The year of the 3D printed miniature and other lies we tell ourselves

3D printing is fantastic for terrain, which is typically larger and smoother, so it’s easier to hide or sand away any printing issue. It’s fine for things like busts or some display mini, where you can afford to be careful and spend the time fixing rough edges. But it really isn’t there compared to good quality plastic for smaller minis with dynamic poses. It’s too cumbersome, too finicky, and the material is too brittle or not hard enough. I don’t doubt that it will get there eventually, particularly for companies that can afford to invest in high-quality, expensive printers and material.

I think GW will sell in-store printed minis before sufficiently good 3d printers are common in players’ homes. The OP makes good points about why this is impractical in some ways, but I can see this happening for special releases or some less popular minis. The other side of the impulse-buy coin is that a lot of people need minis that are not usually in stock in stores. Then, waiting 15 minutes or even an hour (say, whilst you play a game or watch one, or paint some stuff, or just chat with fellow nerds) to get your mini printed beats the current "order on the website and then wait 2 weeks" process.

3d printed shoes are… almost a thing(1). Clothes, not so much… some experimental high fashion fabrics, but nothing you’d wear under normal circumstances.

But to your point about PFAS, afaik no common 3d printing materials contain PFAS - at least not filament ones, i don’t know much about the resin printing world.

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4id0-vvu-u0

I like where you are going with this and love that you dropped Zen here. Permit me to riff/add color, please.

Zen tries to draw a distinction between mental models with an object/subject separation and alternatives.

There are sane and insane reasons why we might adopt one or the other model.

An object/subject thinker might obsess over status symbols, but also the frame itself can lead to discomfort over using the "wrong" part.

Witness something like this in buy/build discussions where cargo-cult thinking plays a bigger part than rational thought. This probably goes well beyond object/subject thinking.

The status symbol thing can be more than posturing for prosperity. Some people get their identity tangled up in brand separate from social concerns.

I talk with LLM's about this sort of thing quite a bit more than I talk with humans. I get irritated when LLM refuses to allow for shorthand language. I hope I don't come across like that.

I agree with what I read as the sentiment from your last line, there's something that can be unsettling about objects carrying more than their intrinsic value.

To be fair, a whole lot of players don't do the painting side of things. It's very common for people to field unpainted minis, or commission paint jobs if they really care about having them painted.

I was never a fan of 3d printers, but now own 2 fdm printers that I'm quite happy with. One is an industrial nylon printer, one a prosumer printer (h2c) for everything else (the nylon printer is much faster than the h2c, printing cf nylon at 30 mm^3 easy. It is also accurate enough at that speed that there are no obviously visible layer lines).

I've probably owned 6 or 7 over the past 10 years, mainly to check out new technology and such.

I also own a very nice wood cnc and a very nice metal cnc, and use both a lot. Since they are 6 figure machines, they get modified instead of replaced ;).

So I have never been afraid to spend money to try things. I also have no issue modifying things (I have rebuilt entire cnc cabinets and mechanicals from scratch, rewritten the plc programs, etc). I donate the things I'm done with to friends or schools.

I say all this because I have also tried 4 resin printers over the past 10 years, and cathartically thrown every single one in a dumpster to avoid anyone else experiencing them.

While they have come a long way, selling any of them as a beginner level printer for someone new to 3d printing should be a crime. I can't think of a faster way to turn someone off from 3d printing. If you are doing product development or dentistry they can make sense. If you want "click button, wait, receive printed model" like most beginners, they make no sense because of the workflow.

Ironically, the one parson I know happy with their resin printer uses it exclusively to print Warhammer 40k minis (he uses one of my old fdm printers for other stuff).