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Other Stuff => General Wargames and Hobby Discussion => Topic started by: arloid on January 16, 2018, 07:14:05 PM
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So I recently saw the Tronxy x5s with a 33x33cm build volume for about $340 on sale, normally costing about $450 (roughly €280 - €372 for us europeans) and started realising how accesible 3d printing has become for the more budget inclined. Another trend I'm seeing is that build volumes are getting bigger then the standard 20x20cm most budget printers seam to fall into. Something els that seams to happen is that manufacturers with good customer service are getting a name, as wel as good understanding of what makes a good, but cheap design.
(as wel as recognising a good design and using them for their own)
Some standout printers are (in my opinion):
Tevo Tarantula
Large community and the ability to choose from flex extruders, dual extruders and a large print bed make it a very versatile printer
Anycubic i3 Mega
Basicly plug and play
Tronxy x5s
Again big print volume, needs some tinkering and some part upgrades.
So what do you guys think, are 3d printers affordable enough now or is it still too much hassle to put them together or pay the price for?
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Bought a "cheap" chinese i3 and a better "cheap" chinese D6, plug and play - and an original prusa mk2 kit. The cheap weren't good out the box and asked for a lot of work and tuning. The cheaper i3 is my workhorse for low quality prints and is slow.
The D6 has been upgraded and tuned, but stay noisy. Very noisy. It's a copy of a Zortrax and can print very fine. I use it to print miniatures in 4mm to 28mm and small and detailed pieces of scenery. The layers are nearly invisible with the right settings.
The prusa do nearly all my work, is easy to use, a little noisy. Printed about 12 kg of PLA since two years, have a huge castle in 15mm, a huge dungeon in 28mm and the same downscaled for 15mm, some home designed scenery........ I don't regret it. The prusa and the i3 are paid by all the prints I made (what it would cost if your prints were available in shop). The motherboard of the D6 died. The D6 will be paid at this year's end.
DON'T look only at the price. All my printers can uses the gcode files from different slicers software. There's mainly Slicer, Simplify 3D and Cura 3. I mostly use Cura 3 now as it allow to fine tune the print: outer perimeter thinner than inner perimeter and so on.
You can also use a lot of plastic brands: PLA is the choice for fine detail, magnetic PLA is available etc. I have seen a more common XYZ printer (very silent and cheap), but it used only proprietary plastic, and only the official slicer from the brand. Not a bad printer, but limited. Don't forget the maintenance cost: ball bearing don't last very long, the nozzle must be changed regulary. On the XYZ, the only way to change the nozzle was to buy a complete head block - and return to the shop to change the bearings.
A standard dungeon piece, the 2x2 inch wall: Take about 16 grams of PLA and less than two hours to print. PLA price per Kg were I live: 25ChF (about 22$). Price of the wall: 0.35$. Compare with a resin one.
So, yes it became accessible, but you need some technical knowledge and a lot of patience. But worth it. Yes, you can print small 6 or 15mm miniatures. No, it's not the same quality than expensive laser printers or traditional sculpts (always the best in my opinion). All in all, a useful tool. I don't consider those machines like a paper printer: those are tools the same way CNC machines, mill machine, circular saw, are tools. I'm a little bit clumsy with tools.
Best regards
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I agree with your viewpoints Teardrop World, you do have to take into account the amount of work you have to make in order to get everything working and fine tuned. Not to mention recurring expenses (although those are pretty minor). Technical knowledge is also important and it might not be in everybody's alley to learn all the ins and outs of 3d printing.
That being said, I do think that at least some cheap 3d printers have reached the point that they can print tabletop quality scenery and some even simple miniatures. However you still have to do your research on that.
One improvement over past years of 3d printing is that there are more affordable 3d printers with a cube frame on the market, I think were going to see that a lot more over the years.
Scurv, I agree. If you can't design stuff then you have to either consider learning it or be content with what's offered online.
