Good 3D printers and traditional games.

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Gx1080
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Post by Gx1080 »

GW has a shitload of IP exploitation, that, either by skill or by luck, is oursorced, so it's inmune to their fuckups.

That + the cool Space Marine factor (and the wide scope of less cool stuff) means that they are going to stay there for a long while, specially since none of the other companies on this business have said degree of IP exploitation (Heroclix doesn't count).

I would say that GW could simply swap to full manual sculpting to stop the copy-paste (so less huge plastic kits, since those are the ones that make Autocad a neccesity), but a simple 3d laser scanner gets rid of that.

Will massed scale 3d printing will kill Tabletop Wargames? Nope. Come on, Magic and YGO are stilll there, despite the several online simulators of them. Will it force companies to adapt to it? Yes, since ALL companies adapt to new technologies and use it to evolve, or simply perish.

Will it kill GW? Overall, they are kinda on a slump right now. If the next Xeno codex is a flop, people will get angry. If the next edition (that IS coming) flops or screws the most popular releases of this edition so far (Dark Eldar and Grey Kights), people will get REALLY ANGRY (probably myself included). So, is perfectly possible that GW "dies" way before the technology is actually viable for mass-scale consumption.

There's several colors of plastic, but right now, every single plastic thing ever done has to be made in a base color and then painted, whatever by hand or in an assembly line. So I don't see painting going away.

Evolution of technology is constant, but is unpredictable. So this thread is still 10-15 years too soon.
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Post by fectin »

MfA wrote:
hogarth wrote:Wow, I didn't know that. I thought the resulting miniatures would be monochromatic. Is there a different print head for each colour of plastic?
At the moment, yes ... there are no CMYK 3D printers yet AFAIK.
http://www.shapeways.com/themes/full_color
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Post by MfA »

Nice, lousy material though.
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Post by fectin »

Sure is. If you want to pay more, you can upgrade to better though.

The problem isn't lack of 3d color printers; it's cost. That drops all the time.
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Post by MfA »

Well, apart from that specific process what I said still holds :) No CMYK printers AFAIK. Polyjet can do colour in a nice material, but it's fixed colours.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Gx1080 wrote: Will massed scale 3d printing will kill Tabletop Wargames? Nope. Come on, Magic and YGO are stilll there, despite the several online simulators of them. Will it force companies to adapt to it? Yes, since ALL companies adapt to new technologies and use it to evolve, or simply perish.
My prediction is exactly the opposite; once mass 3D-printing becomes viable Tabletop Wargames will experience an explosion in growth. When costs drop enough you'll be able to move them from 'expensive hobby' to 'toys' and that's where the money is.

However, I also think that the new driver for wargames will not be any established company, since I have little faith in GW/WotC/WW/CGL pulling their heads out of their asses. It'll either be some young Turk who got their game on and got way ahead of the curve or (more likely) it'll be some other company with a strong IP deciding that they could move even more toys if they marketed them to neckbeards.

The future of the current state of traditional games (other than M:tG/YGO) is very uncertain, but 15 or so years from now wargaming will experience a huge revival if this technology pans out. A 100+ squad of elves sorted by color, sex, and weapon for under 150 dollars in U.S. money? Holy shit.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Gx1080
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Post by Gx1080 »

Between time per game (which expands unless you vastly simplify/abstract rules) and transportation issues (carring a lot of army cases isn't fun), I don't think that any company besides GW will try to push games that have more than 40 minis per side. At most.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

40 minis per side is seriously plenty enough as it is. I'd even go as far as to say 20-25. I mean, Chess doesn't even have that many and that game is pretty much the poster child for 'move certain pieces in a certain order, get punished if you deviate from the process too much' gaming.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

So. Say WotC (or whoever ends up owning the D&D property) ends up pulling their heads out of their asses and 3D printing becomes a thing. Fortunately this happened before they were committed to releasing a new edition of the TTRPG. Here's the situation:

