The main factor that kept me from 40k was the time commitment not the cost.
In my earlier MTG days I played many Necromunda battles. Scratched the itch in an easier onboarding form — also liked the vertical aspect.
The figurines might have to be official and "proper" for tournament play.
But terrain is more vague. Though still dimensionally specified.
And I always feel that it is a shame that so much effort is made to paint armies near perfectly and yet the terrain is flat felt green, or matte grey painted chipboard, with some stuff chucked on it...
A 3D printer can make hills, ruins, furniture, burnt out vehicles - all the other cruft of a gaming universe to give it life!
Given the time, it’s hard not to view this same argument through the lens of AI. People who love crafting their creative works will still do it, even when AI can do it. They will still inspire others because they demonstrate what humans can do, and what we can aspire to.
AI will fill a similar niche when it settles down, I think. Cheap, and mostly what you asked for, but you know you're not going to love the output.
Compared to my home setup, (manual flair espresso press), most coffee shop espresso machines are quite a bit more automated. But I don’t begrudge them that automation, their arms would get too sore. And nobody is paying me to manually press my lever.
It doesn’t seem like a neat mapping.
And perhaps you have to be more nuanced - when TV's first hit the market, a wide-spread concern among film-makers was that it would kill movie theaters. The fear was that people would now only watch movies in the comfort of their homes. That didn't happen back then, but it pretty much did with the combination of big, flat-screen TVs and streaming services.
Learning a skill and practicing it is still extremely enjoyable, even if a machine (or a factory) could do it better, faster, cheaper. The point is not the product, but the process.
Someone who's already well steeped in a hobby as demanding as WH40k and who already has access to items they can purchase alternatively probably is not searching for something else they have to get their head around. And MSLA printing is not a chill hobby by any measure.
> At one point, he said the phrase "you really don't want to get this on your skin" with the casual tone of someone who had definitely gotten it on his skin.
are spot on.
There are currently 10 3d printers in my household and there have been maybe 30 unique ones in total over the past 2 years but after the first 3-4 months of resin printing that was given to a friend and never revisited.
I felt like it couldn’t be done casually and even moderately safe at home but needed some sort of lab with good ventilation. We Jerry rigged a hood using a portable enclosure meant to grow weed in while routing the smell out of your dorm through a window and wore proper PPE the whole time but I still felt sketched out
They are capable of incredibly impressive detail but the labor and safety investment required just makes it too much of a pain to enjoy in the same way that I do my FDM printers.
I moved from an isopropyl alcohol wash to using acetone, which resulted in much crisper details, but that felt substantially more dangerous than the resin ever did. It’s very unpleasant to breathe in. I just put the printer in an unused room, and opened a window every once in awhile, and did my minis washing outside with a mask on.
I was in a Telegram group for awhile that shared all the sets and ended up with dozens of terabytes of extremely high quality miniatures. Often video game modelers moonlight making high quality minis that are much better looking than anything in Warhammer. Once I stopped the hobby I left as it required you to sign up for $30+ a month of subscriptions you needed to share to get access to their group.
I’ve fallen out of the hobby after my good friend passed away because him and I made a lot of minis together, but it was a lot of fun. I was primarily using it for D&D minis though, with 1 resin printer for minis and 3 FDM printers for terrain. Nobody cared at all about “authenticity” and was just wowed by the presentation.
But it's kind of like having an open can of paint in the middle of your house, just sitting there with the lid off. Most of the time that happens only when you're painting the walls, you don't live like that.
Similar experience as to you, I found resin printing to have too crap results given the level of effort to process them.
There's a long way to go.
All in all, 3D printing allows a lot more flexibility in designs, but if you attempt to 3D-print many items of your daily life exactly as they are, the result will often be much worse than with the production process that the object was designed for, or sometimes it is possible to come near to the original object, but producing it using 3D printing takes a lot more effort.
It is rather a consensus in the 3D printing community that people should rather make use of the opportunity to use the insanely increased flexibility that 3D printing allows to reimagine how objects in daily life look like - and thus create better versions of such objects that are (by construction) also good 3D-printable.