Like you said, quality isn't always the best online, when it really bothers me however is when a price is attached. Otherwise, well it's only PLA you wasted and that stuff is dirt cheap.
Quality however is one of the reasons I have taken designing into my own hands, sure I have a lot to learn and I might not be much better then a 20 year old CGI artist at the moment, but you have to start somewhere.
However I never understood people who thought they could print a entire smurf army for cheap.
I really love your traction war tread.
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When you buy a $4K printer for your work and use it whenever you want... yes it is >:D
But seriously way more accessible for your average hobbyist. Aliexpress has some supercheap ones and you can buy some from the USA for $99 USD! Build it yourself though.
The cheap ones have nothing compared to high end printers though but give it time and they will be just as good and just as cheap.
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When you buy a $4K printer for your work and use it whenever you want... yes it is >:D
Its a good excuse isn't it :D
on a more serious note, we are definitely still in a 3d printing boom, everything is moving at a rapid pace and stuff is getting either better or cheaper, or even both, at all the time. So yes, it's getting more and more accessible to everybody, including gamers.
The main "cheap printers" are still all extrusion printers, and I expect that those will be stuck with visible print lines for the foreseeable future, it's a bit of a inherent nature of the technique. There are plenty of ways to smooth this out, and I feel like that is where the next step for gamers should be. There appears to be a vocal group (hopefully a minority) who are unwilling to do any post work on their prints, or even claim they like the character it gives to the prints. (bollocks to that!) its like 3d printing is becoming the fast food of miniatures. Never the best looking, always a bit artificial "but it will do for now" and I just can't wrap my head around this notion.
Maybe I've been hanging with too many model builders of late, but aren't we used to horrible model kits? If you like a design and there is only a 30-year-old resin kit by a Russian company that went under ages ago, it has bubbles and gaps everywhere but you just give it the love it deserves, fill the bubbles and holes, bend the parts and fix the flaws and end up with something great. Why don't we apply this mentality to 3d prints more often? Heck hasn't this been the case for say, forgeworld models, for ages? Ok, now that I've made myself sound terribly old and grumpy...
I wonder if we won't see a parallel to home printers evolving over the coming years. We have had copy shops for ages, and for most of us its still cheaper to get a 300 page pdf of some obscure ruleset printed at one of those, at probably better quality, than doing it ourselves. I could see a 3d version of this evolving, especially in larger cities. The first steps of this have been made long ago at universities and maker spaces.
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And take a look at the Build-Something Competition 2018 entries including 3D printing. This would not have been possible 3-4 years ago due to costs, I'd say. Besides cost, they're also getting easier to use, at least that's my impression.
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I think it was three or four years ago that I agreed that 3D Printing would change the hobby forever. As with all technology quality will increase and prices will fall. Not quite Star Trek 'replicators' by any means, but we're on track to that future point.
That said individual skill with design will still count, just as it does with sculpting by traditional methods; no matter how good your tools, or how 'idiot-proof' CAD becomes. In like manner, you might get a 'perfect' template off the internet, but the quality of the printer/material will always determine what arrives in your hands.
Early days yet still, but there are some good quality figure renders appearing, if only as masters for figures cast using traditional methods. Printing off an entire army might prove expensive for a while yet though.
I don't think it will be long before we're quietly chuckling when we recall 'print lines', in much the same way as we look at today's state of the art figures and wonder how we ever found 'the old ranges' to be attractive.
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Beefcake, I agree, however I'm most interested what kind of design approach ultra cheap 3d printers will take wile still delivering good quality.
Personally I think we will see more monoprice select mini clones using v-groove extrusion and a bowden style setup in the sub $150 bracket, with or without a heated bed only real difference with now being the overall build quality of the printer. Not sure if a heated bed is really necessary for a entry level 3d printer, although it's a nice touch.
Arlequín, quality will always be determined by how good of a machine you have and how good your filament is. However I don't think that 3d printing will ever replace hand sculpting, maybe be just as good, but not replace it.
