Recent-ish 3D printing experiences?

Ah, very cool, I’ll peruse those! Sorry I missed them in a cursory search.

Why did you decide to get a resin printer… is it mostly for the small-scale details for miniatures? From that thread, the mess seems like a real hassle?

The hybrid full-color printers seems pretty cool for that use case: HeyGears G1 Series: The World's 1st Desktop Full-Color 3D & UV Printer – HeyGears Store

It can print a full-color medium-high resolution miniature by combining FDM and UV printing in the same unit, building up depth and adding CMYK color at the same time. No more painting — we all know how terrible I am at that :sweat_smile:

What are you mostly making on them? Is this for a classroom, or do you just go to the makerspace for your personal use?

Yes, very much so! But I’m more interested in the potential artistic and cartographic aspects than functional parts — think topo maps, geology layers, bathymetry cutaways, and things like that. Along with the occasional earring for the GF and Batman mask for the cat, of course :laughing:

Hence the desire to upgrade. While my current one can technically print 4+ colors in the same print, it has to purge the current filament with every color change, meaning heaping globs of waste for any color variations that aren’t strictly layer-by-layer on the Z-axis. Nowadays there are several “toolchanger” printers with better filament swapping and/or multiple nozzles. They allow faster and less wasteful multi-color prints.

The one I’m considering right now is Bambu Lab H2C | Bambu Lab US Store because it seems the most reliable and easy to use, among the current toolchanger models and brand ecosystems. It’s not perfect — still produces a prime tower — but should still quite a bit less wasteful than the non-toolchanger printers.

Really what I want to make are multi-color dioramas & topo maps, like of national parks and hiking trails, but with complex layers and colors (at least 6-8). My hope is to start with digital mapping data (digital elevation models, bathymetry, streets, etc.) and turn them into meshes and then manually adjust them and add props and lighting kits. I am not really quite sure the best workflow to do this with… standard CAD like Fusion or Onshape? A game engine like Unreal? Blender? Advice welcome.

I’ll have to read through that longer thread on my lunch break… wonder if anyone’s done something similar already?