They got a pretty good setting going. It's a bit generic, as fantasy settings for D&D are wont to be, but it's still good. However the setting was geared towards a TTRPG as opposed to a wargame. It's not a huge hurdle (i.e. more Dragonlance than Ninter Vale) but it's still slanted towards TTRPGs. The question now is: should whoever owns the IP gear the miniatures game such that it interacts transparently with the TTRPG or should they just produce an entirely new setting for the wargame altogether? Or rather, which would be more profitable?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

In the event that 3-d printers become cheap and common enough for anyone to use at the corner Kinko's then GW's model of "sell figures to drive profit" will very likely become unsustainable. At that point, it will be cheaper and easier for dedicated players to buy one model ( or just download a quality 3-d scan file ) and self-replicate it to get new figs - the way it already is with rulebooks. To maintain profitability of a miniatures wargame in the face of such technological change, the two options that could remain viable are a subscription model or running official tournaments for profit.

Alternately we might see crazy anti-copying measures like RFID chips embedded in real figs, but nobody is going to care unless you have an official tourney structure to enforce a ban on counterfeits in places where people want to play.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Post by tzor »

Oh great, I can print out Joe Fighter any time I want. That's great. Only that's not my weapon and that's not my armor, and I have a backpack and a ...

OK, let's look at this carefully. D&D is kill things and get their stuff. Put stuff on character sheet. With ease of printing the stuff is now more than words on a character sheet. They need to be reflected on the character. And that stuff changes all the time.

I see profit already. You see, a fundamental nature of iconic character generation is the graphical creation of elements to create that iconic characer. Sure, some people will do that for free (even in the 2D print world) but it's BORING. (Really, how often to you rush to load Heroquest to generate a character? It's really limited after a while.)

So with the D&D character printer program (hey something has to drive the printer) you then input a plethora of options that are included with every new campaign module, rules suppment you create. Want to create poison ivy leaf armor ... well you make a addition for the printer so the player can add that new armor to their minis of their characters.

The ability to create a custom character mini on the fly is the key because people will pay for the abilty for infinite customization, and you make your money not on the making of the mini, but on the design of the customization.
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Post by Vebyast »

Another (cynical, worst-case) scenario includes minifig producers grabbing a ride on the internet censorship bandwagon being driven by the paper, music, movie, and video game publishers. They don't have the press and advocacy corps to do it themselves, but most of the work has already been done, and I can see legislation that makes it illegal to have 3d files that look like legally-protected IP.

Note: I think this is totally batshit insane and would never work, technologically speaking. It just sounds like the kind of thing they'd try.
Last edited by Vebyast on Fri Nov 11, 2011 5:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

tzor wrote:Oh great, I can print out Joe Fighter any time I want. That's great. Only that's not my weapon and that's not my armor, and I have a backpack and a ....
List of 25 free 3d modeling apps

I expect that you can currently convert files from at least one of them into viable output for Fab-at-Home or similar home toolkit 3d print engines.

While Mole is looking into a turntable and green-laser rotating scanner setup, it may very well be possible to achieve acceptable 3-d scans from a setup as cheap as a Camera, lamp, checkerboard and pencil

If we project the current tech 2 to 5 years into the future, digital manipulation in order to reprint a 3d miniature figure will likely become easier than the current process of kitbashing miniatures using hand tools, pins and superglue+zip kicker. Just like how currently editing of photos by using the GIMP to manipulate digital files is much easier than having a darkroom in your basement. So I honestly don't know how you think that customization could be a viable selling point for minis.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Any successful miniatures line for D&D as we know it will either have to be DM-marketed or the wargame portion of the game is going to become a lot more important. I mean, having people print out their character and hold it in their hands is helpful for marketing, but it's not going to make the enterprise profit.

The question I have is: should these things be integrated in the 'base' Dungeons and Dragons game (like the Miniatures Handbook) or should it be its own separate product line with little-to-no transparency aside from some fluff overlap? If it's the former you might be able to get crossover fans. The problem is that the needs of the TTRPG and the needs of the wargame may or may not converge in a sensible way; again, see the Miniatures Handbook.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Gx1080
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Post by Gx1080 »

I don't see miniatures being compatible with a TTRPG ruleset. They are really only useful to help the imagination bit for characters and monsters. And we all know how useful is a grid map on high-level d&d (not at all).