Print lines will probably stay for a while, however become less noticeable. With the advance of "linear advance" and other features that might increase print quality on higher speeds it might become the standard to print with lower layer heights and smaller nozzles. Don't think print lines are as noticeable once you start printing with a 0.2 nozzle, especially with some layers of paint/varnish.
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When you look at what is produced by laser-drawn SLA printers, it's hard to believe print lines will be with us for long. Okay extrusion printing will always be the cheaper option, but the alternative will eventually become affordable too. Look how many people own laserjet printers today, compared to dot-matrix ones; the one time only 'affordable' option.
SLA printers can also print multiple complex items at the same time...
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Got a 3d printer....i3 clone, it's OK especially for £150 (Anet A8+some upgrades).
It works fine and can produce some neat stuff but I'm too lazy to learn to draw in CAD properly.
Messing around with sketchup for now. Plus it takes hours to draw and print... and I takes me several goes to get things right!
I'm 80% through drawing a T-38 tank but I'm stuck on internal/external surfaces... Sketchup seems to hate me and I got fed up with it.
I've gone back to plasticard, a ruler and knife (and the odd laser cut part). If I cock up then it's evident immediately and I correct it...
Old fashioned, definitely old school and going to be left behind by the new kids... but I don't care lol
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What is a good 3D printer for someone who:
- has little to no technical expertise/abililty
- will make nice pieces of 28mm terrain
- easy to get replacement parts and materials for
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Arlequín, sure SLA printers will get a lot more accessible, however it will largely stay a chemical process. Something I don't want to bother with. However for the people that do, you really need a well ventilated room, which means you either keep the garage door open or need to add some ventilation yourself. You basically need a separate room to clean and cure the stuff, even when using sunlight curing resin.
The only thing I consider sketchup to be a good program for is to visualize furniture for a customer, otherwise it's just not cut out for the job. Not to mention all the extra steps needed to turn all the different things into objects. Personally I would go to fusion 360 for the cad aspect of 3d modeling and blender for the sculpting, at least until you can afford a better sculpting program.
Codsticker, easiest are pe-assembled 3d printers or partially asssembled printers, however most of those that I'm aware of are based on the creality CR-10 making them maybe too expensive based on your budget. Previously I would have advised the Anycubic i3 mega, but I just found out that it has some unresolved issues that make the printer unusable.
One that isn't too expensive for its size is the Tevo Tornado, you might have to tighten the wheels of the x, y and z axis as well as lower the acceleration to fix y-skipping, but otherwise it looks like a really great printer to me.
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The first thing everyone suggests is expensive CAD... £36 per month for Fusion 360!
Too rich for something that I'm going to use sporadically.
I'm sure no doubt sketchup has all sorts of problems but it is free!
You can buy off the shelf and get good prints but you will pay for that. The cheaper the printer the more tinkering.
3D printers are currently pretty complex beasts with lots of adjustments needed to get good quality prints.
You need to understand the adjustments and changes needed to diagnose and improve your prints.
The internet will help but when it comes down to it you have to actually tinker!
Also unless you have or acquire CAD skills of some sort you are just printing other people's designs.
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Fusion 360 has a free hobbyist license you can activate once the trail period is over.
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Interesting - thanks!
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There's also freecad (https://www.freecadweb.org/) for the fully offline experience. My 3d work stays offline, so fusion 360 was out for me.
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For the younger among us there are also many student licences which are a lot cheaper. But check the conditions, some allow commercial use, some don't some are limited time, some are for life.
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Discovered Blender ten years ago, but never really worked on it. The first things I printed were commercial models and things from Thingiverse. Designing and printing a unique model was so tempting. As Blender was free, I tried to memorize the most important shortcuts: "E" for extrude a point, "G" to move it.... and after some very basic shapes, a piece of scenery only available home: (warning, shameless link to my blog). Made by a total amateur. https://teardropworlds.wordpress.com/2016/08/23/7tv-technical-scenery/ (https://teardropworlds.wordpress.com/2016/08/23/7tv-technical-scenery/)
But I agree, 3D modeling is as boring today as it was ten years ago. Some models are quickly (and better) made with hands. The most interesting and hard thing is design our own scenery and figures, and very few people have the skills for it. Without the printer, I could not have so much scenery pieces - and other useful accessories and tools.
