Hi all! I have several questions: 1) Tell me please, What most budget 3d printer can print use "Strong & Flexible Plastics"? 2) Can anybody tell me, what equipments use "Neca" company for printing high-quality and detailed figures? Is it 3d printers? Do they paint the figures by handwork?
[ 1 ] None that I know of at the moment. This kind of 3D printing is done by EOS machines that cost upwards of around a million dollars US. There are some fused filament fabrication FFF machines out there that can do nylon though. I'd say that within one to two years there will be a cheap version of the EOS machines available since the patent is long expired for the core selective laser sintering SLS technology. [ 2 ] They don't use 3D printing to make those figures for production since there is currently no known method for producing that kind of quality in color. I'm sure they make their prototypes though using 3D printing. [ 3 ] I'm not sure of the exact method they use, but looking at the figures it appears that the details are too extensive to do by robotic means. Not that it would be impossible to do robotically, it just that it be very difficult to program, so I doubt they are using industrial robots to do the painting.