
That is a very good quality master if it was 3D printed without any modification.
I'm not sure how to word this, but could it be that the model was printed so that the ridges of the layers go vertically down the model instead of horizontally? That would probably reduce the visual impact.
I'd love to see open source miniature models. For use in D&D and Warhammer and such. Of course the detail will have to get better for home printers, but yeah, cool stuff.
I like to think of the future though, and what the op was talking about with post scarcity. With a power source like helium 3 fusion, and advanced 3D printers it's very easy to imagine a post scarcity future. The growing pains from Americas capitalism to a future that only has jobs for maybe 1 million people will require some forward looking leaders.
We are seeing the very early stages of this with cheap manufacturing and delivery sources (like amazon). When the day comes that even the oldest Grandparents know that you should just buy stuff with the click of a button and it shows up at your door for less than any brick and mortar store....what's going to happen?
We're already seeing that transition today with electronic items replacing their physical equivalents, it's a big reason why this recovery is being so hard. We're nowhere near post scarcity, but we are getting close to post scarcity for labor.
Indeed. We should be asking questions about the nature of labor, property and a host of other issues, right now. Should the government, in the future, control the means of production and simply provide for everyone? Or should we stay with a capitalistic system with a tiny amount of extremely rich, and every single other human on earth in a perpetual unemployed poverty state that only exists because of false scarcity? Even more importantly, am I off topic? Or mayhaps I'm the only one on topic?
So I drafted that out a long time ago in AutoCAD. It's a custom lightsaber.
So if I took that old model, adjusted it to be a series of interlocking components that meet the requirements of the printer. Get them printed, shipped to me, sand them and finish them, glue them together with some epoxy. I would have a true real life version of my model?!
Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
You might want to consider increasing the resolution of your model a bit unless you want it to come out as a dodecagonal prism, but yeah that's essentially it. Shapeways and related sites even offer metal as a build option, so you may not even have to paint anything.
Of course, you probably can't call it a lightsaber in public/where Lucasfilm can hear you, but yeah it looks like a doable thing. Might work out a bit expensive though.
First things first. When these get down to around the $500 range for the printer and $50 for a gallon of raw materials, I'm in. Last I checked you were looking at the $2,000 range, and you had to build it yourself. Great for enthusiast, not so much for someone who just wants to mess around on random weekends.
This is tricky. I mean, I'm almost positive this would go under fair use. But then again, I thought the same thing about MP3s back in the day and we know how that turned out. It's hard to imagine what the economic model will change into when you see manufacturing capacity cease to matter. Right now its on a smaller scale where you will probably see Games Workshop suing people left and right for their models being uploaded. But I wonder if it will escalate to the point where software patents have gotten, and you can get sued for uploading a schematic that includes a hinge.
Sorry if this was already covered, but the costs of some kits have already dropped down to the $500 range.
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Those probably aren't that far away. I mean, someone turned an iPhone into one. Sort of.
Its already been done with Kinects, but the image quality needs to increase to at least the printer's own specs.
I think you are grossly overestimating the impact that shipping has. The reason for niche markets to use 3D printing is the reduction in capital costs. No $20,000 mold requiring you to sell however many thousands of units before you can begin to turn a profit.
Though given the volume that FFG does on it's main line of stuff molding would still be cheaper and a fuck ton easier on lead times. Anything you want lots of isn't really a great idea for 3D printing.
I went to a seminar by some of the guys working on RepRap. That is one of their milestones. One of their thrusts is giving these to various poor, isolated communities to try and improve their quality of life. Obviously needing the plastic makes that kind of pointless. Last I heard they were working on a starch-based material (so you can grow potatoes, and somehow easily convert that into the printing material), which had the added benefit of being biodegradable.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/09/gang-used-3d-printers-for-atm-skimmers/
Well, love that, and being able to dump the models into a 3d concrete printer, and print out buildings.
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Hrm. I dunno.
