This was a very enjoyable read for me. I’ve never played 40K but have always been impressed with the craftsmanship and dedication of the community.
I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned. My local game shop makes a lot of cool 3D printed stuff and sells it online or at cons, but even Etsy is now cracking down on prints of “commodity” STLs. IIRC under their new policy, you can’t sell a print you didn’t design yourself. This is ostensibly to cut down on the huge quantity of identical articulated toys.
But the bigger takeaway (i.e., the kit car Ferrari analogy), is similar to how I’ve been thinking about AI image generation lately. You can walk down the streets of New York and buy a counterfeit Birkin bag or Rolex from a street vendor. Are knockoffs “disrupting” the market? I guess, in a way. But I think they also make the authentic item _more_ valuable by being so cheap and fake by comparison. AI-generated “Ghibli” pictures are the same.
I remember when "Warty 40" was invented and largely supplanted Warhammer itself. I remember Citadel Miniatures and (A)D&D 1st editions, not to mention Traveler, Runequest, Tunnels and Trolls, Car Wars and many more. I was pretty decent at painting (quickly and accurately) and several kiddies used to pay me to get their latest regiment of space marines into action with the right colours. I went to a posh school and some of the kids had a lot more disposable income than me. I also had a lot more free time than I do now.
Nowadays I own a 3D printer (Prusa 4S+ with nobs on upgraded from a 3) and an IT company.
16 year old me would have committed ... a minor crime ... for the printer but given that IT was a Commodore 64, I'm not sure how I would have driven the thing.
However a 16 y/o me today with a 3D printer probably would be printing armies out of filament. I used to make plastic models too and saved up for several months to buy a double action air brush. My printer can churn out a small scale tank that rivals a Tamiya effort from back in the day. Some finishing is required but not much.
I might have a go at some Warhammer models and see how it goes, just for old time's sake ...
Pretty much the same age, generation and story. I also remember Traveller and Car Wars, and when 40K was first released as Rogue Trader (and when GW said that they were keeping plastic mini prices comparable to lead minis because the injection moulding equipment was really expensive, but once they'd paid that off they'd be reducing the price of plastic minis dramatically. hahahhahahhahhahah).
I had a go at FDM printing some minis, for old times' sake, and it didn't go well. The best resolution that I can get to is around 0.1mm, which is incredibly slow to print, and still not fine enough. The print layers are still visible, the detail is blurred. Sanding doesn't help that much; the face is still a mess. You can't paint individual eyeballs on them.
If you remember the first generation of plastic gobbos and dwarves in the Warhammer (not 40K) beginner box released back in the early 90's, where they obviously had two-part moulds and there were no underhangs anywhere on the models, then my FDM versions were more shit than those.
The author is spot-on about the hobby, and about the business model, and about 3D printing's place in it.
But have a go, it's a fun challenge for a 3D printer enthusiast :)
>
I had a go at FDM printing some minis, for old times' sake, and it didn't go well. The best resolution that I can get to is around 0.1mm, which is incredibly slow to print, and still not fine enough. The print layers are still visible, the detail is blurred. Sanding doesn't help that much; the face is still a mess. You can't paint individual eyeballs on them.
If you just care about the print layers, use a filament that is solvable in acetone, and use it to smoothen the surface. Of course, if you absolutely need the resolution, you likely must use a resin printer.
> I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned.
In my opinion people simply stopped following the big visions of that time and got satisfied with the current state of 3D printers instead of continuing to iterate on highly experimental designs that could bring the world nearer to these visions.
Cory Doctorow waxed lyrical for many years about the ability to 3d-print clothes and other Maslow-hierarchy needs. Even the most experimental of designs haven't approached that yet... and I think we'd now be scared of increased PFAS levels even if we could.
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.
The only place PFAS is used in an FDM printer is the filament guide some printers have. That's a Teflon tube that the filament travels in towards the hotend.
Bowden style printers tend to have a long tube, direct drive printers sometimes have a short tube fully contained in the hotend assembly.
I don't see how PFAS can be used as a filament in FDM printer. It's not a thermoplastic, that's one of its advantages as a material.
> even Etsy is now cracking down on prints of “commodity” STLs. IIRC under their new policy, you can’t sell a print you didn’t design yourself.
Not really true. There was a lot of drama about this when it came out, but I suspect there were more videos on YouTube about the subject than there have been actual products taken down over this. You just have to disclose that you made it with design partners. (ie, an STL you didn't create)
> But I think they also make the authentic item _more_ valuable by being so cheap and fake by comparison.
Depends.
Here in the balkans, for some reason, Louis Vuitton bags (the ugly brown one with lighter/gold lettering) have become popular with 'the kids' some years ago.. those bags normally cost as much as a modern laptop, some even much more, but due to chinese manufacturers and local market sellers, you can get counterfits for 10-30eur, depending on the design. Are the materials, seams, zippers, metal parts (well.. metallic painted plastic), etc. worse? Sure. But from far away, it's hard to notice the difference.
Now, due to the huge cost difference between the original and the fake and easily obtainable fakes, most of such bags you see in the street are fakes.
Since it's hard to tell them apart, people just assume it's a fake bag, when they see someone carrying it. I personally know people who are pretty rich and buy expensive stuff "just to show it around", and they don't buy those bags anymore, because no one thinks it's an original bag. A 100k mat black mercedes? Can't fake that. 30k gold watch? Sure it can be fake, but few people wear watches nowaday, even fewer notice them, and very few people assume that the watch is fake. But a 3k louis vuitton handbag? In whatever shopping center or larger cafe/club you go with that, there will be a couple more girls with similar, fake ones.
Do they? The high quality fake Rolex that only a watch nerd can tell apart, vs the shitty fake Lolex are different worlds. Similarly, the AI fake Ghibli of myself is just fun. Would it mean more if if flew to Japan and commissioned a painter at Ghibli-world for $3,000 to make the same picture? Sure, but I'm not going to do that.
There's a part in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the narrator's friend's bike needs some fixing, and the narrator said (I paraphrase) "you could use this piece of aluminum from a soda can to fix it", but the bike owner thinks that's blasphemy, the only way to fix it is with a part from the bike manufacturer...
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.
> I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned.
That is not true. I have a resin printer that is around 3 years old (Anycubic Photon Mono M5s) and it has a level of detail that simply cannot be matched by injection molded parts. I have printed some miniatures that have details much smaller than a human hair, like the needle of a syringe in 32mm scale.
Once painted, the figurines are indistinguishable from non-3D printed ones unless you pick them up (they're heavier often).
That said, the article is still right. Resin printers are a massive pain. They're highly toxic, and the time spent preparing, and then post-processing is quite high, but also stressful because of the toxicity. I use my filament printer almost every day, but my resin printer has been collecting dust because of this.
Plus, one thing that the article misses, or rather, casually omits, is that some people want a customized base fig. They'll still put the time, the effort, the whole shebang. But they want to do it on something that is different on a foundational level from what's for sale on official channels.
Such as, I dunno. A proxy that looks like a...
Either way, no, I don't take Resin Printers as a market disruption either. But I have a rather more positive take on them: They probably grow the market itself. Because there are more people getting into the hobby. Well, that and stuff like 10th edition probably helps a bunch.
I waited what I thought (and what was suggested by enthusiasts to be) long enough for the tech to be mature and approachable, and finally bought a highly-recommended beginner printer about three years ago.
I’ll never touch the tech again. The chemicals seem sketchy as hell (I don’t really want any hobbies that make me feel like I need a dedicated area of my house that I only enter while wearing significant PPE, and with gloves that never leave that dirty-zone) and after probably ten joyless hands-on hours burned over a couple weekends, I never got the fucking thing to print a single one of its test designs.
Seems like yet another fiddly hobby for its own sake (that might eventually yield some not-remotely-worth-the-cost fruits) rather than a useful tool. I don’t need what it offers that bad, the amount of money and time I’m going to put toward it in the rest of my life is zero. It’s probably a fine activity if the act of fiddling with 3D printers is the main draw for a person. Otherwise, no.
I would never recommend a resin printer to someone new to 3D printing. They’ve come a long way and are reasonably reliable now, but it’s not a good place to start.
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).
It really depends on what your end goal & use case is. Resin printers are pretty phenomenal for any kind of product development and are very much a useful tool in the industrial design space.
That said, casual hobbyists should almost always start with an FDM (filament) printer as a first printer. Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience :/
It's the perfect "I just want my 3d printer to be a tool" printer.
There are better options now, of course, but it's one of the best purchases I've ever made.
Much better than my Printrbot Metal Plus, which turned out to require all the tinkering of a budget printer at the price of a high-end printer.
Without details on what you were using, I can't be certain, but this absolutely is not my experience.
I got started in 2017 with an Ender 3, and extremely cheap printer with a basic set of features. I improved it by adding a bed leveling sensor and flashing new firmware, along with adding a tool steel nozzle and heater, and a 3d printed housing replacement for it's screen which included a place to mount a raspberry pi, running octoprint, to manage it remotely, and a webcam on a stick mounted to the Z rail. It worked pretty good, and building it was fun.
However in the intervening years, I also bought a Creality CR-6 Max, a much larger printer with a built-in bed leveler. It too got a pi and a webcam, but nothing beyond that, and it too worked well. However both those printers required constant maintenance, troubleshooting and overall fiddling. It remained my niche hobby.
I've since upgraded to a Bambu Lab H2D at great expense ($3,200 retail, utterly dwarfing the sub-$500 printers of before) and honestly, it's like a different tech all together. I don't even NEED a computer, really, unless I want to use one: I can find stuff on my phone, download it, and send it to the printer over their cloud service. And no troubleshooting really to speak of, I think I've had like 3 prints that did some weird shit and required a figure or two, but absolutely no comparison to the other machines. And in fact it's so bulletproof that my wife, who is utterly uninterested and frankly a bit hostile to tech, now uses it more than I do. She says it's a slightly trickier version of a Cricut, which is just WILD to me coming from my experiences with the Ender and Creality before it.
All of these are of course FDM printers. I have also played with a Photon Mono X I got from a friend who didn't want to use it with their birds in their home, and that one while requiring more fiddling and more chemicals, is also virtually bulletproof with regard to print quality, and you get better finishes with some tradeoffs (vulnerability to sunlight, figuring out curing vs. over-curing, what have you) which sounds a bit more like what you were dealing with. I could absolutely see that souring your opinion if you started there, that's not a beginner machine IMHO.