For what I have experienced, the cheaper printers needs a lot of adjustement. The heated bed is really helping adhesion on the plate. Using glue or tape is messy, using Buildtak is expensive. Cheap Sheet of PEI 1,5mm thin is the way I work now: wipe the sheet with alcohol before each print, then use the heating bed between 50/60°. Less failure since the PEI, installed on three printers and not changed for a year - could use it for a few years more.
All in all, it's a great experience to do if you can afford a printer and like the technical aspect of those tools. Learning specialized software for slicing, modelling. Learning some electronic basis to tune the motors or solder some wires. Learning mechanical basis, and learning to not swear when the printer hates you :D
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It's only slower if you're not fluent with the UI/methods. If you're practiced with whatever software you prefer, you can really fly compared to cutting and gluing physical materials.
If you know what you're doing, you can build stuff in 10 minutes that would take days in a practical media. This goes double for modifying/amending stuff that you've already built. There's a reason why digital has almost completely taken over the professional world. If you're, say, filming a sci-fi movie and need a bunch of custom props and set elements, one or two digital modellers and a shop full of printers is going to be way faster, cheaper, and will take you a lot further than a shop full of practical plastic and wood guys.
For a gaming and display model stuff, I'm still a much bigger proponent of Blender (or MAX or ZBrush)-style mesh modelling than CAD. Mesh modelling is much more freeform, and lets you do more complicated stuff much easier and more efficiently. CAD's wheelhouse is precision: better for machine parts and the like where exact tolerances counts, but klugey and primitive for freeform building. There's a reason why so many people who prefer CAD programs tend to produce stuff that's simple and mostly (if not entirely) just made of scaled and booled primitive shapes.
CAD also doesn't mesh as well with slicers, in that slicers need CAD files converted to mesh format (.stl) anyway, so it's easy and super common for casual CAD users to produce print files with ugly under-subdivided curves and other similar flaws, as they are reliant on automated converters that are outside their core skillset and/or workflow. Mesh modelling intrinsically deals with that stuff as the core skill/tool set, so it's impossible to be unaware of that stuff.
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Can mesh modelling programs do precision? I build scale vehicles that are obviously mostly straight lines/flat surfaces/etc.
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Qualified yes. The difference there is mostly* in the UI: CAD is designed to work in actual measurements up front, as it were. Mesh modelers tend to assume you'll be "sketching" your way through rather than using exact measurements, so in some the precision controls take more clicks or keystrokes to use, but pretty much all of them still have those options.
*CAD also tends to have more and better parametric building options, but that's also kind of a front end thing. There's no reason why mesh modellers can't do parametric modelling, and most in fact do to some degree, it's just not as in demand in art modelling as in engineering.
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I'll stick with CAD I think... I'll just find a better program
I'm an engineer so I like to deal in absolutes, I struggle with the fluffy stuff!
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I'll stick with CAD I think... I'll just find a better program
I'm an engineer so I like to deal in absolutes, I struggle with the fluffy stuff!
Hear hear!
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I used to be that way. Could not function without absolute measurements. Even with stuff that was completely made up, I had to make sure everything was in even, clean integers or neatly divisible decimals, and meticulously mathematically proportioned. I even got in the habit of "sketching" fictional subjects using golden rectangles as fractal lego blocks. The sort of thing that's tempting to casually liken to OCD. Even as a little kid, I was the type to count the pegs on bristle blocks to make sure everything was perfectly proportioned, symmetrical, and repeatable.
Eventually, somewhere in my early thirties, I had to realize it was MASSIVELY slowing me down.