--
Addendum: Concerning "the transparent insert thing": as far as I am aware with resin printing, you can 3D-print transparent things very precisely, and even with FDM printing, a lot of progress has been made with respect to printing objects that are quite transparent:
> https://blog.prusa3d.com/3d-printed-lens-and-other-transpare...
Another example is this one where the 3D print was done as a continuous printing (i.e. no slicer, or sorta like a vase mode print) to make the clear show a bit better: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sy50BrlDMo
The big difference in the historical wargame space is that there's no way to trademark Alexander the Great. Anyone can make the minis, whether it's a small-but-awesome company (Victrix! Wargames Atlantic!) or a dude with a 3d printer. As a result, there's some separation between people who write rules (which you can buy as books or PDFs) and people who make minis. The people making minis actually compete on price and quality, and we get fsck'ing awesome minis for ludicrously low prices as a result. Victrix is often $1-$2 per mini, often about a tenth of the price of GW.
I use an fdm printer for terrain, which is a complete game changer. It has none of the problems of resin, and you want big stuff for terrain and care a bit less about layer lines. It's awesome.
The only problem is that only a small corner of the miniatures wargame world plays historicals. :)
(So feel free to ping me if you're in sf/East Bay and want to roll dice sometime.)
High res resin printers are incredible.
Look, 3d printing is almost a psychological thing. You almost nailed it but skipped right past it.
The term proxy used to delineate between wysiwyg and non-wysiwyg. "I am using this chess piece as a marine" The Deoderant Bottle Gravtank from White Dwarf - Not a proxy. They made it custom rules. It was a miniature, and it was furnished with love and care. This culture is now only found in like, airfix or custom scifi modelling.
Modern GW has waged a psychological war on these things, encouraging game stores to do the same.
Proxy is now used, as you have demonstrated, to cover anything not GW. Even if its wysiwyg, its looked down upon, otherised. GW stores have even gone as far as preventing people from playing official GW minis that are end of life in their stores. Soon these will be referred to as like "official proxies" or something.
I have 2 local non GW stores.
Store 1: Owner does not permit unofficial minis in the store at all. Will rant about this policy to anyone who listens. He says there's no way he makes money on printed minis so screw them (I was in the store to purchase paints and brushes and so on for my printed minis when I caught this rant)
Store 2: Has 3 3d printers, sells printing services, sells resin. Doesnt give a crap.
But it doesn't matter in either case, because 40k players are policing each other. GW has shifted the language to otherise armies that even have converted 3d printed bits, let alone full prints.
Not to mention: 3d print resin isnt that bad. The 3d printer business makes a lot of money selling filters and tents and housings and gloves and what not at inflated prices. Some of these things are worthy, others are not. But I was using UV resins for SFX before printers caught on, and guess what, resin fx are smellier and less able to be hidden in a dark corner of your house. Not really a huge impediment. The terror about UV resin seems to be coming both from the people slinging the extra gear, and the people concerned largely with these evil "proxies".
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but GW mostly makes money from new players. Old grizzled angry veterans arent their bread and butter anyway.
Give it 10 years, let more stores embrace 3d printing, let some more permissive games take hold, and then you might have a chance at killing gee dubs. But they will still be selling huge expensive kits to 12 year olds using mums credit card.
Their entire business model is predatory, they nerf armies and then release new models all the time, the rules are monetized and outrageously expensive, and they are litigious to the point of taking down youtube channels in order to prop up their shitty streaming service.
There are so many better games that have embraced 3D printing and are actually fun to play.
It's sort of weird because the issue isn't around proxies representing a figure in another form, but about the perceived "loss" of the value of their efforts from someone popping out something identical without wastin- spending as much time. "I do it, so I value it" is an interesting life code to live by.
So, the actual answer is pride, it seems.