I play a wargame (Battletech) where the rulebook says "use a bottlecap if you want to as long as you can tell which way it's facing" and even there 3D printed minis are uncommon. For Battletech there's two official sources of minis, plastic from CGL and metal from IWM[0]. IWM has a model for almost every unit published in the last 40 years, but some of them are... very hard to look at. CGL's plastic ones look much and cover the most common units so you can usually get by with just them (although, I did just order a couple minis for an upcoming tournament). If I ever see a printed mini, it's either a) one of the ones where the IWM model looks terrible, or b) a model ripped from the Mechwarrior video games that the person thinks looks better aesthetically.
Where 3D printing has been revolutionary for Battletech though has been terrain. Battletech's played on a hex grid, and ever hex has an elevation printed on it to form hills, buildings, and rivers. There's one company (Thunderhead Studios) that makes STLs of the elevation of the official maps that's very popular. Popular enough that they've actually started mass manufacturing them and selling prepainted terrain retail. That shows up in every event I've been to, even official events where 3D minis are banned. But it's a decidedly ancillary part of the experience for Battletech.
I 3D print items that aren't mass produced, either because I'm one of few people who wants them so there's no market or I'm the only person who wants them because they're customized for me.
Most reasonable 3D printer users don't believe they'll replace mass production. They use them for parts you can't buy.
Once you get a 3d printer, you do tend to find many uses for them for things you could easily buy (organizing bins and the like) but I don't think anyone is buying them with this in mind.
I see it as the most important home maintenance tool. Saves hundreds per year on little things that break. Like a wall patch, small o-ring for a toy, drawer slide mount, basement light mount, etc. I will say though that the learning curve is a bit rough if you don’t have CAD experience.
I'm part mechanical engineer and I 3D print things on a near daily basis. My job would be a lot slower and more cumbersome without it. Mind you this is all FDM.
I only played with resin printers briefly, and not only do they produce extremely brittle and off-dimenension parts, they are extremely messy and use chemicals that you really should think twice or three times or four times about having under the same roof as the one you sleep in.
With how useful FDM is to me, it seems really strange that resin printing's killer app has been "miniatures", like it's the niche it fell into after everyone bought one and discovered they aren't great for much else. I am in disbelief that people would willingly deal with resin printers just to do miniatures, like there's no way it could possibly be worth it even if you really like that hobby. It feels wrong even to refer to both under the same umbrella of 3D printing.
That said, if you're not regularly designing parts you need made and/or aren't a CAD user, I don't see much use in the average person having a 3D printer (I have 5 btw)
It sounds like you underestimate the enthusiasm for miniatures in general. There is a lot of demand for finely printed models––look at Tribes on MyMiniFactory, or the success of primarily 3D printed games like Trench Crusade.
On the other side of this _is_ the affordability of 3D printed miniatures. The linked-to article is salient/cogent/great, but the secondary topic at hand––lowering the price of entry for miniatures-based table top gaming––is still salient. 3D printing won't necessarily upend GW's business model, but it does provide an entry point that is more affordable by some calculus.
I think there's a distinction between printing existing 40K/other commercial wargame pieces, vs custom pieces for RPGs, scenery and so forth. My in-person D&D games had lots of custom items (including minis of our characters) which were 3D printed, and resin was only used for detailed prints, with FDM used to provide much of the underlying structure.
Bambu; their app and their website of things to print from your phone without any fuss, means that even if you don't do any CAD yourself, there's still a vast library of things you can print without opening fusion 360 or a hacked copy of SOLIDWORKS.
This was a great read, and perfectly conveyed the combination of passion and anger of every WH player I’ve ever met has had.
Given the time, it’s hard not to view this same argument through the lens of AI. People who love crafting their creative works will still do it, even when AI can do it. They will still inspire others because they demonstrate what humans can do, and what we can aspire to.
This. As with all creative endeavours, part or even most of the enjoyment is the creative process, not the result.
Learning a skill and practicing it is still extremely enjoyable, even if a machine (or a factory) could do it better, faster, cheaper. The point is not the product, but the process.
Unfortunately, I've been to many coffee shops where the coffee tasted much worse than what a modern fully automated machine can produce.
And perhaps you have to be more nuanced - when TV's first hit the market, a wide-spread concern among film-makers was that it would kill movie theaters. The fear was that people would now only watch movies in the comfort of their homes. That didn't happen back then, but it pretty much did with the combination of big, flat-screen TVs and streaming services.
I don’t quite understand this comment, is it sarcastic? Drip coffee is already pretty automatic. Heck, I’ve been places where you just buy the cup and pump the coffee thingy yourself.
Compared to my home setup, (manual flair espresso press), most coffee shop espresso machines are quite a bit more automated. But I don’t begrudge them that automation, their arms would get too sore. And nobody is paying me to manually press my lever.
Thanks for sharing. I've recently been thrown into the 40k universe thanks to my son (who is 9) becoming obsessed with it.
What started out as a "oh look, they've opened a Games Workshop store in this shopping centre... hey it looks like they're giving away free miniatures and showing you how to paint, lets kill 5 mins in the store" has turned into starter packs, combat patrols and lore deep dives with books. All in the span of... 4 weeks.
That said, I have to say, it's been awesome learning about everything Warhammer 40k from him. Normally, I would research something myself to the point of overkill so I could answer his questions, but on this one his enthusiasm is driving it all and he's constantly telling me about this particular faction or that faction.
It's just nice to have a hobby that keeps him away from screen time these days. It also requires patience, dexterity, and creativity - plus there is obviously an incredible amount of lore, world building, backstories, etc, plenty to keep his imagination entertained.
The one big problem, of course, is the money required! Which is why someone recently said to me "maybe get a 3d printer" and we had this exact discussion about quality of printing etc, and regardless, I just don't see that impacting things like book sales or codex's.
Anyway, cool to read about how people got into it and just thought I'd share!
First hit is free; it is a cool hobby though and I like how it combines arts and crafts with gaming, strategy, world lore/building and storytelling, as you noted.
Also the skills are likely transferrable to RPG minis as well as general model building and painting.
I think custom game pieces for basically any tabletop game are a killer app for 3d printers. Also custom scenery and minis for RPGs (for example a mini customized for a player character, a custom monster, a key NPC, etc.)
Probably good for making doll house (or action figure hideout) furniture and accessories as well, though I expect part of the charm of that hobby is making tiny furnishings etc. out of realistic materials like wood, fabric, or ceramic.
And of course for creating replacement components for any toy or model as needed.
Its a much more accessible game that doesnt have a predatory business model behind its ruleset.
GW is frankly a shitty company, they are extremely litigious and their business model hinges around nerfing armies and then launching new models to make up the gap.
Great essay! I have never played WH40k but have been quite into Magic the Gathering at times.
Before I started playing I asked a friend what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards (even in the 90s this would have been possible)
I understood how silly that question was when I felt the pleasure of actually owning a high quality product. Sure, I could spend the time to make my own cards but playing the game is only part of the fun.
Warhammer and MtG get mocked for being expensive but in reality they are comparable to cars, sports, fashion, and all the other things humans spend their disposable income on.
It’s a good question though! I got into Lorcana in 2024 and spent way too much money. I became curious about the $3 “reproductions” for $50 cards on AliExpress and ordered a few, while having matching copies I had pulled myself from packs, so I knew mine were authentic.
I was shocked that even under a jeweler’s loupe, I could tell no difference. Even the microscopic ink patterns were identical, except for the very rare editions of cards that use a special holographic print (called “Enchanted” cards, which are fancier alt art prints of cards, but those have a regular equivalent for gameplay purposes in all cases). It was all just worthless paper at the point.
This “broke the spell” for me, so to speak, and I quit playing. Soon after, I’m guessing everyone else realized this too, or, more likely, were buying the same cards at full price without realizing their provenance, and card prices tanked substantially. I also quit playing because it took up a lot of time and I rediscovered why I stopped playing Magic competitively. I’m an extremely sore loser and when I get into a hobby I play to win, to the point of obsession.
I thought EDH would satisfy my casual interest in MTG. But it ended up being worse than competitive play because of politics, vague deck building restrictions for balance(brackets) and difficult to organize people to play.
I settled into boardgames(especially solo boardgames) last year to satisfy that itch.
I see at least 2 reasons why we don't see proxy play in MTG.
One is the strong dependence on your peers for approval. If your group is against proxies, then you are screwed.
Second is that there are now more ways to play against each other online for free. This approach is much more convenient compared to creating proxies IRL and allows you to play with other people outside your peer group.
> Warhammer and MtG get mocked for being expensive but in reality they are comparable to cars, sports, fashion, and all the other things humans spend their disposable income on.
I guess there really is some kind of "hacker-type" personality who does spend a lot on some things, but these things are typically "not very proprietary", i.e. not things where the producing company enforced the copyright and trademarks heavily, and "highly modifiable". So I guess to such people the question "what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards" is not absurd, but to fans of WH4k or MtG it is: because of their very different product tastes.
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.
Sorry, I was thinking about FDM printers, which is what people tend to have. Resin printing has a lot of issues for minis. It requires more faf and nasty chemicals, and the brittleness issue is even worse.
I don't know Warhammer that well, but I see a lot of 3D printing for historical wargames. Seems popular for naval wargames for instance, but I saw many printed tanks as well. Not so much small scale infantry perhaps. There are so many very specific models that can be needed for historical scenarios that mass-production can't provide everything. Some companies of course print models on demand now, but others sell STL files.
I'm in historicals! And I mess around with 3d printers!
The big difference in the historical wargame space is that there's no way to trademark Alexander the Great. Anyone can make the minis, whether it's a small-but-awesome company (Victrix! Wargames Atlantic!) or a dude with a 3d printer. As a result, there's some separation between people who write rules (which you can buy as books or PDFs) and people who make minis. The people making minis actually compete on price and quality, and we get fsck'ing awesome minis for ludicrously low prices as a result. Victrix is often $1-$2 per mini, often about a tenth of the price of GW.
I use an fdm printer for terrain, which is a complete game changer. It has none of the problems of resin, and you want big stuff for terrain and care a bit less about layer lines. It's awesome.
The only problem is that only a small corner of the miniatures wargame world plays historicals. :)
(So feel free to ping me if you're in sf/East Bay and want to roll dice sometime.)
Obviously there isn’t any of that in Warhammer, at least not officially. Even a pretty niche thing for them is probably at a scale where resin casting would make more sense (assuming they aren’t going to sell or license out STL files). There is a decent unofficial scene around alternative weapons load outs and such like, but it’s not going to destroy GW any time soon.
I'm one of those small sculptors in this space, and I chuckled at the comparison to a Meth lab. Honestly though, my own printer is more like a grow-op. It's all contained in a half size grow tent in order to contain the mess, and easily vent the vapors. It definitely looks sus, and I'm probably on a watchlist for all the gear I've bought.
I'm so confused. I've resin printed DnD minis for everyone in several of the campaigns I've played in. They all love them. Yes, there were gloves. Yes, there was alcohol baths, but I just dropped them in the automatic washer and walked away for ten minutes.
