Whoa! Instant decors, terrains, tiles and gaming accessories!*
The missing link between my two best-preferred hobbies ever: LEGOs and RPGs!
*by "instant" I mean 2 hours and a half. But nevertheless...
'findel
I don't see why it wouldn't work on polystyrene.
I keep looking at prices for 3D printers. I think that's the future of my gaming hobby. Design minis in a CAD program and then print them out. Eventually you can print them out in color. I'm looking forward to when Sam's Club carries them.
That's a lot of fun.
That is very very cool.
Regarding 3-D printing taking over miniatures, I think that's still some way off in the future. I believe that ReaperBryan has mentioned on the fact that Reaper buys 3-d printers every so often to see what the current level of capabilities is, and at present it falls far short of what one would want in terms of detail etc.
But in ten years things may be very different, certainly.
I don't see why it wouldn't work on polystyrene.
I keep looking at prices for 3D printers. I think that's the future of my gaming hobby. Design minis in a CAD program and then print them out. Eventually you can print them out in color. I'm looking forward to when Sam's Club carries them.
I think we're still a long way from printing minis in the present level of details, but many decors elements, terrains accessories and various type of markers are well within the capabilities of 3D printers/milling machines.
Need a gate to represent the entrance of the dwarven mines? A fell tree for the brigand's ambush, a series of (perhaps broken) columns, a rough statue on a pedestal, a low wall, a series of tiles to create a dungeon as you go, flames to represent elementals, counters to represent your flaming sphere/firewall/black tentacles etc. Theses are all realistically doable with the present technology.
Eventually, I can imagine a market for the CAD plans for these. It may take a while for these to be as cheap as I'd like them to be, but we'll get there eventually.
'findel
There are lots of different 3D printing technologies. Some of them are indeed good enough to provide the detail needed for minis. In fact a company sells 3D miniature printouts of WoW characters using that technology today. But it's expensive. Very expensive.
But it is only expensive now because it is new.
Back in 1984 Apple introduced the first home-targeted laser printer. It cost something like $10,000. That's probably $20k in today's dollars. Within a decade those prices had dropped to a few hundred dollars as the market expanded and the technology became more powerful and cheaper. I just saw a personal laser printer on sale at Amazon.com this week for $69. I fully expect the same thing to happen with 3D printers.
But the path from early adopter to mass marketing of electronic devices is much, much faster today than it was 30 years ago. I give it five years at most before a reasonably priced, highly detailed 3D printer capable of printing minis of acceptable quality are available.
I believe that those WoW miniatures are rather larger than ones for RPGs. The impression I had was that they were more on the scale of 6" or something like that. And while that's not trivial to do, it's a lot more possible than the precision rending necessary to create something like this. Although to be honest, I am continually astonished at the level of detail sculptors are able to achieve on 28mm miniatures.
I think that 3-D printers are really very much at the stage of much of computing in the mid-late 1970s. It's either happening on the huge industrial (corresponding to mainframes) scale, or on the hobbyist tinkering in their garage (corresponding to, well, hobbyists tinkering in their garage) scale. Things changed rapidly in the early 1980s, certainly, with the introduction of the Mac and MS-DOS (something whose revolutionary effect tends to be overlooked, really).
Certainly I expect to see something happening on the time scale of a decade, but I am not so optimistic it will happen within five years.
In any case, the applications for (relatively) easy production of terrain are plenty exciting for me for the moment. I just need to determine where I would put any terrain that I want to build, and I'll be able to get to work... in my copious spare time.
I believe that those WoW miniatures are rather larger than ones for RPGs. The impression I had was that they were more on the scale of 6" or something like that.
Yes, they're more like action figures or statuettes in terms of scale than minis.
However, companies like Shapeways are quite capable of 3D-printing miniatures-scale figures (and as users can create their own and make the models available to others, you have a LOT of options, from minis to Cthulhu statues to steampunk iPhone covers to unique dice).
Back in 1984 Apple introduced the first home-targeted laser printer. It cost something like $10,000. That's probably $20k in today's dollars. Within a decade those prices had dropped to a few hundred dollars as the market expanded and the technology became more powerful and cheaper. I just saw a personal laser printer on sale at Amazon.com this week for $69. I fully expect the same thing to happen with 3D printers.
Actually, HP introduced the first mass-market laser printer, the LaserJet, in '84 for $3500. Apple introduced the fourth, the LaserWriter (but the first for a Mac), the following year, for $7000.
Pricing HAS dropped dramatically, though, but more in the last 5-10 years. Amazingly, you can actually get wireless networked laser printers from HP under $100 if you shop around, and color lasers from various manufacturers have gotten incredibly cheap, too.
The key to cheap 3D printers will be a mass-market application - the general populace will need a big reason to utilize the printer. Not really sure what that "killer app" would be for such a device...
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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I was thinking you might be able to combine this with a home grown vacuum molding setup. You would 'print' something using the easy to mold but fragile foam then vacuum mold it into durable plastic pieces which you can produce a bunch of for cheap. It would be a lot of work for single piece runs but could eventually be an alternative to thinks like the Hirst Arts molds.
For that matter you could use something like this to 'print' something then make a mold out of that for use with dental clay or some of the plastics.
I was thinking you might be able to combine this with a home grown vacuum molding setup. You would 'print' something using the easy to mold but fragile foam then vacuum mold it into durable plastic pieces which you can produce a bunch of for cheap. It would be a lot of work for single piece runs but could eventually be an alternative to thinks like the Hirst Arts molds.
For that matter you could use something like this to 'print' something then make a mold out of that for use with dental clay or some of the plastics.
+1 once you have a rough mold you can add better detail, though that is probably just as complicated as sculpting from raw.
HA! You missed....
*vacumes away to reveal a perfectly detailed human face*
Next mini combat, mount rushmore!
I need to take another crack at learning how to use blender.
I don't know of anyone that 3d-prints the final, for-sale product, but there are several sculptors that make their masters in 3d. Check out Yedharo Models, they do stuff for Raging Heroes amongst other things.