Geek only topic 🙂

I’ve given in a bought a copy of heroquest to play with my kids (zatu have it back in stock at a small discount…)

Been looking up painting examples, and I’ve come across 3D printed dungeons that replace the board. This looks pretty cool and a good upgrade on the card from a gaming experience.

I’ve found cult 3D website and it has some interesting stuff on there. I’m tempted to dip my toe into it, terrain in particular is what I’m interested in printing as the cost seems very high for larger pieces. Maybe get into the minatures themselves too at a later date

As I’m starting out – what websites are out there worth reading ? do you have a printer? Are they easy to setup and use? Any pics of what you have made? Ideally I don’t want to do lots of clean up but accept may have to

Ender 3 v2 owner here and a user of both Sketchup and Thingiverse. Most of my prints have been replacement parts for things though and some custom bits for a friend in Berlin.

Printer setup is relatively easy, you just need to make sure that the bed is level and clean (cleaned with IPA). I usually start prints at 50% speed and then speed up after the first few layers.

I did a fair bit of prototyping over winter, which was cold in that part of the house, so I built a box for the whole printer to keep the temperature more friendly to it. It also makes things quieter.

I have an Ender 3 v2 same as Willard, but I’ve got the self levelling mod and a second Z axis motor. I think they make it much easier to get consistent prints.

As a process, it’s not too bad. There’s a little bit of farting about and printing many XYZ cubes, but for me the killer additions were the two mods as above, and bed adhesive sticky spray. The second Z motor means that the beam for the head is supported both ends so it makes it far easier to get accurate Z axis movements and things ended up more consistent.

For printing miniatures resin printing is where it’s at. Filament (FDM) printing (like the various Ender printers) is still used for terrain and big stuff but for the high levels of detail expected for 28mm scale miniatures and the like resin printing is much better suited.

There’s an unending amount of YouTube videos about this at the moment, a lot of miniature designers have Patreons that’ll drown you in STLs on a monthly basis in return for a few dollars, and they all seem willing to sponsor any miniature painting or modelling channels that’ll have them.

Resin printing is a completely different beast to filament printing, there doesn’t seem to quite quite as many things to dial in as there is with the million-and-one settings on an FDM slicer, but you have to sort out cure times, supports in the slicer, then washing and curing prints (while dealing with the fact that uncured resin is not particularly nice stuff) once they’re printed.

Basically what they said.

FDM printing needs a little bit of dialing in, but it’s relatively straightforward. I had an ultimaker, which was supposedly the “apple” of 3d printers, expensive but worked out the box. There’s still a bit of faff as every filament brand behaves slightly differently, and even from one end of the spool to the other they go off as they absorb moisture so you have to keep adjusting speed, temperature, over/under extrusion to get it to work well.

In the end it seems to have bricked itself, either the firmware has an issue (it won’t lift the Z axis past about 2/3 height despite it being the “XL” version) or it’s the motor itself. And print quality’s gone downhill since it was new despite replacing nozzles, bowden tube, etc.

Been into 3d printers a few years now, although have only ever bought or had experience with Prusa machines (got 3 different ones now and their new XL 5-extruder tool changer on order which is pretty exciting!) Looking at forum/FB posts though, they’re clearly the ones to go for at the top of the hobby-end of the scale, if you value your time/sanity 😃 I just load the material, click print, and it “just works” 🍏 🤣

This is for FDM printers… I do have their resin printer also, got good results from it (HQ gargoyle below!) although don’t use it that much tbh and have very little experience with resin as a whole vs my FDM experience – I use those machines virtually every day, incredibly useful things, can’t imagine not having one now!

Nice gargoyle! Wouldn’t last 10 seconds against a fire of wrath though.

Just to repeat the above, oldschool FDM for terrain, resin for little stuff, is basically the law. But if you’ll forgive a long post I’ll go a bit deeper because this is like perfect synchronicity of nerdiness for me.

You CAN print very good miniature scale stuff with FDM- with a lot of effort.So you can still find a lot of stuff about how to really push the platform and get really impressive minis out of an ender, but you’ll spend time and money to get there- and it might break you.

If you go far enough, with acetone and ABS, or filler primer, or similar you can produce a part that people just can’t tell is fdm printed. People are rightly proud of that, but, mostly they did it the hard way back when resin printers weren’t as affordable. A bunch of the well known youtubers etc still do it that way and recommend that way, because it’s what they know, and because they’d have to start over with resin and a new skillset. (and if you sell models, then do you want to redo all the models you did in 2017 for a shitty OG Tevo Tarantula, so it works on a Photon?) That skews advice sometimes

You’re right on the edge of the coin I think, both could work. A lot of games people are, it’s why the market for larger resin printers is so hot now. If you want to shit out walls of reasonable quality, in volume, in the short term, which I think is probably your initial interest, then FDM is probably better. You will have a playable board much faster and easier, and you might not care that it’s very 3d printy looking, because that’s still cool. But it will be more limiting further forwards.

good analogue- Hope could make smooth, curvy brakes but they don’t, because Hope fans like machining, it looks cool and functional and industrial. A hope brake will always look pretty much like something your grandad could have milled with a 1940s Bridgeport and will appeal partly because it’s not all smooth like everything else

So will you look at a wall or a model with obvious 3d printing marks and think, I made that, and you can totally tell, and it’s awesome… Or will you think, that looks shit, it’s all 3d printy and liney, I wish it looked like I’d bought it in Games Workshop.

Lastly- this could be another post. The actual process of building and getting printing on a kit can be tricky- as ChrisL and Molgrips and I found, even now it’s still a pretty specific set of skills and honestly, not many people have absolutely all the tools in their head.

Like, I get good hardware results, because I have the right blend of mechanical and material skills but also, I can deal with the grey areas and inconsistencies that still exist in what looks like it should be a very scientific process. I can be perfectionist AND I can bodge, essentially. But I can’t do the code side, at all, so I’m still on ancient stock firmware 🙂 A big failing. Molgrips struggled with the process-driven parts (ie, following the instructions and doing what he was told in the thread!) but he’s a doer, and way better than most people at the battling-through that would have defeated a lot of people. ChrisL is good at the engineering side and would have no probs with the code, but I think it’s fair to say struggled with the more analog parts of actually pooping plastic- the maddening inconsistencies and the grey areas that make, frinstance, the human imprecision of paper and “feel” better for levelling than feeler gauges.

It is, in the end, technical and precise and also at the same time artistic and analog and caution and leaps of faith and reason and love and hate, all in a box from china and tied together with advice from internet weirdos. Who has all of that in the right doses? Basically nobody. I love that but it’s also the reason some people throw their enders out a window (and mine can sit for months unused because we’ve had an argument)

have an ender 3 which is great

I have the old Heroquest and tried to print some of the broken figures but found it really tough to o get decent quality.

The tricks I learnt are :
buy decent filament
Get the bed clean and level
Beware of draughts- build a box round your printer
Always print a raft as a base

Lots of fun & great for the kids, except when they want to print a Mandolorian helmet that takes 100 hours !

yeah resin is best for miniatures, I’ve never tried personally on FDM but it’s definitely possible, you’ll probably want to swap to a smaller nozzle than the stock 0.4mm that comes with most printers. Also there are certain filaments that can be “smoothed” to help eliminate that “FDM printed” look (at the expense of detail, which is never going to match resin anyway)
https://blog.prusa3d.com/printing-great-looking-miniatures-with-a-0-25mm-nozzle-on-the-original-prusa-mini_33457/