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Sites For and Experiences With tabletop miniature STLs? (self.piracy)

submitted 1 month ago by NuXCOM_90Percent to c/[email protected]

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Anyone know of any good sites for (good) STLs of the popular tabletop/wargaming miniatures?

And, more importantly, anyone have any good experiences with them? My gut would be that the vast majority are pointless in FDM and require the granularity of resin. But I have also seen some wild prints that take advantage of ridiculously thin layer sizes to have insane detail. And, if it isn't a complete fool's errand, this would be a fun set of projects to fine tune both my printing ability and my painting skills.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I looked into this a while back and gave up.

I didn’t find any (good) models I wouldn’t have to pay for, but some of the paid STL sites had sets available for really reasonable prices, so that wasn’t really a blocker.

But FDM is basically incapable of printing any interesting models. Even if you’re printing good layers, most interesting models aren’t geometrically compatible with how an FDM model prints. You can print with supports, but removing supports from such thin, fragile bits of a model is nigh impossible without doing damage.

I went as far as shopping around for a resin printer, but I didn’t like all the ventilation cautions I read. Adding a printer is one thing, but having a well ventilated area that overlaps with where I’d want a printer was an unsolveable problem in my home.

If you just want to give it a try, grab a model off Thingiverse and see how your printer does. If you can get a piece you’d be happy to proceed with painting, that might be worth a few more iterations to see if it’s workable for your setup.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

print with supports, but removing supports from such thin, fragile bits of a model is nigh impossible without doing damage

Removing resin supports is worse, if anything.

They leave little bumps where they're cut off that you have to then try to VERY VERY gently sand off without bending or breaking said fiddly models.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

To be fair, that is true of all miniatures and model kits. It is generally less noticeable if you are dealing with injection molded sprues as a good pair of nippers can get you most of the way. But it is still good to have some sandpaper to touch things up.

Hell, I use an old pair of nippers to remove supports and overhangs from a lot of my "normal" prints.

... and now I am really curious what a 3d printed runner would be. Might do a proof of concept/experiment in onshape.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

My comment was more FDM vs resin support removal, and that it's not like resin is all sunshine and rainbows.

If anything, modern tree supports for FDM have fixed the giant-blob-of-plastic problem with supports you'd previously get on smaller models, where you'd end up with, uh, well, a giant blob of plastic stuck to an arm or a sword or whatever.

Still not fantastic, but until someone figures out antigravity, it's what it is.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah. Although I guess now I don't really know how resin would handle those kinds of support either.

And yeah, it is pretty funny that a resin printer and curer and ventillation setup comes out cheaper than most 40k armies. But the answer probably is to scale up models (there is an artist on mastodon I keep meaning to throw money at).

Thanks