Take a look at trading card games, for example: I could go out and purchase glossy card stock for about 30 bucks, and use my home photo printer that I bought for 12 bucks to print out Magic cards that very few people would be able to tell were not the real thing.
Photo printers & glossy card stock aren't exactly uncommon in households these days, and yet - to my knowledge - Wizards of the Coast hasn't experienced significant sales impact from this technology.
I think a lot of people are skipping a step. Before 3D printers get cheap enough and easy enough to use for the masses I think we'll see kiosk pop up in stores. Most people I run into at work can barely use their cell phone or navigate windows enough to get online still. I expect there to be a lag before 3D printing is user friendly enough for more than techies. So I imagine the game store itself investing in a 3d Printer soon for in store use, or seeing a 3D printer kiosk at Wal-mart next to the DIY photo kiosk. Perhaps in the mall as a novelty for most and practical for a few.
We have a Dimension 1200 at the school where I work. I haven't had a lot of chances to mess with it myself, but I have used its software and seen what it can do.
You can print literally anything that can be represented in 3D space. Anything that needs to be suspended in midair is worked out by the program and supported by a secondary material that dissolves in water. You could print a sphere floating inside another hollow sphere, and it would just make a support pillar holding up the internal sphere...though then you'd have to figure out how to get that support material out.
The program that generates the 3D prints is pretty sophisticated, it will calculate the perfect rotation for the model that requires a minimum of support material. If you print a cylinder sitting on its flat side, it won't need to use any supports. You have the option to print the model at any rotation though, so you could lay the cylinder on its side and the program would generate a semicircle of supports to hold it in place. You could even turn it diagonally and floating an inch off the ground, and the program would adjust for it, but this is not ideal or cost effective.
Right now the three biggest problems with the technology are the cost of print cartridges, the print resolution (the ridges left by steps in the Z axis), and the time required to make anything.
The Dimension uses ABSPlus model and support material. You need one cartridge of each and it costs about $400 for the pair. I don't know exactly how much that works out to in terms of cost per model, but from what I gathered from the rep that taught us about the machine, it's generally not going to save a lot of money to print objects rather than buy them. For example, I don't know if any of you ever buy miniatures, but if a typical booster costs $15-$20 for 8 pre-painted miniatures, you're probably spending a comparable amount in mold material to make that same set of miniatures, accounting for the fact that what you're getting isn't painted or sanded down.
I say "sanded down" because (as was pointed out on the previous page) models come out looking similar to this:
That was created on a MakerBot by somebody at SomethingAwful. You can get better resolution with different materials like resin (click for bigger):
But the ridges are still there. I suppose it depends on how picky you are. They can be sanded down but this is tricky on highly detailed small models like gaming miniatures.
This is why it's sometimes advantageous to rotate the model in a way that uses more support material. X/Y resolution is very good but ridges occur on the Z axis, so you can rotate your model to choose the direction that the ridges appear in, reducing their impact on the structure or making it easier to sand.
Finally, they really do require long amounts of time to print anything. Essentially if we want to make anything bigger than a few cubic cm/inches we're better off to leave it overnight. It's not like you can say "oh hey, I don't have enough silverware for everyone, guess I'll go print up some more." You'd be waiting at least two hours.
All of this will improve with time, just wanted to temper some expectations a little.
With current technology the kiosk would probably be able to make 2-4 prints per day at the most and you'd either be hanging around the store for hours or trusting the store employees to remove it when it's done and hold it for you. With stores expecting to make a profit, it would probably cost a little more than what it would to simply buy the object in the first place, so use would be limited to custom parts.
Actually I'm not even sure how a kiosk would work, given the need for CAD/3D modeling experience. Bring in your disc with Google Sketchup models? Choose one of their premade figurines that has a base with whatever text you want?
I think everyone here is aware that the tech is several years, at minimum, away from being viable for what we are talking about. I first learned of 3D printing when Fingerprints launched. It seems to me like the tech has really caught on in the last few years, along with a surge in small-scale manufacturing so there is definitely motivation to improve the tech.