The entire manual involvement for me from hitting go on the printer to handing out their minis to my friends, ready to be painted, I would estimate at just over five minutes per mini. This includes removing supports. This reads like it was written in 2010, not 2025.
Really enjoyed the article! I'm someone who could never afford 40K as a kid, but since gettinga 3D printer have been fascinated by the potential for printing minis and toys for my own kids. I'd definitely be planning to print my kids minis if they show an interest in future, now I have some knowledge and experience, especially as I find the games workshop business model too predatory for my liking. I'd much rather buy smaller artists model designs and stick to only heading down official routes for rulebooks, codexes and lore.
I'm seeing a lot of people in comments dismiss FMD printers for minis, and thought I'd highlight the work of a youtuber called 'Once in a six side' who did a deep-dive into FDM mini pronting and got some really impressive results with even stock settings and basic PLA filament (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8fuNDTQJCY).
Once he really explored support placement, settings and ideal configurations his best prints rivalled resin in some cases once painted. Really cool to see as someone who isn't interested in messing with resin anytime soon.
I am a new initiate into the world of 3d printing for minis. I decided a resin printer does not suit my small apartment lifestyle, and got an Elegoo Centauri Carbon FDM printer. It's pretty plug-and-play, there was very little setup required.
www.reddit.com/r/FDMminiatures/ will give you an idea of the level of quality you can reach. With the smallest 0.2mm nozzle, will it reach resin levels? Close but not really. Is it good enough for me to screw around with, improve my painting skills, and play casual games? Certainly.
Also I subbed to the OnePageRules patreon, they offer alternative minis and rulebooks that are very similar to GW, with an alternate for fantasy and 40K, as well as fleet battles and other stuff.
> Here we report “3D necroprinting,” a biohybrid manufacturing technique that repurposes female mosquito proboscides as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles. The mosquito proboscis, with its unique geometry, structure, and mechanics, enables printed line widths as fine as 20 μm ...
Loved his writing style - happily read the whole thing.
3D printers are really cool, in a way that's hard to grasp until you use one. My apartment came with a single trash bin, conflicting with the CC+R requirement that you separate out your recycling. I designed and 3D printed a retrofit to hang two trash bags in a single can. Now I can separate my recycling without having it out in my living space.
I also had a kitchen island that came with a drawer that was shorter than my utensil tray, with a frustrating amount of dead space behind the drawer. I bought a dremel and some wood glue to mod the drawer to fit the utensil tray. I 3D printed the tools I needed to do it - like a jig and some vices.
I've been meaning to design and print some hangers for my plastic instruments - I still have my Rock Band kit from college.
Maybe people who play WH4K care about the OEM seal of approval. Maybe they look down at 3D printing. Surely, it still opens the hobby to people who _don't_ have thousands to invest in miniatures. I would 100% print miniatures if I was into that game.
But it feels like he's too focused on that particular micro-market. Maybe there's something in that subculture that makes them look down on 3D printers (and maybe not understanding that is a useful analogy to other "from the outside, this is dumb" situations). But there's a whole lot of utility in 3D printing that has nothing to do with wargames.
Also, my office has a makerspace. I've seen _plenty_ of people printing pieces for tabletop games. The author has his biases too.
The figurines might have to be official and "proper" for tournament play.
But terrain is more vague. Though still dimensionally specified.
And I always feel that it is a shame that so much effort is made to paint armies near perfectly and yet the terrain is flat felt green, or matte grey painted chipboard, with some stuff chucked on it...
A 3D printer can make hills, ruins, furniture, burnt out vehicles - all the other cruft of a gaming universe to give it life!
You can even print rather large terrain pieces that use a smattering of filament. Low percentage lightning until and 2 walls, and you can basically spit out blobs as big as your printer can handle without much waste
The author has a sharp poetic knife he writes with. I first came across war hammer while in school for jewelry design at FIT while the other students had painting miniatures as side gigs. At the time I was heavily into 3d printing jewelry models and it was much more involved because personal printers didn't really exist for easy consumption yet. Several years later and I have moved on to designing even smaller things (too small! No one can see them only feel their effects!) now I've tried to scale back up again, and keep coming back to 3D printing. The hassle of owning my own machine continues to make sending out for prints more appealing.
> For those who had friends in high school—and I'm not being glib here, this is a genuine demographic distinction—40k is a game where two or more players invest roughly $1,000 to build an army of small plastic figures. You then trim excess plastic with a craft knife (cutting yourself at least twice, this is mandatory), prime them, paint them over the course of several months, and then carefully transport them to an LGS (local game shop) in foam-lined cases that cost more than some people's luggage.
> Another fellow dork will then play you on a game board roughly the size of a door, covered in fake terrain that someone spent 40 hours making to look like a bombed-out cathedral. You will both have rulebooks with you containing as many pages as the Bible and roughly as open to interpretation. Wars have been started over less contentious texts.
> The community is incredible. When I moved from Chicago to Denmark, it took me less than three days to find a local 40k game
Somewhat off topic from the rest of the comments but:
Knew someone who was in the Jane Austen Society (New York City chapter). She told me how a member from the Melbourne (as in Australia) chapter was visiting NYC, had never been there and so reached out to the NYC chapter to see if people wanted to hang out.
After the hang out, my friend says: "OMG, she was one of the coolest and most fun people I've ever met! So much fun to take someone else from JAS around NYC for their first time"
This is one of my favorite stories about how a community can grow out of an interest in something and then span the globe. Cool to see the same thing is true of 40k
It is mostly a price point thing but I would expect this tech to come down in price at the same rate that other 3D printing technologies have over the coming years. We're in the 'Stratasys' era of full color high res 3D printing right now.
No, it has nothing to do with resolution or colors. Did you read the article? It's about the absolute pain that resin printing is because of its toxicity.
The moment you have fully non-toxic resin, it will take off.
> [about W40K] ... while still providing frightening amounts of depth if you're the kind of person who finds "frightening amounts of depth" appealing rather than exhausting.
This is me looking at Kenshi, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, and most recently Stationeers in my "last played" games.
Happens all the time - a tool takes 90% of the effort out of part of an effort. They say Its a productivity miracle!
But the thing is, that was one step in a larger process.
For instance. It used to take hours to lay out your software widget controls - dialogs with checkboxes and pulldowns and whatever. They invented tools that let you do it in 10 minutes. CAD saves software!
But reality check: that part of the project was a whole six hours saved, out of a schedule stretching over months. The savings disappear into insignificance.
I think it's also worth mentioning, along with all the very valid points of the article, that 3d printed figures, even at their best, simply cannot match the properties of GW's injection molded plastic at the same time.
FDM prints have visual artifacts you cannot escape with many shapes, and even the most flexible of the expensive resins isn't nearly as durable as a plastic model. Plus plastic models insta-bond with plastic glue making them both easier to assemble and repair (as everything will eventually get damaged through years of play).
I've been doing model work for 30 years, and while 3d print stuff has many uses within the hobby (like making epic terrain way more accessible), replacing the core figures for something like warhammer, to anyone who cares about finish quality and durability at the same time is not one of them.
Weird to mention FDM prints when people, including the author's examples, generally use resin prints which don't have any of the artifacts that you get from FDM prints.
There are places where 3d printing has revolutionized the wargaming hobby. Terrain is one of them, and the biggest one I think. And there's games like Trench Crusade that got their launch via being 3d printable, allowing them the critical mass to get to plastic production.
But at the end of the day, if something is in plastic, I'm buying it in plastic. And I am disappointed by the amount of energy and talent not going into creating new things but...Legally Distinct Space Marines, often sculpted with no notion of actually ever being painted (way over-detailed, etc.)
That is a funny read. I love my Bambu P1S for the flexibility it gives us in our house. The 3d printing community is also only matched by the software community in terms of the open-source ecosystem. There's a big culture of remixing and this and that. My wife and I have printed half a dozen things around the house that are useful. I've only ever made one tiny item and I don't think it's of much use to most people because I just used an LLM to build it: a mount for my Eufy E21 baby camera. It's just a box with two pins that end in a cone shape for lateral strength. It works surprisingly well and all I needed was my calipers, a few minutes with Claude Code, and some iteration with the print. Great fun!
I've actually never heard a prediction for a "self driving car in every drive way within 5 years" and I can't think of a single context where that claim wouldn't be immediately ridiculed.
They are in some people's driveway. That's the remarkable part anyway
I visited my childhood general store while seeing family last week. I was interested to see that the decades old 'fill your own bag with polished rocks' display had been replaced with a bin of 2$ 3D prints.
This was a great read. It reminds me slightly of the book Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. I used to play Warhammer (Fantasy, not 40k) so it was really nice to reminisce.
I get it though. I'm the kind of person who's willing to learn slicing, architecting supports and all the other wonky shit that 3d printing begs of because it provides essentially priceless (read: nonexistent custom things) for me.
Someone who's already well steeped in a hobby as demanding as WH40k and who already has access to items they can purchase alternatively probably is not searching for something else they have to get their head around. And MSLA printing is not a chill hobby by any measure.
His description of resin printing, especially the meth lab comparison and
> At one point, he said the phrase "you really don't want to get this on your skin" with the casual tone of someone who had definitely gotten it on his skin.
are spot on.
There are currently 10 3d printers in my household and there have been maybe 30 unique ones in total over the past 2 years but after the first 3-4 months of resin printing that was given to a friend and never revisited.
I felt like it couldn’t be done casually and even moderately safe at home but needed some sort of lab with good ventilation. We Jerry rigged a hood using a portable enclosure meant to grow weed in while routing the smell out of your dorm through a window and wore proper PPE the whole time but I still felt sketched out
It’s not that bad if you get it on your skin. You just wash it off. The danger is having it on your skin and not realizing it, then going into the sun. It’s an exothermic reaction and since it’s UV reactive, you’ll get an unpleasant burn. I just wore nitrile gloves and I already wear glasses, and printed thousands of miniatures without incident. There’s the GooberTown chemist guy on YouTube who prints lots of minis and he did a breakdown of the chemicals, it’s less dangerous than the bleach you likely have under your kitchen sink. Just don’t drink it or get it in your eyes, it’s not going to explode.
I moved from an isopropyl alcohol wash to using acetone, which resulted in much crisper details, but that felt substantially more dangerous than the resin ever did. It’s very unpleasant to breathe in. I just put the printer in an unused room, and opened a window every once in awhile, and did my minis washing outside with a mask on.
I was in a Telegram group for awhile that shared all the sets and ended up with dozens of terabytes of extremely high quality miniatures. Often video game modelers moonlight making high quality minis that are much better looking than anything in Warhammer. Once I stopped the hobby I left as it required you to sign up for $30+ a month of subscriptions you needed to share to get access to their group.
