I'm kinda surprised people aren't just buying a 3D printer. I print stuff all the time. I'm not into this kind of game but if I were I wouldn't pay that much for a piece of plastic I can print at home for 3 bucks.
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.
Yes 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 :)
Even 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.
Works 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.
Ahhh 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.
Additionally: If you want to _mass_ mass produce these things, an injection molding setup is going to be your goal. You can sort of hack one together for plastic molding using a pneumatic/hydraulic cylinder and some mold plates that are either cast metal (lost-PLA, lost-wax), cured plaster, or CNC'd. The stuff that will give you five million units a day costs as much as a house, but there is a middle ground that is competitive with FDM on quality but significantly faster for more like $300-$3000.
The limitation with injection molding is typically the cost and complexity of having mold plates made when you don't have a demand for all that many units.
Resin is also slow (probably slower per mm^3 than FDM depending on nozzle size), but speed doesn't really matter IMO. But yeah with a high detail 0.2mm nozzle (0.1mm extrusions size) it does tend to get pretty slow. Layer lines are a factor of orientation a lot (you want to have steep angles, not very shallow ones).
I have several printers and I ususually have something "in the oven" while I WFH (my job is not related to 3D printing sadly)
One advantage of resin is that it takes a fixed amount of time per layer no matter the size of the layer. FDM time obviously increases linearly depending on the amount of material to deposit. So a resin printer will take the same amount of time to produce a single figure or as many figures will fit into its print area.
I just Googled for "resin printer at home". There are loads of Reddit discussions and YouTube videos about it. Yes, precautions and a careful setup are required, but "isn't safe" does not look true anymore.
A lot of those people on Reddit and YouTube are doing dangerous things like handling liquid resin without gloves or eye protection, or not ventilating/filtering resin fumes that cause cancer. There are horror stories of people who splashed a bit of resin in their eye and went blind.
It's no more dangerous than a craft like woodworking or spray painting when you follow very basic safety protocols, but the safety culture is near nonexistent in the community.
It's possible, you have to put in some effort. Active ventilation to outside, working with PPE on, washing in isopropyl alcohol, curing with UV light. At least that is what I would do in smaller apartments.
I live in northern county and can vent my 3d printers exhaust to the outside. Friend of mine from CPH did the same with his resin printer.
And if you actively went it outside carpet and close proximity should ok ok'ish health wise. It's just effort and noise that a lot of people don't like to put in.
> That rules out most apartments in countries like the USA and UK
Yes I've always wondered why they love carpets so much. When I lived in such an apartment it was terrible. Always dirty and dusty. I'd much rather have a plastic, wooden or tile floor (the latter not ideal due to breakage though).
But you can ventilate, especially if you blow the air outside through an active blower.
And finally, makerspaces are a great way to do these things anyway. A community that can support and help you when you run into issues, friendly people around to borrow equiment and materials from, and they're usually pretty cheap if you don't get a fixed desks.
Hmm it depends on your sensitivity also. I know some people at our makerspace who have serious allergies to the stuff, even a minor trace and their skin gets all red.
Not everyone is as careful with the stuff so that doesn't really help.
