Will 3d printers soon take over painting as well?

[pauld]

Perhaps it won't be too long till board games come with this as standard

Miniatures for hobbyists with the myriad of periods and genres are a smaller niche but people will undoubtedly take to them when the price falls.  Bulk troops 3D paint, centrepiece models will get the care and attention of your paintbrush

[Fitz]

....people will still want metal figures, or prefer the hand-painted aesthetic.

The "hand painted aesthetic" would be trivially easy to replicate digitally, if that was a desirable feature.

[Mr. White]

Through my time in this hobby, starting back in the late 80s, I went through a spell of about a decade where I preferred plastic models to metal for all the known reasons. However, I'm back to preferring metal.

3d printed minis are currently my least favorite type. I have several, usually through SWAG given away at tournaments, and none of them am I really keen on.

I could be wrong, but easily printed and painted minis seems like it's going to ultimately take the hobby in the direction of becoming disposable. Kind of what's happened to movies and music in the past decade. There's just so much...little of it is valued. Consume and then, on to the next consumption product pumped out. Hobbyists already have a a "butterfly" problem. When a painted army can be printed out in a weekend, I'd expect gamers to bounce even faster and to amass more and more piles of minis...each used less frequently.

Metal minis will probably become a niche within a niche. Like vinyl (or soon to be movie theaters), but I hope there's enough out there into the love of the craft to keep it up.

There's a gazillion video and board games out there I can play if I don't want to create or build for tabletop. Take away the creation of tabletop... I may as play one of those others. But I am about to turn 50, so this could be where I start yelling at clouds...

[Elbows]

While I understand where you're coming from...I'd disagree.  A miniature is a miniature, regardless of it's build material.  Now, a sculpt can make a difference...and plenty of people prefer the older hand-scultped style to the more modern digital stuff.  I myself like digital, but despise the awful "World of Warcraft" aesthetic which is super common amongst 3D sculptors.

There's nothing more disposable about a plastic miniature or a resin 3D print over a metal miniature (other than metal being better for the environment long-term?).  I have plenty of painted plastic miniatures which have been providing excellent service for decades at this point.  Hell, I've painted 200+ miniatures from the old Battle Masters board game in the past two months and will be running games using them...so they're now seeing renewed service after sitting in someone's attic for the past 32 years(!).

They could be "viewed" as disposable, cheap board game miniatures...but now they're painted up, based and going to be seeing service in convention games for the next 10-15 years (I hope).

I guess what I'm saying is that something is only disposable as you make it.

[tin shed gamer]

I'm an analogue sculptor,and I get asked all the time whether I'll do digital sculpting. ( Short answer I'd love to learn to but I'm averaging a sixteen hour day with analogue. ),and am I worried about printed pre painted.

The answer is no.
There's a simple analogy people like to create. You can buy prints of old Masters, commercial mass produced paintings,and AI art.  Yet the market for art Supplies is thriving.
I do see it having a future with in the hobby space. The most obvious market being the 'Fan/ follower ' of a specific artist.  Some of the high earners charge four figure sums. For colouring in. Imagine having a figure almost identical to the original for a three figure sum.
In exactly the same way and Artists will have signed prints of an original painting.
Or you could compare it to premade pre painted terrain . We've all got such items but then you still make your own pieces.
There's already a market for prepainted miniatures. It's likely to be a similar branch within the hobby.  Even if you end up with pre painted / built-in colour miniatures there will still be those who want to repaint them and personalise such figures.
There's no silver bullet to kill creativity  just difference in approach to creating something unique

[Freddy]

3d printing, together with AI and 3d scan technology will take over the painting and sculpting part of the hobby. It is not just about the printing, but also being able to reproduce anything there is, even your painted models based on the pictures you posted online, well, even you yourself based on your social media photos. Style wont be an issue, that is also easy to imitate. This won't happen overnight, it will be a process to overcome the smaller technical problems like colour quality or resolution, but won't take longer than 10-20 years. From then on painting and modelling will be a niche within the niche, as you won't _create_ any more, just deliberately do something the more difficult way instead of the easier one. The only exception will be the top 10% of quality- the same reason I am able to print Mona Lisa on my inkjet pinter, but I still go to the Louvre to see the original.

We saw this coming when we saw the first 3d printer.

[Mr. White]

^ This is it exactly.

My post wasn't a concern about 3d printed minis. Though they aren't my preference, they're just another method of producing models. 3D printed models still require the effort of painting and basing. There's still a creative step. Once they can also be painted, to any style, then the hobby will fundamentally change. If I can have a warhammer army completed in a weekend, including 100% painted, then creating a warhammer army is gonna lose its allure as a planned and designed project. It's just something to have running on the printer while consuming streamed shows.