Before I started playing I asked a friend what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards (even in the 90s this would have been possible)
I understood how silly that question was when I felt the pleasure of actually owning a high quality product. Sure, I could spend the time to make my own cards but playing the game is only part of the fun.
Warhammer and MtG get mocked for being expensive but in reality they are comparable to cars, sports, fashion, and all the other things humans spend their disposable income on.
I guess there really is some kind of "hacker-type" personality who does spend a lot on some things, but these things are typically "not very proprietary", i.e. not things where the producing company enforced the copyright and trademarks heavily, and "highly modifiable". So I guess to such people the question "what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards" is not absurd, but to fans of WH4k or MtG it is: because of their very different product tastes.
I was shocked that even under a jeweler’s loupe, I could tell no difference. Even the microscopic ink patterns were identical, except for the very rare editions of cards that use a special holographic print (called “Enchanted” cards, which are fancier alt art prints of cards, but those have a regular equivalent for gameplay purposes in all cases). It was all just worthless paper at the point.
This “broke the spell” for me, so to speak, and I quit playing. Soon after, I’m guessing everyone else realized this too, or, more likely, were buying the same cards at full price without realizing their provenance, and card prices tanked substantially. I also quit playing because it took up a lot of time and I rediscovered why I stopped playing Magic competitively. I’m an extremely sore loser and when I get into a hobby I play to win, to the point of obsession.
I settled into boardgames(especially solo boardgames) last year to satisfy that itch.
One is the strong dependence on your peers for approval. If your group is against proxies, then you are screwed.
Second is that there are now more ways to play against each other online for free. This approach is much more convenient compared to creating proxies IRL and allows you to play with other people outside your peer group.
We all have large magic collections but Wizards has shown repeatedly that they have no intention of making the game more accessible.
I have been playing magic continuously for 30 years and have not spent a dime on it since 2019.
I built a four-poster bed, and 3D printed the fittings for the curtain rails and the attachment point for the fan.
I built a desk, and 3D printed the entire shelving system for it.
I designed and 3D printed an entire range of boardgaming accessories (storage bins, dice towers, meeples, etc)
I only bought the thing as something to do while in COVID lockdown. But it's been really useful.
But I have to say that the comparison between the time investment in resin printing and preparing official Warhammer models for painting is very incomplete.
Ultimately, if everything goes well with the printing (and it usually does), the whole process will take around an hour of active time (preparing + post-processing) a plate of 20-30 models (however many you can fit). It will DEFINITELY take longer than this to get the same level of quality from plastic sprues. Removing the pieces from the sprues, removing the mold lines, filling the worst ones, etc. is extremely time consuming, and it is really the most boring part of the hobby.
It took me at least 20 hours to prepare around 100 models (small ones), when it would take only 4 or 5 when printing them. This time saving is time you can reinvest in painting.
I also still believe that at some point, with advancements in printers (which happen consistently year over year), but especially in resin formulations, we will reach a state where it will be safe (or at least much safer than it is now) to 3D print models using resin, at which point it will indeed have a large impact on Games Workshop's business.
Home Resin Printers should be in a vented garage, as the unpleasant odor is the least of its issues. The low-viscosity washable water-like resins tend to be much easier to handle, but even when vented outside... an activated charcoal filter is wise if you have neighbors. =3
Some people play warhammer for the cameraderie.
Some people play warhammer to get outreache to sell their 3D printed components, which probably started out as a "hey look at me" but like all side gigs can, has become foundational in who they are, and now occupies them more than cameraderie or winning.
It frequently results in turn 1 wins before you even get to play.
Competitive 40k is even worse.
There are way better tabletop games that are actually fun.
www.reddit.com/r/FDMminiatures/ will give you an idea of the level of quality you can reach. With the smallest 0.2mm nozzle, will it reach resin levels? Close but not really. Is it good enough for me to screw around with, improve my painting skills, and play casual games? Certainly.
Also I subbed to the OnePageRules patreon, they offer alternative minis and rulebooks that are very similar to GW, with an alternate for fantasy and 40K, as well as fleet battles and other stuff.
