3D Printing for D&D

[DenilCartel]

Hey guys,

I have recently heard about people using 3D printers to make miniatures, terrain, monsters etc for their D&D games. Has anyone done this? I live in the UK and don’t want to spend loads of money. Can you get decent results for a machine less than £300?

Thanks!

[SC]

Ender 3 v2 from Creality only cost ~ £180
http://www.creality3dofficial.com

Purchased mine 4 weeks ago, delivery was ~ 1 week to the UK. Prints appear to be fine for what I need.
You can get the ‘slicer’ software for free. Some people use ‘Cura’ but I’ve been using PrusaSlicer (which is also free).

If you get really keen you can always buy a Prusa in the future for ~£1000 !!!

[Soapy]

For terrain printing I highly recommend the Voxelab Aquila, which is a Ender 3 v2 Clone, but actually has some good improvements from the Ender 3. Its available on amazon for £170. I have been able to get very good results with it, and it has good upgrade paths to add things such as auto bed levelling sensors and filament run out sensors in the future should you want them. In my opinion the Prusa’s are overpriced for what they are and you can easily get great results from much cheaper printers with some tuning and experience. These are all the more standard printer you may have seen which use the Fuse Deposition Modelling (FDM) method.

With regards to miniature printing, i would recommend you get a resin (SLA) printer for them, as you will get much better fine detail results with one of them, there are a lot of good printers available in that space also in the £170-200 range, Elegoo Mars or the Voxelab Proxima have both been good printers for myself.

Hope that helps

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by Soapy.

[Brian Etty]

While I agree that cheaper hobby 3d printers can definitely achieve great prints, I have found that tuning and upgrade path to personally not be worth the frustration and annoyance. So I found the price difference to be well worth it for my Prusa.
So much so that I have given my friend my Ender 3, my nephew my Mono Mini, and Qidi tech sits idle until I can find it a home while I run my Prusa printers.

Your mileage may vary on your willingness to tinker and luck with your printer.

[Nicholas Jebson]

For terrain, an FDM printer (filament printer) would definitely be the way to go. at home, I have an Ender 5 pro (about $380 USD) which is super smooth and quiet. I also have a Phrozon Sonic Mini 4K resin printer for printing the bad guys for my party to fight. We play once a fortnight so I often print off any extras I need and paint them ready for the encounters. it cost about $350 USD though you definitely want to find a local supplier as shipping costs can be pretty dire for them.

So in general, if you want to print Mini’s I would recommend getting a resin printer, if its more for terrain get a FDM printer

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