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My group is 3D printing most of our stuff for beer and pretzels games. But official tournaments have a rule where your miniatures have to be official products.
by dharmab 1y ago
My group is 3D printing most of our stuff for beer and pretzels games. But official tournaments have a rule where your miniatures have to be official products.
Note that a standard printer won't be anywhere near as nice quality as official models. You need a resin printer for that, which requires ventilation, some basic PPE, and additional labor to clean and cure the prints correctly. Not something you want to do with small children or pets in the house.
We resin print most of our models. We use FDM for blocky things like tanks and buildings, though. And some complex or very large models can't be printed (although we sometimes use alternatives for those).
Warhammer is an unusually expensive game, too. Other games like One Page Rules will sell you STLs to self-print, or charge very reasonable prices for pro-printed minis. You can buy a 2-player starter kit for OPR for about the same money as one WH40K unit.
- wkat4242 1y agoYes I know, resin printing is not great, I don't like it myself either. But FDM printing has gotten a lot better, especially with the bambulab material switcher where you can use water-dissolvable support material. But cool to hear you're printing them. I can imagine they don't want to allow it at official tournament to protect the golden goose :)
- dharmab 1y agoYeah, we have a couple of Bambus, but the detail on these miniatures is physically smaller than the extruder. So print resolution holds us back a bit.
- wkat4242 1y agoEven with the 0.2mm nozzle? With that you can go pretty detailed because the maximum it can do with that is 0.1mm (how they pull that off with a 0.2mm nozzle I don't know, but all their nozzles do half the nozzle size in layer height). Of course it's not the resolution of a good laser resin printer but resin is also much more expensive and it's a PITA to work with as discussed here.
- dharmab 1y agoWorks fine for a tank, but something like Imperial Guardsman, Sisters of Battle or a Necron Tomb Blade all have features that are too small for FDM. Look up the "Celestine the Living Saint" model - the entire sculpt is small enough to fit inside your hand. The extra cost of resin is negligible at this scale, it's mostly the safety requirements and extra labor that makes it harder.
- wkat4242 1y agoAhhh yes ok I didn't realise that. I'm not into this kind of game at all but a friend who was into it showed me his big flying tanks so I thought they were all that big.