Necroprinting isn't about printing necrons.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw9953
> Here we report “3D necroprinting,” a biohybrid manufacturing technique that repurposes female mosquito proboscides as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles. The mosquito proboscis, with its unique geometry, structure, and mechanics, enables printed line widths as fine as 20 μm ...
(that's 0.02mm)
Really fun game with none of the GW BS.
I only played with resin printers briefly, and not only do they produce extremely brittle and off-dimenension parts, they are extremely messy and use chemicals that you really should think twice or three times or four times about having under the same roof as the one you sleep in.
With how useful FDM is to me, it seems really strange that resin printing's killer app has been "miniatures", like it's the niche it fell into after everyone bought one and discovered they aren't great for much else. I am in disbelief that people would willingly deal with resin printers just to do miniatures, like there's no way it could possibly be worth it even if you really like that hobby. It feels wrong even to refer to both under the same umbrella of 3D printing.
That said, if you're not regularly designing parts you need made and/or aren't a CAD user, I don't see much use in the average person having a 3D printer (I have 5 btw)
On the other side of this _is_ the affordability of 3D printed miniatures. The linked-to article is salient/cogent/great, but the secondary topic at hand––lowering the price of entry for miniatures-based table top gaming––is still salient. 3D printing won't necessarily upend GW's business model, but it does provide an entry point that is more affordable by some calculus.
They are in some people's driveway. That's the remarkable part anyway
> Another fellow dork will then play you on a game board roughly the size of a door, covered in fake terrain that someone spent 40 hours making to look like a bombed-out cathedral. You will both have rulebooks with you containing as many pages as the Bible and roughly as open to interpretation. Wars have been started over less contentious texts.
3D printers are really cool, in a way that's hard to grasp until you use one. My apartment came with a single trash bin, conflicting with the CC+R requirement that you separate out your recycling. I designed and 3D printed a retrofit to hang two trash bags in a single can. Now I can separate my recycling without having it out in my living space.
I also had a kitchen island that came with a drawer that was shorter than my utensil tray, with a frustrating amount of dead space behind the drawer. I bought a dremel and some wood glue to mod the drawer to fit the utensil tray. I 3D printed the tools I needed to do it - like a jig and some vices.
I've been meaning to design and print some hangers for my plastic instruments - I still have my Rock Band kit from college.
Maybe people who play WH4K care about the OEM seal of approval. Maybe they look down at 3D printing. Surely, it still opens the hobby to people who _don't_ have thousands to invest in miniatures. I would 100% print miniatures if I was into that game.
But it feels like he's too focused on that particular micro-market. Maybe there's something in that subculture that makes them look down on 3D printers (and maybe not understanding that is a useful analogy to other "from the outside, this is dumb" situations). But there's a whole lot of utility in 3D printing that has nothing to do with wargames.
Also, my office has a makerspace. I've seen _plenty_ of people printing pieces for tabletop games. The author has his biases too.
But the thing is, that was one step in a larger process.
For instance. It used to take hours to lay out your software widget controls - dialogs with checkboxes and pulldowns and whatever. They invented tools that let you do it in 10 minutes. CAD saves software!
But reality check: that part of the project was a whole six hours saved, out of a schedule stretching over months. The savings disappear into insignificance.
Somewhat off topic from the rest of the comments but:
Knew someone who was in the Jane Austen Society (New York City chapter). She told me how a member from the Melbourne (as in Australia) chapter was visiting NYC, had never been there and so reached out to the NYC chapter to see if people wanted to hang out.
After the hang out, my friend says: "OMG, she was one of the coolest and most fun people I've ever met! So much fun to take someone else from JAS around NYC for their first time"
This is one of my favorite stories about how a community can grow out of an interest in something and then span the globe. Cool to see the same thing is true of 40k
I posted my thoughts on this checks notes five years ago, but it's largely in the same place: https://variancehammer.com/2020/08/06/3d-printing-and-the-ho...
