Is 3d printing getting more accessible for wargamers now?

[zemjw]

There's also freecad for the fully offline experience. My 3d work stays offline, so fusion 360 was out for me.

[YPU]

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.

[Teardrop World]

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/

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

[Connectamabob]

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.

[Rich H]

Can mesh modelling programs do precision?  I build scale vehicles that are obviously mostly straight lines/flat surfaces/etc.

[Connectamabob]

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.

[Rich H]

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! 

[YPU]

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!

[Connectamabob]

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.

[Rich H]

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... 

[arloid]

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.

[Rich H]

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.

[arloid]

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.

[Connectamabob]

...but the human eye is a bugger for wonky patterns, parallel lines and angles...

 (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.

[Rich H]

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.