I’m creating a board game that has custom 3d pieces. I’d like to test out my print before I send it to the game manufacturer and also want to make demo sets. They need a huge tooling fee before they’ll do samples. There are app. 10 designs and no bigger than 45mm.
I’m not sure as to whether I should buy a starter printer or would the learning curve be so big that I should just have a POD company do it. I know blender really well but have never printed anything from a file. I was going to make the file from blender for the company too. Any thoughts? I think my SO and I would use it for other things, probably, maybe, if it’s not so complicated that I give up on it.
Thanks for any advice on this, I don’t know what direction to point on this and I have a ton of work to do already.
Edit: You guys are awesome. I went from totally lost to ordering the Neptune 3 Pro and it should be here next week. Thanks for everything and I hope it goes pretty smoothly, I’ll keep you posted. Thanks again.
@PeleSpirit 3D printing is fun but it can be a time sink. Consider how much done you can invest in this. If you want to push on with other things then POD may be best. If you want to have it as a tool in your bag, then buy one for sure.
One thing I would say about resin printers is they can’t be left for long periods and are best cleaned and packed away if you aren’t using them.
3D printing is fun but it can be a time sink.
Ruh roh, we’ll see how it goes since I ordered the Neptune 3 pro. Thanks for the heads up though.
So you can get an Ender or similar printer for $100-200 and it would mostly work out of the box, but there is often a huge amount of troubleshooting that follows. I got a 3D printer originally to try to earn extra revenue but never ended up selling anything because the hobby took over for me. I spent hours learning how it works and hundreds replacing parts (trying to perfect my machine, not at all necessary). It’s a bit of an investment of time and money but you may find that you end up enjoying it and using it beyond the scope of your current project. It’s definitely something that takes a lot of commitment to learn unless you have a lot of money you’re willing to invest towards a more no-issue printer like a Prusa.
It looks like there are a ton of makerspaces in Seattle. If you have the time, you can actually often volunteer to use the machines for free. And it would give you the ability to use other machines there, like laser cutters. I actually also volunteer about a couple hours north of you at the bham makerspace. If you happen to be in the area and want help printing stuff – or you decide to get a printer and you want help learning how to do it, you should hit me up! I’m super passionate about it and I would be happy to give you advice or help out. :)
I wish I had the time to volunteer, but that’s a great idea if things start to slow down. I just ordered the Neptune pro 3 as a starter for this project so we’ll see how the ease of use goes. I tried all the maker spaces I could find locally and they were either all booked up so you could use the space or they charged $25/half hour and I have no idea how long everything would take. I will definitely hit you up when we get a break from all the stuff we’re doing, that’s a gorgeous drive. Thanks for the offer of help, I really hope I don’t need it, lol.
Hey sounds great! You’ve made a good choice. If/when you have any issues pop up that you need a quick solution to, I’ll be around :)
“Makerspaces” exist for a reason.
You should be able to get access to a higher-quality 3d printer (or CNC mill, or Laser Cutter) from a typical makerspace. It’d be basically a club (often near universities) where people effectively pool their money together for collective ownership.
My local makerspace is at a community college. It requires a safety class before you can use the equipment, so there’s a few weeks of spinup time. The rules will be different wherever you are. In this case, my local State sponsored the funds for the 3d printer, but I still have to pay for resin costs and whatnot when using the printer.
Good software costs a ton of money too, and you might want to find a Makerspace just so that you can get access to the $4000+ class software that engineers use. Or at least the $1000+ software? Thinking like Rhino CAD, Autotools, or a few other professional tools.
Blender is more of a 3d graphics (think Toy Story movie) kind of workflow. It can do 3d designs but its not the original design.
I looked at the makerspaces in my area and all of their 3d printing classes are filled. I would have to pay by the half hour for them to do it but I have no idea how long each piece would take.
My local makerspace is at a community college.
I just checked, no dice.
Blender is more of a 3d graphics (think Toy Story movie) kind of workflow. It can do 3d designs but its not the original design.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by that, I know AutoCAD, Revit, Blender and have used 3D Studio a long time ago, it uses the same basics of building in 3d. Do you mean the slicing software?
Edit: I appreciate the suggestions, I hope that didn’t text weird.
Blender has a ton of “movie” features, such as animation, keyframes, bones, etc. etc. Its almost entirely focused on movie-making. None of these features are useful to you, and in fact they’re harming your workflow. (They’re distracting items on the menu and manual)
Rhino, which is a freeform CAD program for industrial design has many more features. Not only is it $1000 however, but its focus on making artistic 3d printed models is obvious once you use such a program.
AutoCAD is more of an engineer’s tool. Its extremely precise but non-artistic in design. Its $4000 as well, but also the wrong tool for making a board game piece.
