3D Printing Details | dice4dungeons

3D Printing Quality Details

Our aim at dice4dungeons is to provide cost-effective Table Ready miniatures (unpainted) for games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder so everyone can enjoy an enhanced Battle Map at their gaming sessions without it costing a fortune.

To achieve that aim we use Creality Ender 3 printers to do the bulk of our 3D printing, they are known as FDM printers. Fused Deposition Modeling is where molten plastic (PLA) is squeezed through a tiny nozzle and applied in layers to build a three-dimensional object. In our case Miniatures and scatter. In general FDM Printers are said to be good at producing table-ready items, meaning miniatures and scatter that look good at the typical distance one would expect when seated at a table and looking at them on the table in front of you. while we are confident in our ability to provide good table-ready minis and scatter Ultra-high detail close-up work is beyond most FDM printers and is not something we offer.

Using FDM printers with PLA filament gives rise to three quality issues, layer lines, stringing, and supports.

Layer Lines
So even though each mini looks to be a solid object it is actually a series of layers one on top of the other, when viewed up close (really close) you can see the individual layers (known as layer lines). We can tell the printer how thick to make each layer (within tolerances that the printer can handle), the thinner the lines the finer the detail but the longer it takes to print an object and the more expensive the print is (in both time and materials), the thicker the lines then printing is much faster and cheaper but the detail is less defined. For our detailed prints, we use a layer height of .08 mm For large pieces or scatter terrain where detail is less important we use .20 mm We have found the best way to deal with layer lines is to use a suitable priming paint which does a really good job of masking them, which is why we supply our prints primed with Rustoleum special plastic primer paint.

Stringing
Stringing occurs when the molten plastic stretches out as the print head moves about and leaves tiny little webs of plastic strings behind... A lot of things can affect stringing including the room temperature during the print, and drafts across the printer but we have found the biggest cause is the quality of the PLA filament (plastic) being used and its condition. If the PLA filament gets wet or damp it definitely strings more, after a lot of experimentation we have found that we get the best results from eSUN PLA+ which is a bit more expensive than some but gives us much better results overall. We now print exclusively in PLA+ except for a few items in clear PLA (Which isn't available in PLA+ yet). We clean up any obvious stringing on each mini with a series of very fine files before sending them out but to keep prices down we don't spend a huge amount of time on each individual miniature, you may find you need to spend a few minutes cleaning up miniatures to get them at a level that you are happy with. Generally you should expect to spend 10 to 15 minutes of prep time on any mini before painting, unless of course you are happy with the way it looks when you receive it then you can jump straight into the painting.

Supports.
Because the item is printed in layers the printer is unable to print something that doesn't have a layer underneath it, if you try to print something that has nothing underneath it the molten plastic just cascades down to the print bed and creates an almighty mess as it cools, so if a miniature has unsupported elements (and most do) then you have to support those parts of the print and this is where the skill comes into 3D printing. Really good 3D sculptures produce miniatures where everything is supported already. If the miniature has a cloak that is blowing in the wind then it's going to need to be supported, but if that cloak is wrapped around the shaft of a spear then the spear shaft will act as the support, and the cloak will print fine. The problem is those sculpts tend to be fairly simple, the really cool ones always need supports. The problem with supports is everywhere they touch the model they mar the surface slightly when you break them away, sometimes this doesn't matter sometimes it looks terrible. While some programs are pretty good at automatically adding supports generally you get better results if you create them manually. But that takes time, lots of time. A typical miniature can take 3 to 4 hours to print, and we might have to try 6 or 7 different support layouts before we get a result we are happy with, that's 18 to 24 hours of printing alone just to get the first workable result. We spend a lot of time 'dialing in' our models to get the best results we can but it does add to costs.