With fictional stuff it doesn't matter in any rational sense, and even with non-fiction, there's no printer out there that can deliver tolerances to match those ideals, and no human eye that can see an accuracy margin of a few CM when scaled down below 1/35. And that's with sharp eyes: for most people I'd wager the lower end is somewhere around 1/12, and even then, only with an exact mental image of what it should look like at that scale. Without that exact image, most people wouldn't be able to tell at ANY scale. The difference between precise measurements and hand tracing orthos is a placebo when you're dealing with miniatures.
In the end I had to surrender kicking and screaming to the seemingly paradoxical practicality of doing things the "fluffy" way. And once that barrier was broken, my workflow got so much better. It wasn't just the efficiency gained in the tools I was already using: there were whole swaths of tools I had never deigned to touch for being "too imprecise" which where increasingly labor saving in ways that nested and compounded.
So, If I were designing a practical machine part, like a replacement or improvement part for an appliance, say, THEN I'd use precision measurements, 'cause even if the printer can't deliver it down to the micron, it's still the best and safest data to anchor your work on. But for anything else... (hisses in through teeth), yeah no, I'll never go back to that, and I'll strongly discourage it as a self-sabotaging impulse/habit to newbies.
Not saying one should go completely sloppy. It's still important to make sure you're right angles are true 90, and your parallel lines are actually parallel, and all that, but fussing over whether that hull is 12670 scale mm exactly, and not 12668 or 12675 is only slowing you down and taking you away from the big picture. Like cigarette butts on the beach, every little instance of that adds up.
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I generally work to +/- 0.3mm when scratch building - but the human eye is a bugger for wonky patterns, parallel lines and angles...
I toyed with buying a resin printer, I even had the cash ready, but it was pointed out that many of the resins were pretty horrible stuff. So I'm still with FDM (i3 clone) and I don't really like the output so it's not been used for months while I carve plasticard... lol
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I'm getting more and more interested in adding mesh modeling into my workflow. Still going to do a lot of preparation in fusion, but blender should be a good tool in adding organic and curved shapes into the models.
I still have to get used to letting go of certain dimensions, it's very tempting to make for example a brick a certain dimension instead of just dividing the amount of bricks it into whatever lenght of wall you need (if any specific length).
My eyes also fell on resin printers since the cheaper ones fall into my price range Rich, I'm also concerned about the resin since the printer would be stationed inside the same room I sleep. I have yet to find a resin that's really harmless, the monocure resin looks promising, but I have my doubts about it after reading the safety sheet. Even if the printer I intend on buying has a air sealable lid.
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There will undoubtedly clean up and contact with said resin that is the problem for me.
Mine would be in the garage but still don't want really nasty stuff around.
I'm sure it will improve quite rapidly though.
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Sure it will inprove, however there is only that much you can do to make a chemical process less hazardous, sure it would be nice if they improved skin hazards, but I'm personally more concerned about breathing hazards and smell. Can't really improve air quality as it currently stands and putting the printer somewhere else isn't a option. Honestly I'm not gonna take the health risks. Maybe some day we have a different kind of 3d printer that can deliver similar quality to resin printers that's affordable without the risks.
Until that day, or once the hazards have been taken away I will stick to fdm printing.
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...but the human eye is a bugger for wonky patterns, parallel lines and angles...
lol(digital fist bump) Oh, man, yeah. That stuff will get you both coming and going. I used to obsess about getting that stuff as perfect as possible, because when it's wrong you're eye notices way more than with stuff like dimensional measurements. But then when I started looking closely at my photo references I started noticing that while that stuff's perfect on the blueprints, it's actually subtly imperfect on the real world physical things. Lines aren't perfectly straight (and as a consequence, not perfectly parallel), edges have subtle dull areas and dings, "flat" surfaces are slightly wavy. And the kicker is, it's not just any old imprecision you can replicate by just letting yourself be a little sloppy: it's actually subtly imprecise in really specific, organic ways that would take just as much skill to simulate as obsessive perfection.
When it looks wrong because it's imperfect, often it's not just because it's imperfect, but also because it's imperfect in the wrong way.