EDIT: I could be wrong about that though. Their blog posts make it sound like they print directly, though it's not very specific.
That is a very good quality master if it was 3D printed without any modification.
I like to think of the future though, and what the op was talking about with post scarcity. With a power source like helium 3 fusion, and advanced 3D printers it's very easy to imagine a post scarcity future. The growing pains from Americas capitalism to a future that only has jobs for maybe 1 million people will require some forward looking leaders.
We are seeing the very early stages of this with cheap manufacturing and delivery sources (like amazon). When the day comes that even the oldest Grandparents know that you should just buy stuff with the click of a button and it shows up at your door for less than any brick and mortar store....what's going to happen?
But if you don't really mind about quality, casting your own minis is pretty easy. Just get some silicon rubber and buy one original model. Then you can make as many as you want, and better quality than the 3d printed version I saw on the previous page. 3D printing is going to be very exciting for small businesses, and 3D printer generation 5 or whatever will be interesting for home users, but I don't see it making big inroads at home for a while. It's just not good enough and too complex. Think about whether or not your mother would give it a try.
We're already seeing that transition today with electronic items replacing their physical equivalents, it's a big reason why this recovery is being so hard. We're nowhere near post scarcity, but we are getting close to post scarcity for labor.
I think it'll be a real nightmare for GW. There are already places like Chapterhouse Studios that make pieces obviously intended to be used for GW models or outright looking like GW models.
GW has a lawsuit against Chapterhouse right now since Chapterhouse actually markets their stuff as "Infantry and Shoulder Pad Bits compatible with Space Marine® models" and so on, but there are other companies that just make things like "Sci-Fi Templar Knights" like Scibor calls their stuff.
This isn't a Space Wolf Rune Priest, it's a Celtic SF Lord.
I've used one of these a number of times, they're incredibly handy. I've also used one of Stratasys's other products: the Fortus 360. That one can print at around double the z-resolution of the Dimension 1200, and it's insanely fast. That, and it can print polycarbonate
Oh! Something else: Objet's UV resin inkjet style printers can do z-resolutions of 16 microns, but they're proportionately slower and more expensive (unless I'm mistaken). I won't get to use one of those for a bit yet, maybe during my senior project if it's applicable.
I use a free program developed by Autodesk called Photofly. It works by taking a series of standard digital camera photos uploaded to a server, compares the shapes and edges detected in the image and builds a 3D model based on the image data. It then generates a texture which lays on the point cloud, and sends it back to you to download and manipulate. I've found it a bit tricky to use, but I've gotten better at it with practice (it's picky about how close each photo should be from the next). I'm hoping to use it to export point clouds of a few larger objects into some CAD programs for some costuming projects.
About $.23 cents a gram, support material approximately half that. It is slower to build but the Z axis resolution is actually it's best axis for resolution.
The main thing the Thing-o-matic has going for it is the continuous printing capability (the flip table), which seems like it would be more immediately practical. Although it seems like it's easier to buy pre-built Mendel's.
I'm not sure how to word this, but could it be that the model was printed so that the ridges of the layers go vertically down the model instead of horizontally? That would probably reduce the visual impact.
I must admit that took less time than I expected.
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So I drafted that out a long time ago in AutoCAD. It's a custom lightsaber.
So if I took that old model, adjusted it to be a series of interlocking components that meet the requirements of the printer. Get them printed, shipped to me, sand them and finish them, glue them together with some epoxy. I would have a true real life version of my model?!
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Of course, you probably can't call it a lightsaber in public/where Lucasfilm can hear you, but yeah it looks like a doable thing. Might work out a bit expensive though.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
Sorry if this was already covered, but the costs of some kits have already dropped down to the $500 range.
http://www.indiegogo.com/eMAKER-Huxley-3D-printer-kits
http://www.techzonecom.com/detail.php?pr_id=33