3D Printing and At-Home Fabrication Tips

After printing 50+ minis for Gloomhaven, I realized that I needed some way to store (and, more importantly, transport) all of these little guys !  There are a ton of great mini storage solutions already on Thingiverse, but none of them were precisely what I wanted... so I decided to design my own.  Also, after all of this work recently with complex organic shapes, I was looking forward to designing something that was purely mechanically functional in nature =) I had a tote box from Costco that I wanted to use for my minis, so I designed this to fit inside of it.  I measured the inside dimensions (at the bottom, because I learned from last time ) and decided that I should make it fit half of the tote, that way it would be printable in a single piece on my Prusa ;) Those other options on Thingiverse were a great source for ideas.  In the end, I decided that I really liked the "slide-in channel" design that Thetrebor used, but I wanted my sheets to be stack on top ...

I've written tidbits of this information across a few other support-related posts, but I figured that I should put it all in one place.  I've been printing a lot of minis lately, which has meant that I've had to learn a lot about supports and 3D printing.  I use a Prusa MK3, so this post is focused on FDM supports.  I tried a lot of different support structures across several different programs and my favorite ones were tree supports in Meshmixer.  I know many others have had excellent results with other supports, but I've been happy with my results and so that's what I'm going to write about :P Generating tree supports via Meshmixer is a 2 phase process.  First, you've got to figure out your print's orientation, and second, you've got to figure out your actual supports.  For minis, that first step can be a difficult balancing act, as you probably don't want supports to connect to the most detailed parts of the mini (like its face).  You also h...

I've been printing a lot of minis lately, and although I've greatly reduced the stringing on my Prusa MK3 , I haven't been able to eliminate it entirely.  I kindof think that, depending on the nature of the object being printed, some amount of stringing is inevitable.  So I've recently been focusing my efforts on how to gracefully clean up those strings that remain. At this point, I'm only seeing very fine strings, and mostly between very thin parts.  I printed a few copies of RobagoN's incredible Gloomhaven Earth Demon , which you can see has those big spikes jutting up off of the shoulders.  Even with my printer optimizations, I had some stringing between those things (and a bit of loose material at his chin, which I just need to support better).  As you can see, those are exceptionally fine strings (except for the one that goes straight up, where the nozzle lifted after completing the print), but those fine strings are actually difficult to clean up, in the...

I've been working on a character lately with a bunch of swords, like a whole lot.  This model has been especially challenging to print, because those swords stick off of the model at all sorts of odd angles, meaning that they need a lot of support material.  I prefer to use Meshmixer Tree Supports for my minis, as the individual trees can snake around complex geometry and they come off pretty easily and leave very little marking where they were connected.  That said, there are some challenges that I have to overcome when using those supports. 1: Supporting Supports Minis often need some fairly long supports, in order to print some weapon or head detail that is high above the printer bed.  Tree supports are often leaning at some precarious angle, and I've run into issues where the support will lift slightly as it cools, but due to its length and angle that imperceptible lift gets magnified and causes a nozzle collision. To work around this, I make support for my...

I've had a Prusa MK3 for several weeks and have printed nearly a kilogram of upgrades for my boardgames.  Most of that has been terrain features, which have printed beautifully at 0.1 mm layer height (check out the things I've made for some examples).  Sure, the print lines are visible (especially after applying a wash), but I'm still very happy with the results.  I haven't been so happy with attempts at printing miniatures at 0.05 mm layer height. I was vexed to find that 0.05 mm layer height prints on my brand new printer looked like garbage.  They were so covered with strings that I couldn't even remove the support material.  Admittedly, they'd be pretty awesome if I exclusively played campaigns in the Mirkwood, but that's really not what I'm going for. I tried all sorts of things to resolve the situation, and some certainly helped.  I lowered my nozzle temperature from 210 to 200 degrees.  I adjusted my printing speeds so that they'd max ...

So, you've got your 3D printer set up and understand the basics of preparing a file to print, so now you just need some thing  to print.  If you're like me, you're pretty intimidated by the idea of buying a bunch (like the 30-100 needed to run a tabletop campaign) of $3-$20 miniatures and then promptly ruining them with a terrible paint job.  That's why I 3D print - so that I can ruin a $0.50 piece of plastic that I can just print again! So, how do you get your model to print?  Well, there's a few options.  I'd recommend starting with Hero Forge , which has a nice interface that allows you to build your own hero from a huge library of parts.  It's really fun to play around with, looking at the options and seeing how nicely everything fits together.  I just have two complaints: the models can be challenging to print and they're expensive. The models that you make on Hero Forge look gorgeous, but it's up to us and our creativity to figure out how t...