You’re using the wrong 3d program (Blender) to make your board game pieces. That’s all I’m saying. The people in the know would use a program like Rhino (or a comparable industrial design 3d to manufacturing tool). Blender can work, but its obvious that it doesn’t have the CAD or CAM features that a proper industrial tool would have.
Without a CAM-plugin package, are you even sure that your design can be 3d printed correctly? Have you thought about how the 3d printer nozzle (or CNC mill, or whatever you’re using) will create the end-product? Do you have holes in your design?
Do you have any overhangs that are unstable or unable to be printed?
https://www.3dprintingera.com/3d-printing-overhangs-and-bridges/
A tool like RhinoCAM-Mesh (ugggh, another $1000, but you get the gist of this hobby…) will automatically 3d print supports that will snap off so that whatever shape you wanted will be possible to be made.
https://mecsoft.com/products/rhinocam/rhinocammesh/
Just because you made it in Blender doesn’t mean its possible to 3d print. You need to double-check the “head” of the 3d printer, see if it ever collides with your design, check to see overhangs are set, etc. etc. Sometimes, its impossible and you have to go back to square-one and redesign the whole toy (or sculpture) in order for it to be 3d printed.
Tightly-integrated CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) tools check these things for you. If you’ve never thought about how the 3d printer head moves, or what angles are impossible to print, or etc. etc., then you haven’t finished your job. You want to get the CAM to double-check these things for you, and yeah its expensive but its all software these days.
So yeah, a tool like Rhino (lol $1000) plus RhinoCAM-Mesh (lol another $1000) to do this workflow. Now you can do this all manually yourself of course and “design your 3d game piece” for 3d printing (including thinking of temporary struts / braces you need to print-then-cut-out to make your designs successful). But that takes a bit more skill and manual effort, because Blender has no such CAM tools available (at least, that I’m aware of).
Blender has a ton of “movie” features, such as animation, keyframes, bones, etc. etc. Its almost entirely focused on movie-making.
I appreciate what you’re saying but I’m not sure you’ve used Blender lately. It does sculpting, 3d tech and all that, it gets very precise. It’s not as easy to use as AutoCAD and Revit to get precise, but you can do it. All of the architects and engineers I know and work with use AutoCad and Revit and it’s for creating details for arch & hvac drawings. The company I’m working with said they will adjust the file and have that built into the price for manufacturing. I just want to give them a clean file. Thanks though, I don’t think I need it for this, the company I’m working with knows what I’m giving them and seem fine. It’s one component of a huge puzzle.
CAD software is better suited for precision designing. I don’t know if you would require that kind of presicion for board game parts. At least for early stages it may not be a requirement.
I for one still use blender for kinda presicion 3d models.
The models are already built, I made them awhile ago. Some of them have some issues with pieces being random and I wasn’t sure how clean I need to make the models for them to print well. This is one of the reasons I kind of want to get my own printer too, I don’t know how much I don’t know.
Edit: Sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying. Yes, Blender does great for detailed drawings as well as movies.
Shapeways.com and printathing.com
Usually can upload a file and they will print and ship to you
Never used anything like that, but I recommend it anyway. Learning about printing and modeling for printing is fun but takes a lot of time. Then you make a perfect model for 3D printer which cant be moulded…
Id go stright to design for moulding and pay someone for 3D print on resin printer. If model is not suitable for printing you can add supports or just split it in 2 parts and glue them afterwards.
But if you need a new hoby, 3D printing is awesome and affordable nowdays. It can help with your board game design as well. You can even consider 3D printing as main techology
For figures, and especially testing things that will compare to injection molding, going FDM is a really bad idea. It’s superior for engineering parts and rapid prototyping in basically all cases, but is has terrible dimensional accuracy by comparison, and it has a ton of trouble with thin features and overhanging shapes. This is mainly because the nozzle width is orders of magnitude wider than the pixels on a resin printer, so the slicer has to get very creative with dimensions to make complex models work at all. I am a huge FDM enthusiast, but this really isn’t the right place for it.
I’m pretty sure I get what you’re saying. They have the pricing built into the quote for fixing my file, he’s already looked at what it’s going to look like and thought they would need to change a few things. I’m totally cool with that, I’m just trying to have a working file to give them and test a few things. Also, I’d like to have a mock-up to send to reviewers. Thanks for trying to warn me though, I understand what you’re saying.
What things are you testing? If it’s really nothing to do with the way it looks cosmetically, then you will be fine with FDM. But for mockups for reviewers, you may want to just order them SLA’d from JLCPCB. I got a part made by them and the quality was phenomenal and it was super cheap and fast. It’s slower than printing it yourself, but the quality is worlds better and you would have to order hundreds and hundreds before it costs more than buying a printer.
I’m just testing my file for the most part. I’d also like to make a few mock-ups for testing and reviewers for the crowd sourcing campaign. I’ve already ordered the printer and I should get it in a couple of days. Thanks for the source anyway, it looks like a nice place to get stuff printed.