I’ve fallen out of the hobby after my good friend passed away because him and I made a lot of minis together, but it was a lot of fun. I was primarily using it for D&D minis though, with 1 resin printer for minis and 3 FDM printers for terrain. Nobody cared at all about “authenticity” and was just wowed by the presentation.
In my limited research into resins it seems they aren't that different from the UV glue they use at nail salons. So maybe less toxic than they get credit for.
But it's kind of like having an open can of paint in the middle of your house, just sitting there with the lid off. Most of the time that happens only when you're painting the walls, you don't live like that.
Similar experience as to you, I found resin printing to have too crap results given the level of effort to process them.
I have several Bambu Lab printers and even have a fun little side-hustle with them. I do have a single resin printer, and honestly, I've never really gotten the itch to do anything with it.
I’ve really had a similar experience as well. I’m just entering the double digits in number of printers owned, but I’ve resold both of my resin printers.
They are capable of incredibly impressive detail but the labor and safety investment required just makes it too much of a pain to enjoy in the same way that I do my FDM printers.
The opening remarks before getting into the 3D printing itself, are a bit of criticism of over-optimistic tech predictions. It made me pause and wonder, why do those show up so much? I think it's because they have been right a lot during the exponential part of the silicon S-curve, and it feels like there is a bit of left-over cargo-cult behavior echoing from those times.
I fully agree with the article, and I have experienced the exact same pain with resin printing, which has been collecting dust since my first printing streak.
But I have to say that the comparison between the time investment in resin printing and preparing official Warhammer models for painting is very incomplete.
Ultimately, if everything goes well with the printing (and it usually does), the whole process will take around an hour of active time (preparing + post-processing) a plate of 20-30 models (however many you can fit). It will DEFINITELY take longer than this to get the same level of quality from plastic sprues. Removing the pieces from the sprues, removing the mold lines, filling the worst ones, etc. is extremely time consuming, and it is really the most boring part of the hobby.
It took me at least 20 hours to prepare around 100 models (small ones), when it would take only 4 or 5 when printing them. This time saving is time you can reinvest in painting.
I also still believe that at some point, with advancements in printers (which happen consistently year over year), but especially in resin formulations, we will reach a state where it will be safe (or at least much safer than it is now) to 3D print models using resin, at which point it will indeed have a large impact on Games Workshop's business.
JLPCB White Jet Process (WJP) service starts at $5, and is full color including clear.
Home Resin Printers should be in a vented garage, as the unpleasant odor is the least of its issues. The low-viscosity washable water-like resins tend to be much easier to handle, but even when vented outside... an activated charcoal filter is wise if you have neighbors. =3
Look, 3d printing is almost a psychological thing. You almost nailed it but skipped right past it.
The term proxy used to delineate between wysiwyg and non-wysiwyg. "I am using this chess piece as a marine" The Deoderant Bottle Gravtank from White Dwarf - Not a proxy. They made it custom rules. It was a miniature, and it was furnished with love and care. This culture is now only found in like, airfix or custom scifi modelling.
Modern GW has waged a psychological war on these things, encouraging game stores to do the same.
Proxy is now used, as you have demonstrated, to cover anything not GW. Even if its wysiwyg, its looked down upon, otherised. GW stores have even gone as far as preventing people from playing official GW minis that are end of life in their stores. Soon these will be referred to as like "official proxies" or something.
I have 2 local non GW stores.
Store 1: Owner does not permit unofficial minis in the store at all. Will rant about this policy to anyone who listens. He says there's no way he makes money on printed minis so screw them (I was in the store to purchase paints and brushes and so on for my printed minis when I caught this rant)
Store 2: Has 3 3d printers, sells printing services, sells resin. Doesnt give a crap.
But it doesn't matter in either case, because 40k players are policing each other. GW has shifted the language to otherise armies that even have converted 3d printed bits, let alone full prints.
Not to mention: 3d print resin isnt that bad. The 3d printer business makes a lot of money selling filters and tents and housings and gloves and what not at inflated prices. Some of these things are worthy, others are not. But I was using UV resins for SFX before printers caught on, and guess what, resin fx are smellier and less able to be hidden in a dark corner of your house. Not really a huge impediment. The terror about UV resin seems to be coming both from the people slinging the extra gear, and the people concerned largely with these evil "proxies".
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but GW mostly makes money from new players. Old grizzled angry veterans arent their bread and butter anyway.
Give it 10 years, let more stores embrace 3d printing, let some more permissive games take hold, and then you might have a chance at killing gee dubs. But they will still be selling huge expensive kits to 12 year olds using mums credit card.
I dont play GW games anymore aside from Mordheim (discontinued), because frankly GW is a shitty company that I dont want to support.
Their entire business model is predatory, they nerf armies and then release new models all the time, the rules are monetized and outrageously expensive, and they are litigious to the point of taking down youtube channels in order to prop up their shitty streaming service.
There are so many better games that have embraced 3D printing and are actually fun to play.
"I have a high tolerance for tedious bullshit. This exceeded it."
That has to be one of the more amusing reads I've had in a while. And agreed, dealing with all of the extraneous crap that comes along with 3d printing is amazingly high on the tedious scale. Frustratingly so.
"Games Workshop will be selling overpriced plastic crack to emotionally vulnerable adults long after the sun has consumed the Earth." and the earth is flat.
It is very well-known in the 3D printing community that the design of a lot of items that you see in your daily life are actually driven by the limitations of the production process that was used to produce them.
All in all, 3D printing allows a lot more flexibility in designs, but if you attempt to 3D-print many items of your daily life exactly as they are, the result will often be much worse than with the production process that the object was designed for, or sometimes it is possible to come near to the original object, but producing it using 3D printing takes a lot more effort.
It is rather a consensus in the 3D printing community that people should rather make use of the opportunity to use the insanely increased flexibility that 3D printing allows to reimagine how objects in daily life look like - and thus create better versions of such objects that are (by construction) also good 3D-printable.
--
Addendum: Concerning "the transparent insert thing": as far as I am aware with resin printing, you can 3D-print transparent things very precisely, and even with FDM printing, a lot of progress has been made with respect to printing objects that are quite transparent:
That's a weirdly specific requirement though... 3D Printing can also print shapes and objects that aren't possible with traditional manufacturing techniques. Not every process can be used for every object.
I've made a number of outdoor enclosures for electronics projects on my 3D printer. One of the killer features is that you can make vents that take curved paths through the walls of an enclosure. This, when done properly, can prevent most water ingress flawlessly, but allow a surprisingly large amount of airflow
Another example is this one where the 3D print was done as a continuous printing (i.e. no slicer, or sorta like a vase mode print) to make the clear show a bit better: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sy50BrlDMo
Some people play warhammer to get outreache to sell their 3D printed components, which probably started out as a "hey look at me" but like all side gigs can, has become foundational in who they are, and now occupies them more than cameraderie or winning.
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.
Because the tldr of the article is that the authors' specific definition of fanaticism involving investment of hundreds of hours on side tasks like painting individual units is considered based and epic and totally not a collection of junk, and that other solutions involved around not doing things like that are actually not based and not epic and are totally big collections of junk
It's sort of weird because the issue isn't around proxies representing a figure in another form, but about the perceived "loss" of the value of their efforts from someone popping out something identical without wastin- spending as much time. "I do it, so I value it" is an interesting life code to live by.
This game and Shadowrun where always meant to be either fully simulated in software or at least calculated turn by turn even on table top. It would eat up too much time otherwise.
3D printed miniatures are best printed not on FDM machines (the kind most hobbiest have) but on SLA machines. I'm not a gamer, but for Model Railroading, FDM 3D printing has changed the way a lot of modeling of architecture is done. For printing little HO scale people, SLA is a must -- and it's too messy/smelly/dangerous for me to deal with.
This was a very enjoyable read for me. I’ve never played 40K but have always been impressed with the craftsmanship and dedication of the community.
I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned. My local game shop makes a lot of cool 3D printed stuff and sells it online or at cons, but even Etsy is now cracking down on prints of “commodity” STLs. IIRC under their new policy, you can’t sell a print you didn’t design yourself. This is ostensibly to cut down on the huge quantity of identical articulated toys.
But the bigger takeaway (i.e., the kit car Ferrari analogy), is similar to how I’ve been thinking about AI image generation lately. You can walk down the streets of New York and buy a counterfeit Birkin bag or Rolex from a street vendor. Are knockoffs “disrupting” the market? I guess, in a way. But I think they also make the authentic item _more_ valuable by being so cheap and fake by comparison. AI-generated “Ghibli” pictures are the same.
I remember when "Warty 40" was invented and largely supplanted Warhammer itself. I remember Citadel Miniatures and (A)D&D 1st editions, not to mention Traveler, Runequest, Tunnels and Trolls, Car Wars and many more. I was pretty decent at painting (quickly and accurately) and several kiddies used to pay me to get their latest regiment of space marines into action with the right colours. I went to a posh school and some of the kids had a lot more disposable income than me. I also had a lot more free time than I do now.
Nowadays I own a 3D printer (Prusa 4S+ with nobs on upgraded from a 3) and an IT company.
16 year old me would have committed ... a minor crime ... for the printer but given that IT was a Commodore 64, I'm not sure how I would have driven the thing.
However a 16 y/o me today with a 3D printer probably would be printing armies out of filament. I used to make plastic models too and saved up for several months to buy a double action air brush. My printer can churn out a small scale tank that rivals a Tamiya effort from back in the day. Some finishing is required but not much.
I might have a go at some Warhammer models and see how it goes, just for old time's sake ...
Pretty much the same age, generation and story. I also remember Traveller and Car Wars, and when 40K was first released as Rogue Trader (and when GW said that they were keeping plastic mini prices comparable to lead minis because the injection moulding equipment was really expensive, but once they'd paid that off they'd be reducing the price of plastic minis dramatically. hahahhahahhahhahah).
I had a go at FDM printing some minis, for old times' sake, and it didn't go well. The best resolution that I can get to is around 0.1mm, which is incredibly slow to print, and still not fine enough. The print layers are still visible, the detail is blurred. Sanding doesn't help that much; the face is still a mess. You can't paint individual eyeballs on them.
If you remember the first generation of plastic gobbos and dwarves in the Warhammer (not 40K) beginner box released back in the early 90's, where they obviously had two-part moulds and there were no underhangs anywhere on the models, then my FDM versions were more shit than those.
The author is spot-on about the hobby, and about the business model, and about 3D printing's place in it.
