3D Printing

I know, I had meant for this to be a post about the Descendants trilogy from Disney, but like I mentioned last weekend, my husband got a new toy - 3D printer.  It's actually pretty neat and eventually, I'll do a post using his permission to post pics of some of the completed pieces and possibly of the printer in work and the different stages of work that have gone in to what's been printed - mostly figurines.  We plan to paint them as well, so there's that.

Trust me, if you get a 3D printer it won't be easy going.  You'll have to figure out what you can do based on the dimensions of your printer and if your printer works on the metric system or not.  You'll have to figure out how to set things to print for various set-ups.  Supports are needed for parts that "hang" such as archery bows or claws.  We've tried making a set of dice three or four times now, and only just figured out the supports and other bits that go into it - all my husband's doing, of course.  Before you even get to this point you have to decide either resin or filament.  We went with resin so if you decide to use a filament printer, what I'm about to mention likely won't matter much.

When it comes to resin printers, you have to decide on the base resin.  There are a rather large number of colors and durabilities to them.  We've decided to use a rather durable gray for most things with a slightly more durable transparent blue for dice at the very minimum.  Then we had to find everything necessary for a curing station set-up.  I won't get too much into that.  Suffice to say, it was neither cheap nor easy to find everything we needed and we started at Walmart and finished with orders on Amazon.

After we finally got the bulk of things figured out in regards to the actual printing, we looked into painting them.  We haven't started on that yet, but we went to Michaels yesterday to get some base supplies that will be used.  We researched and found that most apparently used an airbrush.  Neither my husband nor I wish to use one.  We've decided to hand paint.  So we bought some spray paint primer and finish for before and after painting the figurines and a 36 count box of Craftsman paints and a small box of hair paintbrushes (at the moment I can't remember what type of hair they were) to get us started.  We will likely get most of our supplies there.

If you do decide to get into 3D printing, be aware to start with a large figure.  Work your way down to learn the system and its idiosyncrasies.  We got advice from a co-worker who went through 3 bottles of resin because he started with the smaller figurines.  We only went through 2 and started by printing a tarrasque.  Our printer can't put it at its full size for the D&D mat, but we already printed off a figure and it's pretty decent.  Having figured out what our printer can handle, we've decided on some back-up ideas for the figures that we are likely to need for our campaigns.  Hopefully next weekend we'll have actually started to paint the figurines we've printed off!