3d printing is a new thing for me; I've been working on this for about a month. Most of this has been devoted to working on mods to enhance the printer, then a set of dungeon tiles for epic dungeon builds. More on that soon.
Minis are a lot harder than tiles. Simple geometric shapes do really well with the printer and look good. Minis are so small and detailed that they are just a lot more difficult to print.
There's also the printer to consider. A 3d printer lays down material on a bed, stacking layers. You can't just let it print into the ether. The print will fall and start to cool in a messy descent. In the case of a mini with suspended elements, you need to use supports. Some printers may have better control over this, or some settings that make it easier. My printer is cheap and easy to work on. That's what I bought it for.
Here's a mini with supports 'on the build plate' printed in the usual orientation.
As you can see it printed and kept the head up just fine, but the suspended legs were unsuccessful.
Here's the same mini printed on its back, a suggestion from the modeler. It was printed with supports 'on the build plate'.
Holy cow. I had to peel away all the support on the left to be able to see the mini. It wasn't actually hard to do, but the supports add a lot of material. Not a huge difference with the cost but the mini is perfect. It took me about 10 minutes to clean the mini up with hand tools. This is kind of a throwback to my earlier painting days when you had to clean flash off of lead minis.
Both minis primed quickly with black spray. I think they both look fine and the supported print just had a little bit of filing to get to this point. The bear is a pretty large, low-detail mini. Next up will be some humanoid-size minis to see what the quality is like.
Minis are a lot harder than tiles. Simple geometric shapes do really well with the printer and look good. Minis are so small and detailed that they are just a lot more difficult to print.
There's also the printer to consider. A 3d printer lays down material on a bed, stacking layers. You can't just let it print into the ether. The print will fall and start to cool in a messy descent. In the case of a mini with suspended elements, you need to use supports. Some printers may have better control over this, or some settings that make it easier. My printer is cheap and easy to work on. That's what I bought it for.
Here's a mini with supports 'on the build plate' printed in the usual orientation.
Here's the same mini printed on its back, a suggestion from the modeler. It was printed with supports 'on the build plate'.
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