So, it has to be a separate wargame. For the purpouse that Tzor describes, a 2d drawing is enough.

Now, we can discuss what a company has to do to get on the wargame business.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Well, to do wargames at all in a game with grand power escalation with D&D you'd have to do several wargames at once. Well, in a way.

At low levels the transparency between a traditional squad-level wargame and D&D isn't... all that high, actually. A wargame at this tier of play would seriously just be people controlling several tokens at once. People just plain don't have the abilities that would seriously break traditional wargaming (like summoning a castle out of nothing).

At medium/high levels is where things start to diverge between the needs of a wargame and the needs of a TTRPG. You really would need to have a separate guide for all of it. I don't think it's a completely hopeless endeavor however. The big problem would be that you'd need a grid map for wargaming but this would also be the time in which D&D would be served better by Really Abstract Zones or at least zooming out the map.


I guess the underlying problem is that wargames force a certain kind of gameplay-based limitation on story. There's no reason for TTRPGs not to just smile and nod and accept the same gameplay-based limitations but I don't know how well it'd go over with the playerbase to be told things like not being able to burrow underneath the earth and snipe Sauron's armies through well-placed Gates.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by virgil »

Just out of curiosity, as an alternative to 3D printing/sculpting, what would be the public interest in using sculpted tokens rather than miniatures? What would be the comparative price vs boardgame cardboard stock or full-scale miniatures? Pogs & the stuff from 4E's Monster Vault are essentially what I'm talking about, but they're a little chintzy for what I'm thinking. I'm talking of the plastic or whatever they use to make Pog Slammers. The ideal format for PCs and boss monsters would be things like
Image
Image
Image
Last edited by virgil on Tue Jul 03, 2012 6:55 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by hogarth »

(a) Please tile those images vertically, if possible.

(b) Quite a few people I've talked to like tokens (including myself). However, part of what makes them likeable is the fact that they're much cheaper, so I'd probably prefer cardboard tokens over plastic ones.
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Post by virgil »

Vertically tiled now.

Obviously the cardboard ones would be the cheapest, but I'm curious about the price spectrum of cardboard token vs sculpted token vs 3D figure.
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Post by hogarth »

virgil wrote:Obviously the cardboard ones would be the cheapest, but I'm curious about the price spectrum of cardboard token vs sculpted token vs 3D figure.
I couldn't tell you. But I suspect that as soon as you start talking about making small production runs, the cost gap jumps significantly.
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Post by Vebyast »

If you just want tokens and are willing to accept some limitations on the design (basically, no arches), you can use a 3-axis router or a laser cutter to make them. Wood costs roughly as much as peanuts - literally cents per token, unless you want to use really rare wood. The vast majority of the cost is going to be the machine to make them. Let's go for high quality and say that a small laser cutter might run about $10k. You might be able to make forty or fifty tokens an hour. At a dollar per unit, it'd take you less than a year to make back all your money, and the rest is pure profit.
Last edited by Vebyast on Wed Jul 04, 2012 12:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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virgil
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Post by virgil »

There's apparently a printer that's only $300, and their advertising implies the ability to print the following; which seems to be the minimum resolution necessary for minis.
Image
Last edited by virgil on Tue Jan 05, 2016 5:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by erik »

I look forward to them becoming mainstream toys (not just for grownup kids) in the next 5 years. Is it bad that I want one higher quality than that (I don't want to see the layers so easily), but also want it even cheaper? (tho $300 ain't bad at all!)
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Post by Mord »

erik wrote:Is it bad that I want one higher quality than that (I don't want to see the layers so easily), but also want it even cheaper?
No, no it is not. :thumb:
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Post by OgreBattle »

What would be a good 3D printer for making...

1) 28mm miniatures that have small detail and come largely in one piece
2) Gundam kits that come in sheets and are largely hollow/thin

Would a same printer be able to do both, or would you need different ones for each
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