There are places where 3d printing has revolutionized the wargaming hobby. Terrain is one of them, and the biggest one I think. And there's games like Trench Crusade that got their launch via being 3d printable, allowing them the critical mass to get to plastic production.
But at the end of the day, if something is in plastic, I'm buying it in plastic. And I am disappointed by the amount of energy and talent not going into creating new things but...Legally Distinct Space Marines, often sculpted with no notion of actually ever being painted (way over-detailed, etc.)
What started out as a "oh look, they've opened a Games Workshop store in this shopping centre... hey it looks like they're giving away free miniatures and showing you how to paint, lets kill 5 mins in the store" has turned into starter packs, combat patrols and lore deep dives with books. All in the span of... 4 weeks.
That said, I have to say, it's been awesome learning about everything Warhammer 40k from him. Normally, I would research something myself to the point of overkill so I could answer his questions, but on this one his enthusiasm is driving it all and he's constantly telling me about this particular faction or that faction.
It's just nice to have a hobby that keeps him away from screen time these days. It also requires patience, dexterity, and creativity - plus there is obviously an incredible amount of lore, world building, backstories, etc, plenty to keep his imagination entertained.
The one big problem, of course, is the money required! Which is why someone recently said to me "maybe get a 3d printer" and we had this exact discussion about quality of printing etc, and regardless, I just don't see that impacting things like book sales or codex's.
Anyway, cool to read about how people got into it and just thought I'd share!
First hit is free; it is a cool hobby though and I like how it combines arts and crafts with gaming, strategy, world lore/building and storytelling, as you noted.
Also the skills are likely transferrable to RPG minis as well as general model building and painting.
I think custom game pieces for basically any tabletop game are a killer app for 3d printers. Also custom scenery and minis for RPGs (for example a mini customized for a player character, a custom monster, a key NPC, etc.)
Probably good for making doll house (or action figure hideout) furniture and accessories as well, though I expect part of the charm of that hobby is making tiny furnishings etc. out of realistic materials like wood, fabric, or ceramic.
And of course for creating replacement components for any toy or model as needed.
Its a much more accessible game that doesnt have a predatory business model behind its ruleset.
GW is frankly a shitty company, they are extremely litigious and their business model hinges around nerfing armies and then launching new models to make up the gap.
FDM prints have visual artifacts you cannot escape with many shapes, and even the most flexible of the expensive resins isn't nearly as durable as a plastic model. Plus plastic models insta-bond with plastic glue making them both easier to assemble and repair (as everything will eventually get damaged through years of play).
I've been doing model work for 30 years, and while 3d print stuff has many uses within the hobby (like making epic terrain way more accessible), replacing the core figures for something like warhammer, to anyone who cares about finish quality and durability at the same time is not one of them.
GW themselves make resin miniatures, they used to be called forgeworld.
I'm seeing a lot of people in comments dismiss FMD printers for minis, and thought I'd highlight the work of a youtuber called 'Once in a six side' who did a deep-dive into FDM mini pronting and got some really impressive results with even stock settings and basic PLA filament (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8fuNDTQJCY).
Once he really explored support placement, settings and ideal configurations his best prints rivalled resin in some cases once painted. Really cool to see as someone who isn't interested in messing with resin anytime soon.
That has to be one of the more amusing reads I've had in a while. And agreed, dealing with all of the extraneous crap that comes along with 3d printing is amazingly high on the tedious scale. Frustratingly so.
This is me looking at Kenshi, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, and most recently Stationeers in my "last played" games.
https://www.mimakieurope.com/products/3d/
It is mostly a price point thing but I would expect this tech to come down in price at the same rate that other 3D printing technologies have over the coming years. We're in the 'Stratasys' era of full color high res 3D printing right now.
The moment you have fully non-toxic resin, it will take off.
i dont own a boat.
i imagine real propellers are somewhat expensive. and people often dont buy 2 to keep a spare on board. and on occasion they do fail.
why not a 3d printed backup propeller then? it only needs to last 1/2 a trip..only the way back...
If you do something useless with a tool that's not on the tool, that's on you.
