The recent advances in 3d scanner tech have also been impressive. There is even one the works off of images from a smartphone.
I have been watching 3D print technology closely for almost a decade now precisely because I think they will be incredibly useful for making miniatures and terrain. 3D printing is becoming the fusion of the consumer electronics realm... meaning that affordable, reasonable quality 3D printing has been two years away now for about a decade...
The cheapest 3D printers are still the Makerbot ones. Those are suitable for lots of terrain items, but are still not close to being good enough to print out miniatures. The ones that print miniatures are still in the tens of thousands of dollars range.
Generally for technology to leave the engineering labs and enter the home user space requires some "killer app" to drive the home market. So far that "killer app" has not appeared, and as much as I would love to have miniature printing be that killer app.... that's not likely.
Until the consumer market drives the demand to support the mass production of reasonably priced 3D printers, they will likely remain as engineering or design tools and will continue to be priced as such.
Two more years? Maybe... I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Hah. The mainstream media finally decided this tech was 'newsworthy'?
Anyways yeah there's certainly a Market for this kind of technology. Did anyone ever play Spore? Those promotional models they made of a limited number of
Peoples creations? This shows it's possible. Problem is yeah, you'd have to make it cheap. And you'd have to make a cheap and intuitive piece of software to allow you to design figurines in 3D that could be made readily available to the masses.
Some sort of freeware that works on low graphics and replaces the jobs of the highly skilled designers out there making the molds for miniatures.
I don't know about anyone else, but back when I was working as a CAD designer. When I took my work home and used the sophisticated draughtsman software to design a space station based of one of my games design student buddies. It crashed every odd hour from the strain. This being the same pc that plays crysis on max graphics for hours at a time. And the end product was crap. I guess I didn't learn much at that 3D design course.
Point being, sure the tech's maturing. But the software needs to become much simpler and I'd still rather use a model designed by a professional.
But yeah, custom miniatures are coming to a games store near you in 2015!
I just downloaded Google's "Sketchup" 3D modeling software, and a plugin that allows me to convert to 3D printer files. I'm going to do a miniature and send it to one of the 3D printing services to see what sort of quality I get back.
The problem with the creation of an intuitive 3D modeling user interface is that 3D modeling itself isn't very intuitive. In fact many people struggle badly with the basic visualization of 3D shapes, which is what is really required to do 3D modeling in the first place. When I was an Engineering student back in the late 70s, the single thing that drove most engineering students out of that area and into some other field was the inability to accurately do that mental transformation of shapes. It's not easy to keep track of all the angles and edges and holes and protrusions as the shape in your head spins and tumbles...
Most likely the first consumer apps for 3D printing will be based on a "customize this model" approach, where the app has a basic shape (like a person or a car or a piece of furniture) and the user will modify attributes (like color or texture or add-ons) which will be applied by the application without the user needing to work out exactly where the left ear should be...
But the problem so far has been that the industry simply doesn't see a consumer demand for the product. It's stuck at the stage that the computer industry was in the 70s when the head of IBM famously said "nobody needs a 'home' computer."
But in a couple years....
Just to clarify, the cheapest 3D printers aren't the ones Makerbot is selling as completed devices at the electronics show, the cheapest ones are the ones that you buy as a kit and assemble yourself (procuring items like metal rods, nuts, bolts and washers from your local hardware store). Those are, I think, around the $500 price point for the cheapest ones. I keep thinking I'll get one and build one myself, but I've got too many projects underway already....
I must admit after posting this I went home and thought to myself "right if I had one of those what would I print?" and came up with... cheap novelty items and that was about it.
Computers moved from the lab to the home via the office and certainly when the technology becomes advanced enough to print items using other materials than just plastic I can potentially see them making a similar move (being able to print out a new USB cable when my old one becomes frayed would be very useful) but I just don't see a need for the kind of small plastic objects that they can currently print out
This has been the problem with the current technology since they first came out. They are GREAT TOOLS for making models or making doodads. But they are of very limited use in making actual usable THINGS.
I've spent a lot of time perusing the Makerbot library and have been looking at the Cubicle library too. Basically you're right. For a couple thousand dollars you get something that can produce small plastic trinkets for about the same price that you can buy the same thing at Walmart or a toy store.
That's a hard market to sell to.
The folks who could put that ability to actual economically sensible use are generally the folks who have pretty high quality and production standards which the "affordable" 3D printers are still a long way from meeting.
Even as miserably poor as my own sculpting and painting skills are, I can easily produce far more attractive and durable miniatures and terrain from epoxy or polymer clay. And if I need lots and lots of copies, I can always make molds and cast copies from durable products like Excalibur or Hydrostone, or even casting resin (although casting resin can be pretty expensive itself).
I love the technology. I'm a pretty good example of a potential early adopter for 3D printing. But even I am not yet finding the products being offered compelling enough to take the plunge...