guppy
Paint Manipulator
Posts: 202
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Post by guppy on Mar 1, 2017 7:55:47 GMT
Been thinking about getting into making custom minis by having them 3d printed though some online service.
Modeling the characters is mostly just a question of time, where I think is the problem will occur is in making the file good for printing.
I mean there are plenty of guides online about making model ready for printing with various types of printers ( detail size, wall thickness, drain holes, etc ) but some times I read that people are still having problems / need to modify models that looking at them in blender seem to satisfy all of the above.
So what ( in your experience ) makes a file good, or perhaps more interestingly what makes it bad?
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Post by matakishi on Mar 4, 2017 11:06:34 GMT
I held off answering this assuming someone with more 3D experience would come along but, since they haven't... Spindly stuff is bad. Not impossible but a pain. I would,'t print a 28mm human sized miniature at all, it wouldn't be anyway near good enough to use. Scenery is best, big monsters a close second. I prefer kits rather than a complete thing that will need supports. This miniature is great because it doesn't need supports and it's been split so the rounded arms and body can be printed easily and joined together later. It comes out at about 60mm tall. This cave lurker has been designed so it can be printed upright in one go, the arms are self supporting. I ended up using a support between the legs just to be safe. If the lower groin/belly didn't sag quite so much it wouldn't have needed any support.
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Post by curufin on Mar 4, 2017 13:14:41 GMT
I agree. I am a big fan of designing things in multiple pieces that print flat and can be assembled later. I also agree that 28mm minis (especially non-monsters) will have nowhere near the quality that many gamers have become used to (unless you are using a high end service like ShapeWays, which will charge about $20+ a mini to print). I would never use a printed mini for a PC. However, printing monsters, especially larger ones, can be quite beneficial. If I needed 2 Umber Hulks and 6 Hook Horrors for an encounter, suddenly printing makes sense. One other thing that makes a good print is 'Manifold". Having "manifold" means that the 3d object is watertight. This is needed for your slicing software to generate a path to print. Sometimes the software doesn't know what to do when a model looses manifold and can result in a failed print...or something that simply won't print. My advice would be to look through all of these Printable Minis. Download them, and then look at them in your modeling program. Take a look at how Miguel broke them down into pieces and how much detail he used to get a starting point. Unfortunately, a lot of it is trial and error with something as complex as minis. That may be hard to do with an online printing service.
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Post by fantascientist on Mar 9, 2017 16:53:35 GMT
As the others said, small details may be difficult to get printed right, especially on FDM printers. Myself I do print 28mm human sized figures. We used to play with just bottle caps instead of mini's, so anything is a big improvement. Of course the quality is much less compared to cast figures, but with some paint on them they can still look quite neat i.m.o. I like using them, since the material costs are very low (1 mini weighs maybe 5g including supports etc., which means I can easily print 100 of them using 1 roll of filament). As curufin said though, it takes some experience and a bunch of trial and error to print mini's right. I've found that if you want details to show, you really need to exaggerate them a lot. Even though a model's details might look good on your computer, they may not show at all when you print them. On 28mm human sized models, you will most likely not be able to see much of any facial features, for example. Here's a huge list of 3d printed DND mini's (not my work). These were printed on a cheap 3D printer and they look pretty nice i.m.o. If you intend to design your own models but don't want to buy a 3D printer, take a look at www.heroforge.com/ . They're not cheap ($20 for one mini I believe), but they have experience printing them and you will get something nice. If you only need a few, this may be a reasonable option. If you need a lot, I think having them printed commercially will become very expensive.
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art
Paint Manipulator
Posts: 109
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Post by art on Mar 19, 2017 2:44:56 GMT
I am having the same issue of being able to create pretty good looking files from the stand point of appearance for printing. I don't know how to fix them up, however, to be really good for printing. I really just tweak the files until they seem to work. I have one that I know has layers inside and is causing it to take forever to be sliced. I have tried a "hallower" routine, but it doesn't seem to fix it. I am doing this just because I enjoy designing and providing new ideas and resources for gaming. I don't get paid in other words. Be nice if someone knew how to do this or has a program if they could take one of my files and give me ideas on what to do and how to fix it or tell me what was wrong and give information on inexpensive resources. I will and have posted my items on thingiverse for everyone to freely use once I get them "fixed". I hate taking peoples files off of thingiverse and then having to either fix their work or throw away what I printed, because it is not done right.
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Post by fantascientist on Mar 19, 2017 22:27:07 GMT
Try Netfabb's cloud repair service. When I find models that have trouble slicing, this usually helps a lot. It will fix most issues like non manifold models, inverted triangles, intersecting shells, etc. You will still need to account for size of details etc. yourself though to make them appear nicely when printed.
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