It's part of why CGI can look bad if things look too "perfect". There's actually a maddeningly subtle art to making something look perfect enough to look brand new, yet just imperfect enough in just the right tiny ways to make it look real. A lot of artists way overshoot the mark and make stuff that looks more beaten than it should.
I remember looking at high res photos of the space shuttle, and thinking that to actually fully duplicate those photos with a miniature, you'd have to spend a mind melting amount of time making sure the tiles were not just individually weathered slightly differently, but also engraved and leveled to just the right kind of super-granulated subtle irregularity. It would actually be easier in CG, because you could in theory write a procedural shader, but even then it would be an art to getting just the right kind of non-random randomness.
Then I went an looked at pics of naval ships and discovered that a lot of the smooth curves and flat surfaces were actually subtly irregular in a way that's almost imperceptible when you're looking for it, but is really noticeable when it's not there. Drove me nuts because I realized that those immaculately molded Japanese model kits could never look entirely real in a clear photo, unless you deliberately went over them with a scraper and sanpaper, but only a tiny bit in the exact rigt way. Ironically, expertly scratchbuilt ones came closer to nailing it because the manual scratchbuilding process made perfection impossible, so if you made it as perfect as you could, it would be closer to just imperfect enough.
Sculpting has this problem too. Many digital sculptors lean too heavily on the symmetry/mirror function, and IMO it's part of the reason why even masterfully sculpted "realistic" human faces often still look a bit uncanny valley or at least still subtly fake or cartoony in a way you can't quite put your finger on. The skin details might not be symmetrical, but the bones and muscles are perfectly so in a way even the most attractive real human face never is. Physical clay doesn't have this problem, because even if you try you could never get symmetry that perfect with just calipers and your eyeballs. But digital sculpting with symmetry turned on for as long as you can cuts the work time literally in half, and completely removes the need to develop the skill to duplicate symmetrical features manually, so there's a whole generation of otherwise incredibly skilled sculptors now who don't know any better.
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I've rebuilt things completely because of slightly wonky angles....
I was looking at 3d printers for producing masters, but seeing as I only need the one model each time it's faster for me to work direct in plastic and wood.
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Connectamabob hits its on the head.
Perfect 3d prints often look uncanny due to too perfect angles, add in the fact that undercuts and nooks tend to get filled in for 3d printing first, and then again for moulding and you get a very artificial looking model.
I actually had a happy accident with the first cars I did for Eureka. There was an issue with my printer (if you have a resin printer, there always is...) and I had to do a lot of filling with putty and finishing the models with fine grit sanding, fine by me, I like doing this kind of work. But at last years salute there were a couple of people who commented that they "didn't look like 3d prints" I think that that handwork and the minor flaws it brings along helped avoid the uncanny valley.
What I will say is this. I do a bit of stuff in 1/300, and at that scale a "minor flaw" might just be too much, the extreme precision of resin printers starts to become necessary there.
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Okay my predictions where right, the future of cheap 3d printers does lay in cantilever style 3d printers. We already had printers like the malyan and monoprice select mine, but the tronxy x1 and creality ender 2 also get really cheap during sale periods. Sure those 3d printers have a small build area, but if you play on a smaller scale let's say 15mm or use modular systems like openlock this isn't a problem.
One thing is for sure, I couldn't resist buying a ender 2 for less then €150.
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IMO if you have the choice between one larger printer vs two smaller ones, go with the multiple smaller ones. If you need a large print, you can print it faster and with less risk of failure by sectioning the model and printing the parts simultaneously on separate machines.
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I often need to convert some images and I search for the best tool. Now I'm interested in this online image converter https://onlineconvertfree.com/converter/images/ (https://onlineconvertfree.com/converter/images/) How effective is it?
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Probably best start a new thread, this one is very old and about 3d printing ;)
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Funny how far you've come, eh Rich? :D
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Funny how far you've come, eh Rich? :D
Just read back through lol you're not wrong!