3D printing sculpting

I'll have to ask what he uses. I think he's been trying several different products as for still testing it - to see quality of each product / brand.

Other friends of mine have ordered custom 3D printed DnD miniatures from a site once. The quality of detail is actually really good, but the texure needs sanding. Friends did not sand it since they wanted the grainy look ( they were playing half-dragon characters ).

^ forgot tp mention this. So I don't think quality of detail is an issue. It'd just be the type of material used to print. Friend with the printer does a lot of casting too, so I mean if actually printing parts doesn't work well in terms of material quality --- could always resort to using the printer as a mold maker instead and using whatever material you wish afterwards. Just putting an idea out there

A close friend of mine has a small 3D printer. I believe he got it for around 300 USD. He's still testing the limits of it. For the most part, he's been printing our paintball team misc. Gear such as missiles and such.

As for detail, we've found ways where you can scan a pre-existing stuff and edit it in the program then print it, or custom your own in thd program. We have yet to try the scanning though. We plan to scan a miniature for a test run and see how well it goes.

From our experience, for a small 3D printer, printing stuff for these customs might be okay. Depending on the material used to print and what not. Also depending how much wear and tear you're expecting while working on a custom may be another factor.

But considering we've used ours for paintball, I think it should do fine if you ever get a small, cheap 3D printer. However, always expect to do some sanding for that smoother look.

Cool, see if you can convince them to print a 6-inch scale head at the best resolution. Since it's one of the inexpensive ones, that's probably like 100 microns. Would be neat to see what that result is like so we can determine if that's passable or if we really do need better resolution.

Yeah 300 bucks sounds pretty cheap for a 3D printer, but I'm wondering it's possible to print detailed faces of armour plates. But it would have to print PVC plastic, most of the cheaper 3d printers only print out ABS which is hard and brittle.

Thanks for the info Dr nightmare!
Your probably right about the sculpting thing, but I think maybe in time when 3d printers get cheaper and better, accessories, bases or other things can be digitally printed. I still actually enjoy sculpting details, it's a main part of the hobby. But I've seen some amazing things such as superior Spiderman legs 3D printed. Just imagine the possibilities. Say you hated the wings on the angel figure of the TRU all new X men box set, you could just download a pre-sculpted file of bird wings and modify it and turn it into a badass pair of wings. But I think I might invest in a 3D printer one day, I could print dioramas or bases.

Even as every new generation of people becomes more and more accustomed to technology, I don't think traditional sculpting will ever go away. And it's not because it's some noble artform that needs to be preserved, it's because most people are too lazy, busy, or can't afford to learn to sculpt digitally. It's not as simple as just slapping around a bunch of digital clay.

I havent seen any 3d printers under a few thousand dollars that were worth buying just to print heads and accessories, they print at low resolutions so you get a ton of ugly lines in the printed pieces. Someone posted about using one on these wrestling forums http://forum.wrestlingfigs.com/thread/3 ... 3d-printer

There are examples there of a home printed one and one gotten from printing places like Shapeways.

EDIT
Did some quick research, you can get a badass 3D printer for about $3000. There are a few at that price that let you print at 20 micron resolution for smoooooth pieces.