But have a go, it's a fun challenge for a 3D printer enthusiast :)
> I had a go at FDM printing some minis, for old times' sake, and it didn't go well. The best resolution that I can get to is around 0.1mm, which is incredibly slow to print, and still not fine enough. The print layers are still visible, the detail is blurred. Sanding doesn't help that much; the face is still a mess. You can't paint individual eyeballs on them.
If you just care about the print layers, use a filament that is solvable in acetone, and use it to smoothen the surface. Of course, if you absolutely need the resolution, you likely must use a resin printer.
> I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned.
In my opinion people simply stopped following the big visions of that time and got satisfied with the current state of 3D printers instead of continuing to iterate on highly experimental designs that could bring the world nearer to these visions.
Cory Doctorow waxed lyrical for many years about the ability to 3d-print clothes and other Maslow-hierarchy needs. Even the most experimental of designs haven't approached that yet... and I think we'd now be scared of increased PFAS levels even if we could.
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
The only place PFAS is used in an FDM printer is the filament guide some printers have. That's a Teflon tube that the filament travels in towards the hotend. Bowden style printers tend to have a long tube, direct drive printers sometimes have a short tube fully contained in the hotend assembly.
I don't see how PFAS can be used as a filament in FDM printer. It's not a thermoplastic, that's one of its advantages as a material.
Is filament that different from the plastics we already make clothes out of?
> even Etsy is now cracking down on prints of “commodity” STLs. IIRC under their new policy, you can’t sell a print you didn’t design yourself.
Not really true. There was a lot of drama about this when it came out, but I suspect there were more videos on YouTube about the subject than there have been actual products taken down over this. You just have to disclose that you made it with design partners. (ie, an STL you didn't create)
> But I think they also make the authentic item _more_ valuable by being so cheap and fake by comparison.
Depends.
Here in the balkans, for some reason, Louis Vuitton bags (the ugly brown one with lighter/gold lettering) have become popular with 'the kids' some years ago.. those bags normally cost as much as a modern laptop, some even much more, but due to chinese manufacturers and local market sellers, you can get counterfits for 10-30eur, depending on the design. Are the materials, seams, zippers, metal parts (well.. metallic painted plastic), etc. worse? Sure. But from far away, it's hard to notice the difference.
Now, due to the huge cost difference between the original and the fake and easily obtainable fakes, most of such bags you see in the street are fakes.
Since it's hard to tell them apart, people just assume it's a fake bag, when they see someone carrying it. I personally know people who are pretty rich and buy expensive stuff "just to show it around", and they don't buy those bags anymore, because no one thinks it's an original bag. A 100k mat black mercedes? Can't fake that. 30k gold watch? Sure it can be fake, but few people wear watches nowaday, even fewer notice them, and very few people assume that the watch is fake. But a 3k louis vuitton handbag? In whatever shopping center or larger cafe/club you go with that, there will be a couple more girls with similar, fake ones.
Nobody uses Etsy for STL’s.
There are some great sites with thousands of designs for reasonable prices.
Do they? The high quality fake Rolex that only a watch nerd can tell apart, vs the shitty fake Lolex are different worlds. Similarly, the AI fake Ghibli of myself is just fun. Would it mean more if if flew to Japan and commissioned a painter at Ghibli-world for $3,000 to make the same picture? Sure, but I'm not going to do that.
There's a part in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the narrator's friend's bike needs some fixing, and the narrator said (I paraphrase) "you could use this piece of aluminum from a soda can to fix it", but the bike owner thinks that's blasphemy, the only way to fix it is with a part from the bike manufacturer...
https://www.excitant.co.uk/rip-robert-m-pirsig-why-zen-and-t...
But I suppose a Rolex has the property of "a token to remind me of my prosperity" that a Lolex doesn't...
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.
> I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned.
That is not true. I have a resin printer that is around 3 years old (Anycubic Photon Mono M5s) and it has a level of detail that simply cannot be matched by injection molded parts. I have printed some miniatures that have details much smaller than a human hair, like the needle of a syringe in 32mm scale.
Once painted, the figurines are indistinguishable from non-3D printed ones unless you pick them up (they're heavier often).
That said, the article is still right. Resin printers are a massive pain. They're highly toxic, and the time spent preparing, and then post-processing is quite high, but also stressful because of the toxicity. I use my filament printer almost every day, but my resin printer has been collecting dust because of this.
Plus, one thing that the article misses, or rather, casually omits, is that some people want a customized base fig. They'll still put the time, the effort, the whole shebang. But they want to do it on something that is different on a foundational level from what's for sale on official channels.
Such as, I dunno. A proxy that looks like a...
Either way, no, I don't take Resin Printers as a market disruption either. But I have a rather more positive take on them: They probably grow the market itself. Because there are more people getting into the hobby. Well, that and stuff like 10th edition probably helps a bunch.
I waited what I thought (and what was suggested by enthusiasts to be) long enough for the tech to be mature and approachable, and finally bought a highly-recommended beginner printer about three years ago.
I’ll never touch the tech again. The chemicals seem sketchy as hell (I don’t really want any hobbies that make me feel like I need a dedicated area of my house that I only enter while wearing significant PPE, and with gloves that never leave that dirty-zone) and after probably ten joyless hands-on hours burned over a couple weekends, I never got the fucking thing to print a single one of its test designs.
Seems like yet another fiddly hobby for its own sake (that might eventually yield some not-remotely-worth-the-cost fruits) rather than a useful tool. I don’t need what it offers that bad, the amount of money and time I’m going to put toward it in the rest of my life is zero. It’s probably a fine activity if the act of fiddling with 3D printers is the main draw for a person. Otherwise, no.
It sounds like you used a resin printer.
I would never recommend a resin printer to someone new to 3D printing. They’ve come a long way and are reasonably reliable now, but it’s not a good place to start.
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).
It really depends on what your end goal & use case is. Resin printers are pretty phenomenal for any kind of product development and are very much a useful tool in the industrial design space. That said, casual hobbyists should almost always start with an FDM (filament) printer as a first printer. Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience :/
https://youtube.com/@pyottdesign
Both have their uses.
My Prusa Mk3s (kit built) from 2019 has been no-fiddle for all seven years of its life.
Those things are indestructible. The oldest I have has done well over 100 km of filament.
It's the perfect "I just want my 3d printer to be a tool" printer. There are better options now, of course, but it's one of the best purchases I've ever made.
Much better than my Printrbot Metal Plus, which turned out to require all the tinkering of a budget printer at the price of a high-end printer.
Without details on what you were using, I can't be certain, but this absolutely is not my experience.
I got started in 2017 with an Ender 3, and extremely cheap printer with a basic set of features. I improved it by adding a bed leveling sensor and flashing new firmware, along with adding a tool steel nozzle and heater, and a 3d printed housing replacement for it's screen which included a place to mount a raspberry pi, running octoprint, to manage it remotely, and a webcam on a stick mounted to the Z rail. It worked pretty good, and building it was fun.
However in the intervening years, I also bought a Creality CR-6 Max, a much larger printer with a built-in bed leveler. It too got a pi and a webcam, but nothing beyond that, and it too worked well. However both those printers required constant maintenance, troubleshooting and overall fiddling. It remained my niche hobby.
I've since upgraded to a Bambu Lab H2D at great expense ($3,200 retail, utterly dwarfing the sub-$500 printers of before) and honestly, it's like a different tech all together. I don't even NEED a computer, really, unless I want to use one: I can find stuff on my phone, download it, and send it to the printer over their cloud service. And no troubleshooting really to speak of, I think I've had like 3 prints that did some weird shit and required a figure or two, but absolutely no comparison to the other machines. And in fact it's so bulletproof that my wife, who is utterly uninterested and frankly a bit hostile to tech, now uses it more than I do. She says it's a slightly trickier version of a Cricut, which is just WILD to me coming from my experiences with the Ender and Creality before it.
All of these are of course FDM printers. I have also played with a Photon Mono X I got from a friend who didn't want to use it with their birds in their home, and that one while requiring more fiddling and more chemicals, is also virtually bulletproof with regard to print quality, and you get better finishes with some tradeoffs (vulnerability to sunlight, figuring out curing vs. over-curing, what have you) which sounds a bit more like what you were dealing with. I could absolutely see that souring your opinion if you started there, that's not a beginner machine IMHO.
I play a wargame (Battletech) where the rulebook says "use a bottlecap if you want to as long as you can tell which way it's facing" and even there 3D printed minis are uncommon. For Battletech there's two official sources of minis, plastic from CGL and metal from IWM[0]. IWM has a model for almost every unit published in the last 40 years, but some of them are... very hard to look at. CGL's plastic ones look much and cover the most common units so you can usually get by with just them (although, I did just order a couple minis for an upcoming tournament). If I ever see a printed mini, it's either a) one of the ones where the IWM model looks terrible, or b) a model ripped from the Mechwarrior video games that the person thinks looks better aesthetically.
Where 3D printing has been revolutionary for Battletech though has been terrain. Battletech's played on a hex grid, and ever hex has an elevation printed on it to form hills, buildings, and rivers. There's one company (Thunderhead Studios) that makes STLs of the elevation of the official maps that's very popular. Popular enough that they've actually started mass manufacturing them and selling prepainted terrain retail. That shows up in every event I've been to, even official events where 3D minis are banned. But it's a decidedly ancillary part of the experience for Battletech.
[0] Catalyst Game Labs and Iron Wind Metals
I 3D print items that aren't mass produced, either because I'm one of few people who wants them so there's no market or I'm the only person who wants them because they're customized for me. Most reasonable 3D printer users don't believe they'll replace mass production. They use them for parts you can't buy.
Once you get a 3d printer, you do tend to find many uses for them for things you could easily buy (organizing bins and the like) but I don't think anyone is buying them with this in mind.
100% agree
I built a four-poster bed, and 3D printed the fittings for the curtain rails and the attachment point for the fan.
I built a desk, and 3D printed the entire shelving system for it.
I designed and 3D printed an entire range of boardgaming accessories (storage bins, dice towers, meeples, etc)
I only bought the thing as something to do while in COVID lockdown. But it's been really useful.
I see it as the most important home maintenance tool. Saves hundreds per year on little things that break. Like a wall patch, small o-ring for a toy, drawer slide mount, basement light mount, etc. I will say though that the learning curve is a bit rough if you don’t have CAD experience.
I'm part mechanical engineer and I 3D print things on a near daily basis. My job would be a lot slower and more cumbersome without it. Mind you this is all FDM.
I only played with resin printers briefly, and not only do they produce extremely brittle and off-dimenension parts, they are extremely messy and use chemicals that you really should think twice or three times or four times about having under the same roof as the one you sleep in.
