28mm Miniature/Figurine Printing

Hi there,

I'm interested in prototyping 28mm wargame miniatures with Shapeways. Has anyone else done this? The upload file size limit is just 60mb, which is way too small for a highly detailed 3d sculpt coming out of Zbrush. Are there ways around this or am I taking the wrong approach here?

Cheers

You can zip the file for uploading (or use binary STL instead of ascii), but the actual limit to look out for is maximum number of triangles in the mesh (officially 1million, the actual hard limit appears to be closer to two million triangles nowadays).

Also see this thread about mesh decimation.

Yes, 1 million tris is way less than the usual zbrush output.

BTW, I am *very* interested in seeing any work done for making this kind of miniatures. I'd be happy to see screens of your experiences, if you feel in the mood of doing so. I mean, I always check those

In the super old Amorphium 1.0 , which I don't know if anyone here has ever handled (there was no zbrush then, as far as I can remember) had this absolutely great paint mask feature to paint-decrease mesh density as you would desire to do it (black was full optimization, white full density, and you painted it over the model, then hit apply...). I am not a Zbrush user, so I do not know if it has it. I indeed purchase it many years ago, when it was still only a bit of an evolved 2.5D painting tool, never purchased the upgrades.

Anyway, maybe is not a bad idea if I recommend here two helper tools, both free :

One from the powerful Autodesk, dunno how this is free, btw, but it is...
Meshmixer
https://meshmixer.com

Another one which has been more time out there, free, and also, open source:
Meshlab
https://meshlab.sourceforge.net

Anyway, you only need whatever the modeler or specialized utility to allow you to make soft selections (3ds max term) or soft painted masks, and apply only in that area the optimization. Whatever gets the job done and you like it better.

I find myself often just using Blender to manually optimize, but that's surely as am more familiar to it lately than any other thing, these days (with the Wings3D exception)

IMHO, the main obstacle is not technical, but related to the price/quality ratio, if you plan to sell them at a similar price as the non 3d print made ones sell. But imo mostly as these miniature prices are shockingly low in the regular market. The margin is close to zero, even worse if doing traditionally+shipping. Plus, sth often not taken in consideration, is that a lot of people purchasing those are not like train hobbyists, or other scale collecting(+making in many cases) people, which aren't imo simple users, but very talented artisans. Many on the figures for gaming area, do prefer a clean, non transparent model they can use right away in their games, without any post editing work, as users. And I know the faces I would see of more than one which I know well, when seeing their purchased miniatures with residues when opening the box. A very normal thing in 3D printing, but they are not used to that. At least the many I know in my area.... I know a lot of players which only might want to do a paint job, as much, if they are in the mood, and feel slightly confident to even do a basic one color paint. They expect to get a smooth, non white neither transparent figure directly out of the box. Hard to compete there for 3D printing, due to this and pricing. In the material side, at least for thiese 28mm figures, I have my hopes on HD Acrylate, as long as it continues being polished as a maker material, towards being really very convenient for specific uses like this. You said prototyping, though, surely to produce a prototype then send to a company for mold injection. IMO for making prototypes there's several good options here in Shapeways.

Best luck!

Edit: Sorry for the big text additions edit after the first post some minutes ago....

Hey Silvanus,

Thanks for the insight! Yes I'm just looking to prototype through Shapeways right now, to get my toes wet and maybe eventually team up with someone to have models made the traditional way with molds. This new black acrylate material is what got me excited about 3d printing game miniatures https://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/24432-introducing-ou r-newest-material-black-high-definition-acrylate.html

For your curiosity I've attached a pic of what I've created in 3d.

If you haven't, I strongly recommend getting a sample print before you go any further at all. The accuracy of these prints is not at all comparable to injection molding, and in a 28mm fig you'll lose a lot of fine detail.

The reason for that triangle limit isn't only because the files are inconveniently large, but also because it's extremely rare to need a million triangles to describe the amount of detail that a reasonably sized printed object can carry. Unless you have a bizarre edge case, e.g. a 3D fractal with much more surface area than volume, with that many triangles you're just throwing them into the bit bucket: anything much smaller than the resolution of the machine is won't be rendered at all. So you might as well decimate.

Thanks for the info Bathsheba, all makes sense to me. What exactly do you mean by a sample print?

I'm wondering if you know what process the big miniature companies are using these days? I know Games Workshop is sculpting their models digitally because they use screen grabs of the digital sculpts in their instruction manuals. Do they have super high end 3d printers to create the model they then create the mold from? Or do they 3d print at a larger scale to preserve the details and then scale down with the molds somehow? I remember in the older days that they would actually sculpt their models at 3x the scale and somehow shrink that down to 28mm with the molds...

Some brands do CNC, direct to mold. 3ups, and scale down with pantograph, is only done by those sculpting traditionally or with poor or no CNC machines.

For the resin and metal cast models by others brands, 3D print at final size using high resolution printers. Some use same machines than BHDA but on "high" settings and with vulcanization ready material. Others use similar machines or a different system; in any case, all them common for high end jewelry. Your model probably needs exaggerations (enlarge some things to make them obvious but also to compensate reproductions losses) and simplifactions (remove tiny things). The skill is in picking what to change without making it look like a toy or noise.