This blog has covered 3D printing in the wargaming hobby before – is it a threat to the hobby? The promised future? But while there are a lot of opinions about 3D printing in the hobby, I’ve found there’s not a whole lot of resources in going over the basics of getting started, what you need, etc.
So this is a start of a series that is going to attempt, at least, to provide that. For this installment, we’ll be covering the “Why?” of 3D printing – what appeal does it have for wargamers – as well as some of the basics of deciding what kind of 3D printer you want. Future installments will get more into the weeds about those choices.
Also – if you want a more conversational approach to some of this, the latest release for Lost to the Nails is myself, Brian Harvey and Carl Tuttle discussing this.
Why 3D Print in the First Place?
We’re going to ignore the “To make counterfeit models” reason to 3D print, because I think it’s both a disservice to 3D printing’s role in the hobby, and also illegal.
To me, 3D printing is a technical substitute to several artistic pursuits in the hobby. Building terrain, sculpting models or bits, and making the types of things that just help your hobby life be a little easier. And it allows you to leverage the creativity of other people – if someone makes a really cool conversion piece, etc. you don’t need them to fabricate it for you (and hope they have the time and inclination to do so).
I limp those things into three broad categories: Utility prints, terrain, and minis.
Let’s talk about utility prints first.
Recently, I designed and 3D printed some support pillars for my airbrush booth that had room to sink magnets into it (long story). I needed something, and a couple of hours later, it was done. It was immensely satisfying. I asked my wife “Is this why people who have miter saws and can just build something from their spare scrap pile are always so smug, because this is awesome?”
I’ve done a lot of little things like that – printed up a bunch of color coordinated, custom sized paint holders to organize my painting station. Built a couple jigs to make sure things are sized correctly when cutting things. Even designed and printed some stabilizing holders to keep my Nuln Oil in the bottle and not on my desk.
It’s that feeling – that you’re making something that’s cool and solves your problems.
Which brings me to terrain…
I love terrain. If I could spend a couple years just painting terrain, I’d be happy in my hobby. But I hate foam. Hate it. Can’t stand the feel of it. Hate the sound of it. Don’t particularly like the feel of dried PVA glue on my fingers. Which means scratch building terrain, for me, is not particularly something I look for. Which meant for a long time, I was basically stuck with official kits, whatever it was.
3D printing has let me vastly expand the kits I can use, it lets me play with the scope, size things up and down for different scales, and even digitally kit bash (or physically combine) kits in new ways. It’s brought a lot of joy to my hobby time that way. Like this artillery position built into a hill – this will end up being the combination of some resin pieces for vents, a door, and the cannon itself, some filament printed hills, all with a little design tweaking by me to make them work and a whole mess of scale modeling sandbags glued on top. It was satisfying to build in a way that’s rare to feel with even some of the best designed terrain kits from GW.
Though to be clear, I have a lot of those too.
The same is true for bits and figures. I like what the 40K Badcast refers to as “Warhammer Weirdos” for miniatures – astropaths and savants and gangers and a bunch of other things that work wonderfully well for narrative scenarios. Tiny urban terrain bits for AT18 to make the boards feel more lived in. The odd really cool shoulder pad. There’s a wealth of that. And there are a lot of manufacturers making their own lines of miniatures – either for skirmish games like SAGA or Star Grave that doesn’t really care where the figures come from, or in support of their own small games where there’s not enough demand to justify something capital intensive. For example, Modiphius, who make the Fallout miniatures game, have a lot of their terrain kits available for 3D printing, because while there may never be enough demand to justify an injection moulded plastic Red Rocket fuel station, the initial design work and then STL distribution is easy enough.
That’s really it – the reason to get into 3d printing is that it gives you another avenue of creativity with which to express your hobby.
What Type of Printer Should I Get?
Broadly speaking, there are two types of printers – filament (or FDM) printers, and resin (or SLA) printers. Each have their plusses and minuses.
FDM Printers
FDM stands for Fused Deposition Modeling, and is, essentially, laying down a stream of molten plastic that’s headed by the printer and then extruded through a nozzle. This image is a decent representation of what’s happening:
The nozzle, the bed, or sometimes both, move around according to a set of commands, and eventually, successive layers of the molten plastic, which swiftly hardens and bonds to the layer below it, turn into an object. And this…exceedingly sped up…is what it looks like in practice:
The primary appeal of FDM printers is for utility prints and terrain, because it’s relatively fast and extremely affordable. A 1 kg spool of filament (we’ll go into types in a future post) will get you well on your way to having a full table’s worth of terrain, and will set you back no more than about $30 USD. The downside is that those layers of filament, as they go down, leave grooves (just like on the diagram above) that are visible, giving distinct visual layers. There are ways to minimize this (more, thinner layers minimizes lines at the expense of speed) but they will always be there. Clever designers can figure out how to hide them a bit, and with some paint, I think it’s possible for filament-printed pieces to look quite good:
Beyond just the layer lines issue, FDM printers also struggle with figures, especially human-sized 28mm ones for some technical reasons. Thin objects like staffs, antennas, etc. can often have problems because they’re so small, so a layer of plastic doesn’t have time to fully cool and harden before the 200+°C nozzle comes over it again for the next layer, causing it to droop and blob. Again, there are ways to work with this but…it’s maybe not always the right choice if you’re wanting to print lots of miniatures. But for terrain, I’d assert that FDM printers are unbeatable.
Resin Printers
Resin printers work through an entirely different method. Essentially, a vat of liquid, UV-curable resin with a transparent film is placed above a source of UV light. A screen in between them (now custom screens, formerly just screens similar to those from cell phones) provides a mask, letting light in only in certain places. A metal build plate is lowered into the resin, stopping a very small amount above the bottom of the vat (say 0.05mm). The UV light turns on and the resin trapped between the bottom of the vat and the build plate cures. The build plate then lifts, peeling the cured resin off the bottom of the vat, and the whole process begins again, slowly building up a model upside down.