With how useful FDM is to me, it seems really strange that resin printing's killer app has been "miniatures", like it's the niche it fell into after everyone bought one and discovered they aren't great for much else. I am in disbelief that people would willingly deal with resin printers just to do miniatures, like there's no way it could possibly be worth it even if you really like that hobby. It feels wrong even to refer to both under the same umbrella of 3D printing.
That said, if you're not regularly designing parts you need made and/or aren't a CAD user, I don't see much use in the average person having a 3D printer (I have 5 btw)
It sounds like you underestimate the enthusiasm for miniatures in general. There is a lot of demand for finely printed models––look at Tribes on MyMiniFactory, or the success of primarily 3D printed games like Trench Crusade.
On the other side of this _is_ the affordability of 3D printed miniatures. The linked-to article is salient/cogent/great, but the secondary topic at hand––lowering the price of entry for miniatures-based table top gaming––is still salient. 3D printing won't necessarily upend GW's business model, but it does provide an entry point that is more affordable by some calculus.
I think there's a distinction between printing existing 40K/other commercial wargame pieces, vs custom pieces for RPGs, scenery and so forth. My in-person D&D games had lots of custom items (including minis of our characters) which were 3D printed, and resin was only used for detailed prints, with FDM used to provide much of the underlying structure.
Some of the limited edition miniatures produced by GW are sold by scalpers for nearly as much as a 3d printer.
Bambu; their app and their website of things to print from your phone without any fuss, means that even if you don't do any CAD yourself, there's still a vast library of things you can print without opening fusion 360 or a hacked copy of SOLIDWORKS.
This was a great read, and perfectly conveyed the combination of passion and anger of every WH player I’ve ever met has had.
Given the time, it’s hard not to view this same argument through the lens of AI. People who love crafting their creative works will still do it, even when AI can do it. They will still inspire others because they demonstrate what humans can do, and what we can aspire to.
This. As with all creative endeavours, part or even most of the enjoyment is the creative process, not the result.
Learning a skill and practicing it is still extremely enjoyable, even if a machine (or a factory) could do it better, faster, cheaper. The point is not the product, but the process.
Great point. Also, nobody would go to a cafe where the coffee comes from a fully automated machine instead of a barista.
Coffee vending machines have existed since the, what, 1950's maybe?
AI will fill a similar niche when it settles down, I think. Cheap, and mostly what you asked for, but you know you're not going to love the output.
Unfortunately, I've been to many coffee shops where the coffee tasted much worse than what a modern fully automated machine can produce.
And perhaps you have to be more nuanced - when TV's first hit the market, a wide-spread concern among film-makers was that it would kill movie theaters. The fear was that people would now only watch movies in the comfort of their homes. That didn't happen back then, but it pretty much did with the combination of big, flat-screen TVs and streaming services.
I don’t quite understand this comment, is it sarcastic? Drip coffee is already pretty automatic. Heck, I’ve been places where you just buy the cup and pump the coffee thingy yourself.
Compared to my home setup, (manual flair espresso press), most coffee shop espresso machines are quite a bit more automated. But I don’t begrudge them that automation, their arms would get too sore. And nobody is paying me to manually press my lever.
It doesn’t seem like a neat mapping.
If it was 90% as good and 50% of the price (no tipping hopefully) I’d do it.
There are several robot cafes in major cities across the world
Or you could just buy a machine and learn to make coffee?
Thanks for sharing. I've recently been thrown into the 40k universe thanks to my son (who is 9) becoming obsessed with it.
What started out as a "oh look, they've opened a Games Workshop store in this shopping centre... hey it looks like they're giving away free miniatures and showing you how to paint, lets kill 5 mins in the store" has turned into starter packs, combat patrols and lore deep dives with books. All in the span of... 4 weeks.
That said, I have to say, it's been awesome learning about everything Warhammer 40k from him. Normally, I would research something myself to the point of overkill so I could answer his questions, but on this one his enthusiasm is driving it all and he's constantly telling me about this particular faction or that faction.
It's just nice to have a hobby that keeps him away from screen time these days. It also requires patience, dexterity, and creativity - plus there is obviously an incredible amount of lore, world building, backstories, etc, plenty to keep his imagination entertained.
The one big problem, of course, is the money required! Which is why someone recently said to me "maybe get a 3d printer" and we had this exact discussion about quality of printing etc, and regardless, I just don't see that impacting things like book sales or codex's.
Anyway, cool to read about how people got into it and just thought I'd share!
> free miniatures and showing you how to paint
First hit is free; it is a cool hobby though and I like how it combines arts and crafts with gaming, strategy, world lore/building and storytelling, as you noted.
Also the skills are likely transferrable to RPG minis as well as general model building and painting.
I think custom game pieces for basically any tabletop game are a killer app for 3d printers. Also custom scenery and minis for RPGs (for example a mini customized for a player character, a custom monster, a key NPC, etc.)
Probably good for making doll house (or action figure hideout) furniture and accessories as well, though I expect part of the charm of that hobby is making tiny furnishings etc. out of realistic materials like wood, fabric, or ceramic.
And of course for creating replacement components for any toy or model as needed.
You should look into One Page Rules.
Its a much more accessible game that doesnt have a predatory business model behind its ruleset.
GW is frankly a shitty company, they are extremely litigious and their business model hinges around nerfing armies and then launching new models to make up the gap.
Great essay! I have never played WH40k but have been quite into Magic the Gathering at times.
Before I started playing I asked a friend what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards (even in the 90s this would have been possible)
I understood how silly that question was when I felt the pleasure of actually owning a high quality product. Sure, I could spend the time to make my own cards but playing the game is only part of the fun.
Warhammer and MtG get mocked for being expensive but in reality they are comparable to cars, sports, fashion, and all the other things humans spend their disposable income on.
It’s a good question though! I got into Lorcana in 2024 and spent way too much money. I became curious about the $3 “reproductions” for $50 cards on AliExpress and ordered a few, while having matching copies I had pulled myself from packs, so I knew mine were authentic.
I was shocked that even under a jeweler’s loupe, I could tell no difference. Even the microscopic ink patterns were identical, except for the very rare editions of cards that use a special holographic print (called “Enchanted” cards, which are fancier alt art prints of cards, but those have a regular equivalent for gameplay purposes in all cases). It was all just worthless paper at the point.
This “broke the spell” for me, so to speak, and I quit playing. Soon after, I’m guessing everyone else realized this too, or, more likely, were buying the same cards at full price without realizing their provenance, and card prices tanked substantially. I also quit playing because it took up a lot of time and I rediscovered why I stopped playing Magic competitively. I’m an extremely sore loser and when I get into a hobby I play to win, to the point of obsession.
I thought EDH would satisfy my casual interest in MTG. But it ended up being worse than competitive play because of politics, vague deck building restrictions for balance(brackets) and difficult to organize people to play.
I settled into boardgames(especially solo boardgames) last year to satisfy that itch.
I see at least 2 reasons why we don't see proxy play in MTG.
One is the strong dependence on your peers for approval. If your group is against proxies, then you are screwed.
Second is that there are now more ways to play against each other online for free. This approach is much more convenient compared to creating proxies IRL and allows you to play with other people outside your peer group.
My playgroup proxies everything.
We all have large magic collections but Wizards has shown repeatedly that they have no intention of making the game more accessible.
I have been playing magic continuously for 30 years and have not spent a dime on it since 2019.
> Warhammer and MtG get mocked for being expensive but in reality they are comparable to cars, sports, fashion, and all the other things humans spend their disposable income on.
I guess there really is some kind of "hacker-type" personality who does spend a lot on some things, but these things are typically "not very proprietary", i.e. not things where the producing company enforced the copyright and trademarks heavily, and "highly modifiable". So I guess to such people the question "what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards" is not absurd, but to fans of WH4k or MtG it is: because of their very different product tastes.
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.
This hasn’t been the case for several years.
High res resin printers are more than capable of printing high quality minis.
There are hundreds of videos on youtube to back that up, squidmar in particular has done several side by side comparisons.
Sorry, I was thinking about FDM printers, which is what people tend to have. Resin printing has a lot of issues for minis. It requires more faf and nasty chemicals, and the brittleness issue is even worse.
I don't know Warhammer that well, but I see a lot of 3D printing for historical wargames. Seems popular for naval wargames for instance, but I saw many printed tanks as well. Not so much small scale infantry perhaps. There are so many very specific models that can be needed for historical scenarios that mass-production can't provide everything. Some companies of course print models on demand now, but others sell STL files.
I'm in historicals! And I mess around with 3d printers!
The big difference in the historical wargame space is that there's no way to trademark Alexander the Great. Anyone can make the minis, whether it's a small-but-awesome company (Victrix! Wargames Atlantic!) or a dude with a 3d printer. As a result, there's some separation between people who write rules (which you can buy as books or PDFs) and people who make minis. The people making minis actually compete on price and quality, and we get fsck'ing awesome minis for ludicrously low prices as a result. Victrix is often $1-$2 per mini, often about a tenth of the price of GW.
I use an fdm printer for terrain, which is a complete game changer. It has none of the problems of resin, and you want big stuff for terrain and care a bit less about layer lines. It's awesome.
The only problem is that only a small corner of the miniatures wargame world plays historicals. :)
(So feel free to ping me if you're in sf/East Bay and want to roll dice sometime.)
Obviously there isn’t any of that in Warhammer, at least not officially. Even a pretty niche thing for them is probably at a scale where resin casting would make more sense (assuming they aren’t going to sell or license out STL files). There is a decent unofficial scene around alternative weapons load outs and such like, but it’s not going to destroy GW any time soon.
3D printers absolutely revolutionized small volume plastic manufacturing and prototyping.
If you do something useless with a tool that's not on the tool, that's on you.
There's 40 of them sitting in my garage doing useful work that would have been absolutely impossible without this tech.
I'm one of those small sculptors in this space, and I chuckled at the comparison to a Meth lab. Honestly though, my own printer is more like a grow-op. It's all contained in a half size grow tent in order to contain the mess, and easily vent the vapors. It definitely looks sus, and I'm probably on a watchlist for all the gear I've bought.
Is your printer a resin or FDM printer?
Anyone seriously printing miniatures does it on a resin printer.
The number of people speaking from a position of authority in this comment section saying they have only tried FDM for minis is hilarious.
High res resin printers are incredible.
I'm so confused. I've resin printed DnD minis for everyone in several of the campaigns I've played in. They all love them. Yes, there were gloves. Yes, there was alcohol baths, but I just dropped them in the automatic washer and walked away for ten minutes.
The entire manual involvement for me from hitting go on the printer to handing out their minis to my friends, ready to be painted, I would estimate at just over five minutes per mini. This includes removing supports. This reads like it was written in 2010, not 2025.