I'm not gonna say this is going to be good or bad overall. It will clearly impact all the hobby shops and hobby companies, no more need for all these paint suppplies, but it'll probably also cut down on waste, particularly from aerosol sprays. As mentioned, I do think it's gonna fragment the player base for each game even more and gamers are gonna become hyper-butterflies. Buuuut...maybe everyone will have minis for every game now. i dunno. TBH, I hope to pretty much be done with my hobby collection well before then.

Playing with hand sculpted, hand painted models is gonna be like the vintage car hobby, although still quite a bit nerdier. ha

[Brummie]

Sounds all a bit pie in the sky really.

Not to be pessimistic. No doubt the option will exist, but what we tend to do when faced with the allure of new technology is act as if its going to somehow change everything in a distinctly dramatic way.

There are still serious limitations to 3D Printing that are just rarely acknowledged and the material is most certainly a sticking point. Best thing 3D Printing did was make the design/production of masters easier and also made it possible to get a hold of niche vehicles/items that otherwise would be too cost inefficient to manufacture in more traditional formats. That was it. Trying to 3D Print off entire armies is still a bit so-so. Quality control is a major issue which will persist (and this isn't always down to the Printer but Human operator error and/or laziness and the actual designs themselves).

We're not even sure how well the material ages yet its so relatively new.

You also have to learn how to use the thing.

My general take is, we may see being able to print/paint armies simultaneously in future, but there will be strings attached; cost being key - better quality PJs will still dramatically increase the cost and £ ratio of printed minis to plastic minis, still sits in plastic/metal miniatures favor right now and likely will for the foreseeable. You'll end up with only some people really being able to utilise the technology well and fewer still will sell those services and if demand is high the more they can ask from your wallet.

Paint and Plastic/metal will still be reliable options (we also cannot understate the therapeutic effects of just painting figures).

The Hobby is more at threat of becoming niche because the people who have really championed it will be tapping out in the next 10/20 years more then anything. In fact I'm sure there is a range of possibilities here (no one suspected that GW would become suddenly much more successful during the Covid Years or that DnD would see a huge resurgence in the last 5-6 years). There are a lot of ways it could play out and likely in a way that wasn't obvious until after the fact.

[Simlasa]

This will sound kooky, but oh well...
The assembly/modeling/painting process is a bit like a magic ritual for me... during with the manufactured products become 'my guys'. As I work on them I get to know them and put a bit of myself into them. They're never going to be the best, but they're mine.
Having a table full of figures that are indistinguishable from anyone elses'? Is that even a hobby any more?
Even with historical subjects, I just can't see myself wanting that. I'd just as soon be using cardboard flats... or even chits.

I'm sure it will catch on like wildfire, similar to many other trends I've ignored all my life... I'll be the guy with the crappy looking figures that he knows and loves, that will be hard to replace, that will likely get chucked in the trash when he's dead... oh well.

[Freddy]

Figure building and painting will not cease to exist of course, and not only because of some nostalgic old farts- photography, nor even photoshop did not kill canvas painting, heck, we have calligraphy as a hobby 600 years after Gutenberg.

Sure, 3d prints have a lot of drawbacks today, and some of them will stay maybe forever. But by 2040 we will have a convenient machine producing some rather marzipan-like coloured figures a lot of people will see as a viable alternative for building and painting their own figures, and they will be right regarding the speed and quality of their work (no offense). Also we will have a higher tier of industrial quality (and price) machinework producing some higher quality, but as I said, the top quality will be unfeasible to copy- the microtexture of painted surfaces are very hard to properly reproduce with printing, even with todays 2d technology, 3d will add extra problems to that. And the cost increase of a quality increase is not linear, more like exponential, so above a level it simply wont be worth it. On the positive side top tier painters will be able to get some money on worse-quality copies of their work the same way todays artists sell good quality prints of their stuff.

Also no one will print fully painted armies overnight, machines capable of this output will be above the price range of a fellow hobby enthusiast. And also an overkill for home unless the goal is to fill the entire barn with toy soldiers before the next full moon or to recreate the battle of Leipzig with 1:1 unit sizes.

In fact I'm sure there is a range of possibilities here (no one suspected that GW would become suddenly much more successful during the Covid Years or that DnD would see a huge resurgence in the last 5-6 years). There are a lot of ways it could play out and likely in a way that wasn't obvious until after the fact.