There's 40 of them sitting in my garage doing useful work that would have been absolutely impossible without this tech.
Where 3D printing has been revolutionary for Battletech though has been terrain. Battletech's played on a hex grid, and ever hex has an elevation printed on it to form hills, buildings, and rivers. There's one company (Thunderhead Studios) that makes STLs of the elevation of the official maps that's very popular. Popular enough that they've actually started mass manufacturing them and selling prepainted terrain retail. That shows up in every event I've been to, even official events where 3D minis are banned. But it's a decidedly ancillary part of the experience for Battletech.
[0] Catalyst Game Labs and Iron Wind Metals
“The bottleneck isn't acquiring plastic. The bottleneck is everything else.”
Getting models is certainly a bottleneck if you dont have $1000 to spend on minis.
In my city you can resin print the same army for $100 at one of dozens of 3D printing shops.
Same goes for high end mtg proxies.
If you are interested in a great game with an open license that encourages printing and hacking together your own models check out Trench Crusade.
I think GW will sell in-store printed minis before sufficiently good 3d printers are common in players’ homes. The OP makes good points about why this is impractical in some ways, but I can see this happening for special releases or some less popular minis. The other side of the impulse-buy coin is that a lot of people need minis that are not usually in stock in stores. Then, waiting 15 minutes or even an hour (say, whilst you play a game or watch one, or paint some stuff, or just chat with fellow nerds) to get your mini printed beats the current "order on the website and then wait 2 weeks" process.
High res resin printers are more than capable of printing high quality minis.
There are hundreds of videos on youtube to back that up, squidmar in particular has done several side by side comparisons.
The entire manual involvement for me from hitting go on the printer to handing out their minis to my friends, ready to be painted, I would estimate at just over five minutes per mini. This includes removing supports. This reads like it was written in 2010, not 2025.
neonnoodle•16h ago
I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned. My local game shop makes a lot of cool 3D printed stuff and sells it online or at cons, but even Etsy is now cracking down on prints of “commodity” STLs. IIRC under their new policy, you can’t sell a print you didn’t design yourself. This is ostensibly to cut down on the huge quantity of identical articulated toys.
But the bigger takeaway (i.e., the kit car Ferrari analogy), is similar to how I’ve been thinking about AI image generation lately. You can walk down the streets of New York and buy a counterfeit Birkin bag or Rolex from a street vendor. Are knockoffs “disrupting” the market? I guess, in a way. But I think they also make the authentic item _more_ valuable by being so cheap and fake by comparison. AI-generated “Ghibli” pictures are the same.
aleph_minus_one•15h ago
In my opinion people simply stopped following the big visions of that time and got satisfied with the current state of 3D printers instead of continuing to iterate on highly experimental designs that could bring the world nearer to these visions.
samplatt•8h ago
kennywinker•6h ago
But to your point about PFAS, afaik no common 3d printing materials contain PFAS - at least not filament ones, i don’t know much about the resin printing world.
1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4id0-vvu-u0
chaosite•3h ago
I don't see how PFAS can be used as a filament in FDM printer. It's not a thermoplastic, that's one of its advantages as a material.
Rebelgecko•6h ago
fragmede•15h ago
netsharc•9h ago
https://www.excitant.co.uk/rip-robert-m-pirsig-why-zen-and-t...
But I suppose a Rolex has the property of "a token to remind me of my prosperity" that a Lolex doesn't...
heddycrow•6h ago
Zen tries to draw a distinction between mental models with an object/subject separation and alternatives.
There are sane and insane reasons why we might adopt one or the other model.
An object/subject thinker might obsess over status symbols, but also the frame itself can lead to discomfort over using the "wrong" part.
Witness something like this in buy/build discussions where cargo-cult thinking plays a bigger part than rational thought. This probably goes well beyond object/subject thinking.
The status symbol thing can be more than posturing for prosperity. Some people get their identity tangled up in brand separate from social concerns.