Really enjoyed the article! I'm someone who could never afford 40K as a kid, but since gettinga 3D printer have been fascinated by the potential for printing minis and toys for my own kids. I'd definitely be planning to print my kids minis if they show an interest in future, now I have some knowledge and experience, especially as I find the games workshop business model too predatory for my liking. I'd much rather buy smaller artists model designs and stick to only heading down official routes for rulebooks, codexes and lore.
I'm seeing a lot of people in comments dismiss FMD printers for minis, and thought I'd highlight the work of a youtuber called 'Once in a six side' who did a deep-dive into FDM mini pronting and got some really impressive results with even stock settings and basic PLA filament (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8fuNDTQJCY).
Once he really explored support placement, settings and ideal configurations his best prints rivalled resin in some cases once painted. Really cool to see as someone who isn't interested in messing with resin anytime soon.
I am a new initiate into the world of 3d printing for minis. I decided a resin printer does not suit my small apartment lifestyle, and got an Elegoo Centauri Carbon FDM printer. It's pretty plug-and-play, there was very little setup required.
www.reddit.com/r/FDMminiatures/ will give you an idea of the level of quality you can reach. With the smallest 0.2mm nozzle, will it reach resin levels? Close but not really. Is it good enough for me to screw around with, improve my painting skills, and play casual games? Certainly.
Also I subbed to the OnePageRules patreon, they offer alternative minis and rulebooks that are very similar to GW, with an alternate for fantasy and 40K, as well as fleet battles and other stuff.
> ... With the smallest 0.2mm nozzle, will it reach resin levels? ...
Necroprinting isn't about printing necrons.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw9953
> Here we report “3D necroprinting,” a biohybrid manufacturing technique that repurposes female mosquito proboscides as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles. The mosquito proboscis, with its unique geometry, structure, and mechanics, enables printed line widths as fine as 20 μm ...
(that's 0.02mm)
If you like OPR you would also enjoy trench crusade.
Really fun game with none of the GW BS.
Loved his writing style - happily read the whole thing.
3D printers are really cool, in a way that's hard to grasp until you use one. My apartment came with a single trash bin, conflicting with the CC+R requirement that you separate out your recycling. I designed and 3D printed a retrofit to hang two trash bags in a single can. Now I can separate my recycling without having it out in my living space.
I also had a kitchen island that came with a drawer that was shorter than my utensil tray, with a frustrating amount of dead space behind the drawer. I bought a dremel and some wood glue to mod the drawer to fit the utensil tray. I 3D printed the tools I needed to do it - like a jig and some vices.
I've been meaning to design and print some hangers for my plastic instruments - I still have my Rock Band kit from college.
Maybe people who play WH4K care about the OEM seal of approval. Maybe they look down at 3D printing. Surely, it still opens the hobby to people who _don't_ have thousands to invest in miniatures. I would 100% print miniatures if I was into that game.
But it feels like he's too focused on that particular micro-market. Maybe there's something in that subculture that makes them look down on 3D printers (and maybe not understanding that is a useful analogy to other "from the outside, this is dumb" situations). But there's a whole lot of utility in 3D printing that has nothing to do with wargames.
Also, my office has a makerspace. I've seen _plenty_ of people printing pieces for tabletop games. The author has his biases too.
This really is a fantastic piece of writing, one of the most entertaining I've read on HN
Very much agree it cracked me up. He’s lived it!
The main factor that kept me from 40k was the time commitment not the cost.
In my earlier MTG days I played many Necromunda battles. Scratched the itch in an easier onboarding form — also liked the vertical aspect.
This article was great but the writing was an absolute delight.
A least the 3D printers today are great to print terrain, ruins and so on as a base for painting and decorating.
^ This. ^
The figurines might have to be official and "proper" for tournament play.
But terrain is more vague. Though still dimensionally specified.
And I always feel that it is a shame that so much effort is made to paint armies near perfectly and yet the terrain is flat felt green, or matte grey painted chipboard, with some stuff chucked on it...
A 3D printer can make hills, ruins, furniture, burnt out vehicles - all the other cruft of a gaming universe to give it life!
You can even print rather large terrain pieces that use a smattering of filament. Low percentage lightning until and 2 walls, and you can basically spit out blobs as big as your printer can handle without much waste
The author has a sharp poetic knife he writes with. I first came across war hammer while in school for jewelry design at FIT while the other students had painting miniatures as side gigs. At the time I was heavily into 3d printing jewelry models and it was much more involved because personal printers didn't really exist for easy consumption yet. Several years later and I have moved on to designing even smaller things (too small! No one can see them only feel their effects!) now I've tried to scale back up again, and keep coming back to 3D printing. The hassle of owning my own machine continues to make sending out for prints more appealing.
> For those who had friends in high school—and I'm not being glib here, this is a genuine demographic distinction—40k is a game where two or more players invest roughly $1,000 to build an army of small plastic figures. You then trim excess plastic with a craft knife (cutting yourself at least twice, this is mandatory), prime them, paint them over the course of several months, and then carefully transport them to an LGS (local game shop) in foam-lined cases that cost more than some people's luggage.
> Another fellow dork will then play you on a game board roughly the size of a door, covered in fake terrain that someone spent 40 hours making to look like a bombed-out cathedral. You will both have rulebooks with you containing as many pages as the Bible and roughly as open to interpretation. Wars have been started over less contentious texts.
> The community is incredible. When I moved from Chicago to Denmark, it took me less than three days to find a local 40k game
Somewhat off topic from the rest of the comments but:
Knew someone who was in the Jane Austen Society (New York City chapter). She told me how a member from the Melbourne (as in Australia) chapter was visiting NYC, had never been there and so reached out to the NYC chapter to see if people wanted to hang out.
After the hang out, my friend says: "OMG, she was one of the coolest and most fun people I've ever met! So much fun to take someone else from JAS around NYC for their first time"
This is one of my favorite stories about how a community can grow out of an interest in something and then span the globe. Cool to see the same thing is true of 40k
So it's just a technology problem. As soon as bambu or someone evolves the tech sufficiently to have full color full resolution, the meta will change.
That tech already exists.
https://www.mimakieurope.com/products/3d/
It is mostly a price point thing but I would expect this tech to come down in price at the same rate that other 3D printing technologies have over the coming years. We're in the 'Stratasys' era of full color high res 3D printing right now.
No, it has nothing to do with resolution or colors. Did you read the article? It's about the absolute pain that resin printing is because of its toxicity.
The moment you have fully non-toxic resin, it will take off.
> [about W40K] ... while still providing frightening amounts of depth if you're the kind of person who finds "frightening amounts of depth" appealing rather than exhausting.
This is me looking at Kenshi, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, and most recently Stationeers in my "last played" games.
Happens all the time - a tool takes 90% of the effort out of part of an effort. They say Its a productivity miracle!
But the thing is, that was one step in a larger process.
For instance. It used to take hours to lay out your software widget controls - dialogs with checkboxes and pulldowns and whatever. They invented tools that let you do it in 10 minutes. CAD saves software!
But reality check: that part of the project was a whole six hours saved, out of a schedule stretching over months. The savings disappear into insignificance.
I think it's also worth mentioning, along with all the very valid points of the article, that 3d printed figures, even at their best, simply cannot match the properties of GW's injection molded plastic at the same time.
FDM prints have visual artifacts you cannot escape with many shapes, and even the most flexible of the expensive resins isn't nearly as durable as a plastic model. Plus plastic models insta-bond with plastic glue making them both easier to assemble and repair (as everything will eventually get damaged through years of play).
I've been doing model work for 30 years, and while 3d print stuff has many uses within the hobby (like making epic terrain way more accessible), replacing the core figures for something like warhammer, to anyone who cares about finish quality and durability at the same time is not one of them.
Weird to mention FDM prints when people, including the author's examples, generally use resin prints which don't have any of the artifacts that you get from FDM prints.
> even the most flexible of the expensive resins isn't nearly as durable as a plastic model
GW themselves make resin miniatures, they used to be called forgeworld.
There are other ways to exit of W40K such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrikWars .
Great essay.
I posted my thoughts on this checks notes five years ago, but it's largely in the same place: https://variancehammer.com/2020/08/06/3d-printing-and-the-ho...
There are places where 3d printing has revolutionized the wargaming hobby. Terrain is one of them, and the biggest one I think. And there's games like Trench Crusade that got their launch via being 3d printable, allowing them the critical mass to get to plastic production.
But at the end of the day, if something is in plastic, I'm buying it in plastic. And I am disappointed by the amount of energy and talent not going into creating new things but...Legally Distinct Space Marines, often sculpted with no notion of actually ever being painted (way over-detailed, etc.)
That is a funny read. I love my Bambu P1S for the flexibility it gives us in our house. The 3d printing community is also only matched by the software community in terms of the open-source ecosystem. There's a big culture of remixing and this and that. My wife and I have printed half a dozen things around the house that are useful. I've only ever made one tiny item and I don't think it's of much use to most people because I just used an LLM to build it: a mount for my Eufy E21 baby camera. It's just a box with two pins that end in a cone shape for lateral strength. It works surprisingly well and all I needed was my calipers, a few minutes with Claude Code, and some iteration with the print. Great fun!
I've actually never heard a prediction for a "self driving car in every drive way within 5 years" and I can't think of a single context where that claim wouldn't be immediately ridiculed.
They are in some people's driveway. That's the remarkable part anyway
I visited my childhood general store while seeing family last week. I was interested to see that the decades old 'fill your own bag with polished rocks' display had been replaced with a bin of 2$ 3D prints.
You can absolutely 3D print warhammer.
“The bottleneck isn't acquiring plastic. The bottleneck is everything else.”
Getting models is certainly a bottleneck if you dont have $1000 to spend on minis.
In my city you can resin print the same army for $100 at one of dozens of 3D printing shops.
Same goes for high end mtg proxies.
If you are interested in a great game with an open license that encourages printing and hacking together your own models check out Trench Crusade.
how about 3d printing backup boat propellers?
i dont own a boat.
i imagine real propellers are somewhat expensive. and people often dont buy 2 to keep a spare on board. and on occasion they do fail.
why not a 3d printed backup propeller then? it only needs to last 1/2 a trip..only the way back...
Nice article. It kind of puts model railroading into perspective.
This was a great read. It reminds me slightly of the book Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. I used to play Warhammer (Fantasy, not 40k) so it was really nice to reminisce.
Honestly, resin printers are a god send to the miniatures community. Hands down best tech to print warhammer, n-scale, D&D, you name it.
I get it though. I'm the kind of person who's willing to learn slicing, architecting supports and all the other wonky shit that 3d printing begs of because it provides essentially priceless (read: nonexistent custom things) for me.