And yes, there are also non-technical factors. Vitualization of our life comes with a counter-force in form of a crave for "real" stuff, and regarding luxury items (which toy soldiers are) handcraft is always regarded as higher value thus higher prestige than machine work.

The Hobby is more at threat of becoming niche because the people who have really championed it will be tapping out in the next 10/20 years more then anything.

Depends on where you live, here 40k and Warhammer Fantasy (whatever it is called now) attracts a lot of younger folks who have the potential to turn into historical. Also historical wargame events attract a healthy amount of younglings- but this, of course, needs an enthuriastic team who organize public historical wargame events.

[Bloggard]

interesting comments / thoughts.

I would think Freddy must have it about right.

And I guess what Fritz says above about it being 'trivial' to replicate any kind of painting style is likely to be true as well - although there has to be some kind of limitation in terms of workable materials for 3D printing with regard to how they compare to hand-painted figures? [*I see now that Freddy pretty much covers this thought with his predictions etc in the post above this one ...]

and obviously this is a 'taste' thing / subjective, but some of those prints in Osmoses's post above I find repulsive / unsettling in their happy-valley photo-realistic quality.
Wouldn't want to go within a country-mile of anything like that, although by the same token wasn't aware that kind of 'quality' / subtlety was do-able already.

[2010sunburst]

Not sure Freddy has it right myself.  Most of what he says was the argument against digital photography a few years ago…..but convenience and speed won out there really quickly…..after all, when was the last time you saw a new wet film camera in a mainstream shop?  This technology is fairly new now, but once it attains critical mass and becomes an everyday tool investment into ease of use and speed will transform it beyond recognition.  After all, miniature production will be a very small part of what it will be ultimately be used for, and those uses will drive the change.  We just get the crumbs off the table in that respect.

[Freddy]

Not sure Freddy has it right myself.  Most of what he says was the argument against digital photography a few years ago…..but convenience and speed won out there really quickly…..after all, when was the last time you saw a new wet film camera in a mainstream shop?  This technology is fairly new now, but once it attains critical mass and becomes an everyday tool investment into ease of use and speed will transform it beyond recognition.  After all, miniature production will be a very small part of what it will be ultimately be used for, and those uses will drive the change.  We just get the crumbs off the table in that respect.

I think the comparison to both photography and normal 3d printing is a bit flawed. Photography is a huuuuuuge market and the change came together with the "virtualisation" of photos- you do not see wet film cameras, but no physical photos either, it is all digital. 3d printing is booming because it has a lot of industrial uses too. But painting-quality 3d printing is kind of a niche, it does not have a lot of use besides modeling, so I predict a bit steadier pace of advance. A constant advance nonetheless.
Convenience is another thing- 3d modeling might be cheaper than in plastic, but far less convenient, at least for now.

[Tactalvanic]

As has been intimated, will it become possible to do these things, yes.

But it won't happen as such because of our hobby, but rather as an afterthought or re-application of functionality developed for something that generates more money than miniature printing does.. as mentioned above - we get it at the tail end of something else, that makes it possible.

Our hobby will be one the beneficiaries of the development rather than the reason for it.

As with the example of digital photography - the mainstream industries adopted the tech - its cheaper/maybe not better in some ways (look at the change from analogue to digital telephony - data convergence - analogue is much better, but digital is good enough for telephone calls and cheaper overall, especially with the convergence of other digital and data transmission tech).

You will of course always get some people who want and like DIY. whether that is in miniature or full scale.

You will always have peoples tastes change and likely they will add some of it to their hobby space/collection.

Then you will get people who prefer the VR/holo-table/deck versions when they happen.

I like my lead mountain, it comforts me and provides me with inspiration, not sure 3d pre-coloured ready to play would suite me, even if they become affordable during my lifetime - and the theory being I will already have my armies mostly painted by then 

Makes me wonder how that will go on the re-sell market Ebay auctions of "AI pro-printed pro-pre-coloured miniatures" added to all the other names on the listings?

[Fitz]

Convenience is another thing- 3d modeling might be cheaper than in plastic, but far less convenient, at least for now.

That's going to change very swiftly. I'm already seeing AI generated or assisted 3d modeling applications or add-ons, and that sort of thing has the potential to create a multitude of online HeroForge-like apps in a very short space of time.

I may be an old man shaking my fist at a cloud, but I have a jaundiced view of the onset of AI into every facet of life. I think it's going to be a similar situation as we had with the arrival of cheap DTP apps in the '80s and '90s, when almost overnight, trained layout design professionals were replaced commercially by masses of cheap amateurs with no idea of what they were doing, adding WordArt to everything.