"Are we there yet" with 3D printing?

Well, take a look at this one:

I started a Heroquest campaign with my kids and my daughter (3 yrs) just wants to play the elf all the time. I thought it'd be neat for her to have a female elf figure to play with. I looked through the usual companies and found a couple of suitable models that weren't all ass and tits but would have had to order them from the US. Luckily I've just bought a 3D printer!

It's an Anycubic Photon resin printer and you can get one delivered to your door for well less than 400 euros these days. I've been waiting for a printer to come along that would be accurate enough for miniatures and consumer grade PLA printers haven't quite been accurate enough yet. Then I saw one gamer in a Finnish miniatures group post some models he had printed using a resin printer and I knew the time was ripe for me to jump on the 3D printing bandwagon too.

The printer after finishing up its first model, a test piece.

I won't start blabbing on about what a resin printer is and how it works, you can find that stuff easily online. Suffice to say, It takes a bit of calibrating, messing about with toxic chemicals and being smart when posing your 3D models for printing but it isn't anything people can't handle. The prints I've done have turned out really good and the problems I've had so far are nothing a bit of calibration and a good workflow can't fix. The quality of the prints when successful is quite enough for Epic scale tanks, but nooot quite there for the infantry figures I tested.

A Battletech Atlas was my first "proper" print and it turned out excellent on the front. On the back, some of the details were muddled by something more experienced printers call "light bleed", where the resin bits that are printed first might have additional curing of the resin because of the UV light spilling through the resin. 

So, coming back to that elf, here's a company that takes the concept of 3D printing miniatures yourself and builds a great business case for it instead of crying about piracy: https://www.heroforge.com/

On that site you can easily design your own figures, choose their appearance, clothing, gear, poses and even facial expressions. You can then either have them print and ship those models for you or you can buy a printable 3d file for yourself. That's what I did with the elf:

A slight printing error on the hair, probably due to insufficient supports below it.

My printer can't quite capture all the nuance of the expression on the 3D model but I'd say it's pretty damn good! I painted the figure using colours chosen by my daughter and she can enter the dungeon with her own custom elf next time! I really hope we'll be seeing some big manufacturers get onboard with this business idea. How about getting to customize and print your own, licenced 40K figures? Heroforge sells their digital models for ten dollars each, which is a bit expensive for more than a one-off hero every now and then, but I hope the prices will come down. They do have sales every now and then and for example on Black Friday you could get a model for four dollars. That would be low enough to buy some more often, especially as their design engine gets better.


I still have a lot to learn using this new printer but I'm really happy I got one! You'll definitely be seeing more 3D printed stuff from me in the future!

ADDENDUM: Here's a Stug model from a guy on thingiverse scaled down to 1/300.Needless to say I'm happy with the quality!