There are two primary advantages of resin printing. First, they are much higher resolution – with very dense pixels in the screens that provide the masks, as well as small layers (0.05mm is four times thinner than the standard 0.20mm I print my terrain at, for example) they can capture figures very well.
The second is that resin printing scales very well. What I mean by this is that while printing potentially thousands of layers might be slow, the masking screen is either on, or off – adding more objects to the build plate just means more of it is exposed to UV light. As long as they fit on the plate, one object or seven take the same amount of time. In contrast, FDM printers must physically lay down every bit of melted plastic, and so multiple objects, while convenient for not having to start multiple jobs, take progressively longer. And new technologies that allow for faster curing mean resin printers have made impressive speed gains recently.
There are however some disadvantages. The first is that resin is more expensive than filament, by a fairly wide margin, which for large prints erodes the value proposition of 3d printing something. The second is that FDM printers have fairly large build plates. For example, the Prusa Mk3S, my workhorse FDM printer, has a build plate that is 25cm x 21cm, whereas my Epax X1 has a 12.8cm x 8.1cm build plate. That means for large terrain pieces things may simply not fit. There are larger printers with correspondingly larger build plates for resin printers – an Epax X10, for example, is 22.1cm x 13cm, but FDM printers still – by and large at consumer prices – have the advantage there.
There are also other issues printing terrain on resin printers that I’ll touch on in the resin-specific post.
The other problem is post-processing. For FDM printers, once your build plate cools down, you take your new chunk of plastic off and…you’re done. That’s it. Prime it, paint it, and put it on the table.
For resin printers, you have to rinse your resin piece, which is covered in uncured resin in a solvent like isopropyl alcohol, and then cure it in UV light until it’s fully hardened. All of this while wearing nitrile gloves. You may also have to carefully remove support material that comes as essentially a tiny forest of little resin support beams. It’s messy. It’s often worth it, but it’s definitely messy. Again, in the resin-specific post, I’ll get into some things that can help.
So my answer? If you just want to print terrain at 28mm scale, get an FDM printer. If you really want to print figures – for example, you have an active RPG group and every week you want to present custom monsters, etc., or you want to do a lot of smaller scale terrain, consider a resin printer. Tiny AT18-scale figures are what got me into resin printing.
Degree of Difficulty
This is a question I get asked a lot: “Which one is harder?” The answer (unhelpfully) is that they’re different. Because I like graphs, it goes kind of like this:
Resin is sort of always ambiently difficult, due to the higher degree of processing resin prints require, the need for gloves and IPA or another solvent, etc. Most of the time FDM prints are pretty fire-and-forget. Set your printer up, watch the first layer or two go down, and walk away, checking in on it occasionally. But when FDM prints go wrong, in my experience they’re considerably more of a pain than when resin prints do. An errant resin print that just failed is me grumbling, emptying out the vat and resetting some things. An errant FDM print often involves prying a giant blob of plastic off a heated nozzle wearing welding gloves while trying not to damage any delicate wires. But that’s only happened twice, whereas the things that make resin printing a pain happen every print.
Where Do I Get Help?
There are lots of places to get help. You’re welcome to leave a question in the comments here, or Tweet @VarianceHammer if you so desire. But for the most part, support is online. I highly recommend, before you buy a printer, joining that printer’s community on Facebook to see how helpful they are, and how active the group is. There is some great community support out there…and some not so great community support. There’s also some YouTube channels I suggest:
3DPrintingPro is a good, RPG/wargaming specific (more RPGs admittedly) channel primarily focused on resin printing.
3D Printing Nerd does a lot of really solid reviews, etc. primarily focused on FDM printing.:
Thomas Sanladerer has an excellent getting started series, and is excellent for…3D printing related experimentation?
3D Printed Tabletop is another mostly RPG-centric channel, but presents a good mix of resin and FDM printing, some cool models, and the host is just a nice guy.
Where Do I Get Models?
The models for both types of printers are called STL files, and there’s a huge number of places to get them. Again, social media is your friend here.
One of the biggest repositories is Thingiverse. This is a great resource, but is often hard to find things in (their search function is dubious at best). Yeggi is a search engine that works better for that. There are other large online marketplaces for STL files, with Cults3D and MyMiniFactory being some of the better ones for wargaming. MMF is where a lot of Kickstarter campaigns, Patreons, etc. end up delivering their files, and generally speaking, you can find a lot there. They’ve also gotten into crowdfunding campaigns.
Speaking of Kickstarter and Patreons, there are a lot of those out there, alongside people just selling their files on web stores. Some of my favorites are:
3D Alien Worlds which makes the amazing Samurai terrain I showed above, as well as Necron and Eldar-themed terrain.
Grim Dark Terrain which makes amazing 8mm scale terrain for Adeptus Titanicus, all of which is astonishingly modular. You could spend a good year just making boards out of his stuff and it would be a year well spent.
Soul Forge Studios which has both a MMF store and one of the most dynamic and responsive Patreon campaigns I’ve ever seen. They make great starships for Battlefleet Gothic and similar systems, and their work on Heresy-era Gloriana-class battleships has been great to watch.
There are, of course, countless others – ranging from display pieces for people who really want to work on larger scale figures, to particular types of terrain, certain themes (Vikings, etc.), etc. It’s worth exploring, asking around, and keeping an eye on where other people say their stuff is from.
Where Do We Go From Here?
This is just the first installment of this series – I’m planning a more in-depth post on both resin printers and filament printers, going deep into the weeds. Those may take more than a couple days to write, but if you’re interested, that’s where we’re heading.
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