Someone who's already well steeped in a hobby as demanding as WH40k and who already has access to items they can purchase alternatively probably is not searching for something else they have to get their head around. And MSLA printing is not a chill hobby by any measure.
You would be surprised at the custom WH40K models I’ve seen. Not armies, but props!! Oh my!!
The quality of resin printed minis is amazing compared to regular 3d printing. There's actually facial features.
It’s good enough to make a mold and cast mini’s the old fashioned way. With liquid resin and a two part registered rubber mold.
His description of resin printing, especially the meth lab comparison and
> At one point, he said the phrase "you really don't want to get this on your skin" with the casual tone of someone who had definitely gotten it on his skin.
are spot on.
There are currently 10 3d printers in my household and there have been maybe 30 unique ones in total over the past 2 years but after the first 3-4 months of resin printing that was given to a friend and never revisited.
I felt like it couldn’t be done casually and even moderately safe at home but needed some sort of lab with good ventilation. We Jerry rigged a hood using a portable enclosure meant to grow weed in while routing the smell out of your dorm through a window and wore proper PPE the whole time but I still felt sketched out
It’s not that bad if you get it on your skin. You just wash it off. The danger is having it on your skin and not realizing it, then going into the sun. It’s an exothermic reaction and since it’s UV reactive, you’ll get an unpleasant burn. I just wore nitrile gloves and I already wear glasses, and printed thousands of miniatures without incident. There’s the GooberTown chemist guy on YouTube who prints lots of minis and he did a breakdown of the chemicals, it’s less dangerous than the bleach you likely have under your kitchen sink. Just don’t drink it or get it in your eyes, it’s not going to explode.
I moved from an isopropyl alcohol wash to using acetone, which resulted in much crisper details, but that felt substantially more dangerous than the resin ever did. It’s very unpleasant to breathe in. I just put the printer in an unused room, and opened a window every once in awhile, and did my minis washing outside with a mask on.
I was in a Telegram group for awhile that shared all the sets and ended up with dozens of terabytes of extremely high quality miniatures. Often video game modelers moonlight making high quality minis that are much better looking than anything in Warhammer. Once I stopped the hobby I left as it required you to sign up for $30+ a month of subscriptions you needed to share to get access to their group.
I’ve fallen out of the hobby after my good friend passed away because him and I made a lot of minis together, but it was a lot of fun. I was primarily using it for D&D minis though, with 1 resin printer for minis and 3 FDM printers for terrain. Nobody cared at all about “authenticity” and was just wowed by the presentation.
In my limited research into resins it seems they aren't that different from the UV glue they use at nail salons. So maybe less toxic than they get credit for.
But it's kind of like having an open can of paint in the middle of your house, just sitting there with the lid off. Most of the time that happens only when you're painting the walls, you don't live like that.
Similar experience as to you, I found resin printing to have too crap results given the level of effort to process them.
I have several Bambu Lab printers and even have a fun little side-hustle with them. I do have a single resin printer, and honestly, I've never really gotten the itch to do anything with it.
I’ve really had a similar experience as well. I’m just entering the double digits in number of printers owned, but I’ve resold both of my resin printers.
They are capable of incredibly impressive detail but the labor and safety investment required just makes it too much of a pain to enjoy in the same way that I do my FDM printers.
The opening remarks before getting into the 3D printing itself, are a bit of criticism of over-optimistic tech predictions. It made me pause and wonder, why do those show up so much? I think it's because they have been right a lot during the exponential part of the silicon S-curve, and it feels like there is a bit of left-over cargo-cult behavior echoing from those times.
I fully agree with the article, and I have experienced the exact same pain with resin printing, which has been collecting dust since my first printing streak.
But I have to say that the comparison between the time investment in resin printing and preparing official Warhammer models for painting is very incomplete.
Ultimately, if everything goes well with the printing (and it usually does), the whole process will take around an hour of active time (preparing + post-processing) a plate of 20-30 models (however many you can fit). It will DEFINITELY take longer than this to get the same level of quality from plastic sprues. Removing the pieces from the sprues, removing the mold lines, filling the worst ones, etc. is extremely time consuming, and it is really the most boring part of the hobby.
It took me at least 20 hours to prepare around 100 models (small ones), when it would take only 4 or 5 when printing them. This time saving is time you can reinvest in painting.
I also still believe that at some point, with advancements in printers (which happen consistently year over year), but especially in resin formulations, we will reach a state where it will be safe (or at least much safer than it is now) to 3D print models using resin, at which point it will indeed have a large impact on Games Workshop's business.
JLPCB White Jet Process (WJP) service starts at $5, and is full color including clear.
Home Resin Printers should be in a vented garage, as the unpleasant odor is the least of its issues. The low-viscosity washable water-like resins tend to be much easier to handle, but even when vented outside... an activated charcoal filter is wise if you have neighbors. =3
Yes and No.
Look, 3d printing is almost a psychological thing. You almost nailed it but skipped right past it.
The term proxy used to delineate between wysiwyg and non-wysiwyg. "I am using this chess piece as a marine" The Deoderant Bottle Gravtank from White Dwarf - Not a proxy. They made it custom rules. It was a miniature, and it was furnished with love and care. This culture is now only found in like, airfix or custom scifi modelling.
Modern GW has waged a psychological war on these things, encouraging game stores to do the same.
Proxy is now used, as you have demonstrated, to cover anything not GW. Even if its wysiwyg, its looked down upon, otherised. GW stores have even gone as far as preventing people from playing official GW minis that are end of life in their stores. Soon these will be referred to as like "official proxies" or something.
I have 2 local non GW stores.
Store 1: Owner does not permit unofficial minis in the store at all. Will rant about this policy to anyone who listens. He says there's no way he makes money on printed minis so screw them (I was in the store to purchase paints and brushes and so on for my printed minis when I caught this rant)
Store 2: Has 3 3d printers, sells printing services, sells resin. Doesnt give a crap.
But it doesn't matter in either case, because 40k players are policing each other. GW has shifted the language to otherise armies that even have converted 3d printed bits, let alone full prints.
Not to mention: 3d print resin isnt that bad. The 3d printer business makes a lot of money selling filters and tents and housings and gloves and what not at inflated prices. Some of these things are worthy, others are not. But I was using UV resins for SFX before printers caught on, and guess what, resin fx are smellier and less able to be hidden in a dark corner of your house. Not really a huge impediment. The terror about UV resin seems to be coming both from the people slinging the extra gear, and the people concerned largely with these evil "proxies".
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but GW mostly makes money from new players. Old grizzled angry veterans arent their bread and butter anyway.
Give it 10 years, let more stores embrace 3d printing, let some more permissive games take hold, and then you might have a chance at killing gee dubs. But they will still be selling huge expensive kits to 12 year olds using mums credit card.
I dont play GW games anymore aside from Mordheim (discontinued), because frankly GW is a shitty company that I dont want to support.
Their entire business model is predatory, they nerf armies and then release new models all the time, the rules are monetized and outrageously expensive, and they are litigious to the point of taking down youtube channels in order to prop up their shitty streaming service.
There are so many better games that have embraced 3D printing and are actually fun to play.
"I have a high tolerance for tedious bullshit. This exceeded it."
That has to be one of the more amusing reads I've had in a while. And agreed, dealing with all of the extraneous crap that comes along with 3d printing is amazingly high on the tedious scale. Frustratingly so.
This article is so good. I wish everything on the internet was this clear and good.
"Games Workshop will be selling overpriced plastic crack to emotionally vulnerable adults long after the sun has consumed the Earth." and the earth is flat.
GW is half the UK economy these days.
A 3D printer can't even print a DVD case, with the transparent insert thing.
There's a long way to go.
It is very well-known in the 3D printing community that the design of a lot of items that you see in your daily life are actually driven by the limitations of the production process that was used to produce them.
All in all, 3D printing allows a lot more flexibility in designs, but if you attempt to 3D-print many items of your daily life exactly as they are, the result will often be much worse than with the production process that the object was designed for, or sometimes it is possible to come near to the original object, but producing it using 3D printing takes a lot more effort.
It is rather a consensus in the 3D printing community that people should rather make use of the opportunity to use the insanely increased flexibility that 3D printing allows to reimagine how objects in daily life look like - and thus create better versions of such objects that are (by construction) also good 3D-printable.
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Addendum: Concerning "the transparent insert thing": as far as I am aware with resin printing, you can 3D-print transparent things very precisely, and even with FDM printing, a lot of progress has been made with respect to printing objects that are quite transparent:
> https://blog.prusa3d.com/3d-printed-lens-and-other-transpare...
Please don’t speak on behalf of the entire 3D printing community. Just say what you think.
That's a weirdly specific requirement though... 3D Printing can also print shapes and objects that aren't possible with traditional manufacturing techniques. Not every process can be used for every object.
I've made a number of outdoor enclosures for electronics projects on my 3D printer. One of the killer features is that you can make vents that take curved paths through the walls of an enclosure. This, when done properly, can prevent most water ingress flawlessly, but allow a surprisingly large amount of airflow
There are some ways to FDM 3D-print transparent plastic, see https://www.printables.com/model/15310-how-to-print-glass as one example.
Another example is this one where the 3D print was done as a continuous printing (i.e. no slicer, or sorta like a vase mode print) to make the clear show a bit better: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sy50BrlDMo
Some people play warhammer to win.
Some people play warhammer for the cameraderie.
Some people play warhammer to get outreache to sell their 3D printed components, which probably started out as a "hey look at me" but like all side gigs can, has become foundational in who they are, and now occupies them more than cameraderie or winning.
Why not just transition to LEGO for the figures and units ?
If you don't like painting space men, WH40k isn't for you.
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.
Lego is equally expensive.
Because the tldr of the article is that the authors' specific definition of fanaticism involving investment of hundreds of hours on side tasks like painting individual units is considered based and epic and totally not a collection of junk, and that other solutions involved around not doing things like that are actually not based and not epic and are totally big collections of junk
It's sort of weird because the issue isn't around proxies representing a figure in another form, but about the perceived "loss" of the value of their efforts from someone popping out something identical without wastin- spending as much time. "I do it, so I value it" is an interesting life code to live by.
So, the actual answer is pride, it seems.
This game and Shadowrun where always meant to be either fully simulated in software or at least calculated turn by turn even on table top. It would eat up too much time otherwise.
WH40k is a pretty garbage game.
It frequently results in turn 1 wins before you even get to play.
Competitive 40k is even worse.
There are way better tabletop games that are actually fun.
3D printed miniatures are best printed not on FDM machines (the kind most hobbiest have) but on SLA machines. I'm not a gamer, but for Model Railroading, FDM 3D printing has changed the way a lot of modeling of architecture is done. For printing little HO scale people, SLA is a must -- and it's too messy/smelly/dangerous for me to deal with.
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