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Reply To: "This technology will DISRUPT miniature companies." says Maker's Muse

January 11, 2020 at 12:46 am #1469896

phaidknott

7023xp

@blinky465 We’ve had some updates over at the Fabled Realms Kickstarter.

They’ve had more than a few obstacles in trying to get 3D printing to a manufacturing level. Some of the issues have been the resins “curing” in the bottles before they even reached the printer, edge refraction distortion due to forest casting (whatever that means it’s a bit technical for me), and not being able to use the full bed to cast minis. All this has meant the production costs for the minis have been a lot more than they had originally planned.

So they are now going to ship the game with normal drop cast resin, and offer the 3D prints as a “collectors” mini (at a higher price). But I do think 4Ground really stepped forwards in experimenting with the technology (and probably know more about the hurdles that need to be overcome), and if they hadn’t tried to do it…then we’d never have known if it was feasible or not (the actual answer at the moment seems to be “kinda”).

So probably we’ll need to see the new larger bed printers appear to do the forest casting, AND see a reduction in the resin costs before we’ll be able to print off entire armies (ie 100s of figures) at home. If this becomes viable to commercially sell the 3D printed figures (where you need to produce 1000s) by a wargames manufacturer is probably a way off at the moment.