I talk with LLM's about this sort of thing quite a bit more than I talk with humans. I get irritated when LLM refuses to allow for shorthand language. I hope I don't come across like that.
I agree with what I read as the sentiment from your last line, there's something that can be unsettling about objects carrying more than their intrinsic value.
gerdesj•15h ago
Nowadays I own a 3D printer (Prusa 4S+ with nobs on upgraded from a 3) and an IT company.
16 year old me would have committed ... a minor crime ... for the printer but given that IT was a Commodore 64, I'm not sure how I would have driven the thing.
However a 16 y/o me today with a 3D printer probably would be printing armies out of filament. I used to make plastic models too and saved up for several months to buy a double action air brush. My printer can churn out a small scale tank that rivals a Tamiya effort from back in the day. Some finishing is required but not much.
I might have a go at some Warhammer models and see how it goes, just for old time's sake ...
marcus_holmes•12h ago
I had a go at FDM printing some minis, for old times' sake, and it didn't go well. The best resolution that I can get to is around 0.1mm, which is incredibly slow to print, and still not fine enough. The print layers are still visible, the detail is blurred. Sanding doesn't help that much; the face is still a mess. You can't paint individual eyeballs on them.
If you remember the first generation of plastic gobbos and dwarves in the Warhammer (not 40K) beginner box released back in the early 90's, where they obviously had two-part moulds and there were no underhangs anywhere on the models, then my FDM versions were more shit than those.
The author is spot-on about the hobby, and about the business model, and about 3D printing's place in it.
But have a go, it's a fun challenge for a 3D printer enthusiast :)
iLoveOncall•13h ago
That is not true. I have a resin printer that is around 3 years old (Anycubic Photon Mono M5s) and it has a level of detail that simply cannot be matched by injection molded parts. I have printed some miniatures that have details much smaller than a human hair, like the needle of a syringe in 32mm scale.
Once painted, the figurines are indistinguishable from non-3D printed ones unless you pick them up (they're heavier often).
That said, the article is still right. Resin printers are a massive pain. They're highly toxic, and the time spent preparing, and then post-processing is quite high, but also stressful because of the toxicity. I use my filament printer almost every day, but my resin printer has been collecting dust because of this.
raikouwithboobs•6h ago
Such as, I dunno. A proxy that looks like a...
Either way, no, I don't take Resin Printers as a market disruption either. But I have a rather more positive take on them: They probably grow the market itself. Because there are more people getting into the hobby. Well, that and stuff like 10th edition probably helps a bunch.
bdcravens•13h ago
Not really true. There was a lot of drama about this when it came out, but I suspect there were more videos on YouTube about the subject than there have been actual products taken down over this. You just have to disclose that you made it with design partners. (ie, an STL you didn't create)
phantasmish•13h ago
I’ll never touch the tech again. The chemicals seem sketchy as hell (I don’t really want any hobbies that make me feel like I need a dedicated area of my house that I only enter while wearing significant PPE, and with gloves that never leave that dirty-zone) and after probably ten joyless hands-on hours burned over a couple weekends, I never got the fucking thing to print a single one of its test designs.
Seems like yet another fiddly hobby for its own sake (that might eventually yield some not-remotely-worth-the-cost fruits) rather than a useful tool. I don’t need what it offers that bad, the amount of money and time I’m going to put toward it in the rest of my life is zero. It’s probably a fine activity if the act of fiddling with 3D printers is the main draw for a person. Otherwise, no.
pyottdes•13h ago
https://youtube.com/@pyottdesign
jacquesm•7h ago
ToucanLoucan•11h ago
I got started in 2017 with an Ender 3, and extremely cheap printer with a basic set of features. I improved it by adding a bed leveling sensor and flashing new firmware, along with adding a tool steel nozzle and heater, and a 3d printed housing replacement for it's screen which included a place to mount a raspberry pi, running octoprint, to manage it remotely, and a webcam on a stick mounted to the Z rail. It worked pretty good, and building it was fun.
However in the intervening years, I also bought a Creality CR-6 Max, a much larger printer with a built-in bed leveler. It too got a pi and a webcam, but nothing beyond that, and it too worked well. However both those printers required constant maintenance, troubleshooting and overall fiddling. It remained my niche hobby.
I've since upgraded to a Bambu Lab H2D at great expense ($3,200 retail, utterly dwarfing the sub-$500 printers of before) and honestly, it's like a different tech all together. I don't even NEED a computer, really, unless I want to use one: I can find stuff on my phone, download it, and send it to the printer over their cloud service. And no troubleshooting really to speak of, I think I've had like 3 prints that did some weird shit and required a figure or two, but absolutely no comparison to the other machines. And in fact it's so bulletproof that my wife, who is utterly uninterested and frankly a bit hostile to tech, now uses it more than I do. She says it's a slightly trickier version of a Cricut, which is just WILD to me coming from my experiences with the Ender and Creality before it.
All of these are of course FDM printers. I have also played with a Photon Mono X I got from a friend who didn't want to use it with their birds in their home, and that one while requiring more fiddling and more chemicals, is also virtually bulletproof with regard to print quality, and you get better finishes with some tradeoffs (vulnerability to sunlight, figuring out curing vs. over-curing, what have you) which sounds a bit more like what you were dealing with. I could absolutely see that souring your opinion if you started there, that's not a beginner machine IMHO.
Aurornis•11h ago
I would never recommend a resin printer to someone new to 3D printing. They’ve come a long way and are reasonably reliable now, but it’s not a good place to start.
terribleperson•11h ago
jacquesm•7h ago
terribleperson•1h ago
Much better than my Printrbot Metal Plus, which turned out to require all the tinkering of a budget printer at the price of a high-end printer.
DannyBee•6h ago
I've probably owned 6 or 7 over the past 10 years, mainly to check out new technology and such.
I also own a very nice wood cnc and a very nice metal cnc, and use both a lot. Since they are 6 figure machines, they get modified instead of replaced ;).
So I have never been afraid to spend money to try things. I also have no issue modifying things (I have rebuilt entire cnc cabinets and mechanicals from scratch, rewritten the plc programs, etc). I donate the things I'm done with to friends or schools.
I say all this because I have also tried 4 resin printers over the past 10 years, and cathartically thrown every single one in a dumpster to avoid anyone else experiencing them.
While they have come a long way, selling any of them as a beginner level printer for someone new to 3d printing should be a crime. I can't think of a faster way to turn someone off from 3d printing. If you are doing product development or dentistry they can make sense. If you want "click button, wait, receive printed model" like most beginners, they make no sense because of the workflow.
Ironically, the one parson I know happy with their resin printer uses it exclusively to print Warhammer 40k minis (he uses one of my old fdm printers for other stuff).
ajsnigrutin•10h ago
Depends.
Here in the balkans, for some reason, Louis Vuitton bags (the ugly brown one with lighter/gold lettering) have become popular with 'the kids' some years ago.. those bags normally cost as much as a modern laptop, some even much more, but due to chinese manufacturers and local market sellers, you can get counterfits for 10-30eur, depending on the design. Are the materials, seams, zippers, metal parts (well.. metallic painted plastic), etc. worse? Sure. But from far away, it's hard to notice the difference.
Now, due to the huge cost difference between the original and the fake and easily obtainable fakes, most of such bags you see in the street are fakes.
Since it's hard to tell them apart, people just assume it's a fake bag, when they see someone carrying it. I personally know people who are pretty rich and buy expensive stuff "just to show it around", and they don't buy those bags anymore, because no one thinks it's an original bag. A 100k mat black mercedes? Can't fake that. 30k gold watch? Sure it can be fake, but few people wear watches nowaday, even fewer notice them, and very few people assume that the watch is fake. But a 3k louis vuitton handbag? In whatever shopping center or larger cafe/club you go with that, there will be a couple more girls with similar, fake ones.
throw-12-16•7h ago
There are some great sites with thousands of designs for reasonable prices.