Honest review - 2 years with 3D printers

it's been over two years since I picked up my first 3d printer and with that I've had a lot of time to figure out what I think about 3d printing so 3d printing for miniature painting or your wargaming hobby what is it like is it really worth it this video is sponsored by titan forge hey everyone you're watching squid more miniatures i'm AML about two years ago I picked up my first 3d printer I was knee-deep in a game called H of sigmar you probably know about it and I had found so many 3d printable terrain files that I wanted to print for my war games and with that my interest for the Hobby of 3d printing was born and that sentence the hobby of 3d printing keep that in mind because that's sort of the key point of this whole video 3d printing is really a hobby on its own that requires time and practice to get it right so buckle up because this is going to be a long video where I cover all of the things that I've experienced throughout these two years and what I think about 3d printing what I like and some things that I don't like as much so when it was time for me to get into 3d printing and mostly wanted to print terrain so the most obvious choice was to get an FTM printer printing with PLA at that time gave me the option to print larger things using the large build plate with a large volume and the price point and the smell factor at that time was something that considered and that made me choose the any cubic I three mega it set me back about three hundred dollars and I selected that one over a lot of the other cheaper versions because it didn't have to do as much self-assembly and oh boy have I used this printer to print stuff I think I printed about maybe five or six gaming tables some of them for my gaming club and some of them for myself right now I have at least three full gaming tables worth of terrain anything from cityscapes to a lava gaming table with floating rocks and lots of ruins in just small bits and scattered terrain and on top of that the FDM printer was amazing to print like measurement couches for the games different tools to carry my Warhammer on the world's warbands and gaming cards so it's been really useful for me and I've used it quite a lot [Music] and since then two years ago I've gotten another two printers and I have a third one on the way Danny cubic f3 mega I purchased myself the resin printers the ANA cubic photon and the frozen sonic mini was given to me or borrowed to me by the producers to use for the channel so I did not pay for this and I want to have full disclosure with that although it's been sponsored or lent to the channel it doesn't affect my opinion and I'm going to be honestly true about what things I like and dislike about the products and 3d printing in general 3d printing is an incredibly hot topic right now and one of the biggest positives is the vast majority of different 3d prints and the quality of different alternate sculpts to games that you can get for example like the ones the Titan Forge make who are specifically made for 3d printing and take advantage of the technology that 3d printing have to the max but with these positives there's also the negatives that we mentioned let's jump into some of those from the beginning most 3d printers today are made in China or at least in Asia but there are obviously other brands that make printers in the States or in Europe as well and with that comes technical support that's let's call it subpar if you run into problems you're pretty much without support from the 3d printing brands there are obviously brands that are better than others but get into this hobby with the expectation of not getting help from the 3d printer producer you're going to have to take help from the 3d printing hobby community [Music] let's travel back to ml two years ago he got his first FDM printer almost fully built the i3 mega only needs like two screws put in and you need to connect the cable that's hidden underneath it it needed a little bit of calibration and I was ready to go almost that calibration on FDM printers isn't always asked simple you have the said axis you have the build plate that means calibrating sometimes those just don't want to work together it took me quite a lot of time a lot of prints to get the results that I wanted probably cost me about 60 to 90 bucks of filament to get to that quality that I found was decent enough to make my prints from and on top of that I had the problem with the filament that was included with the printer which was horrible which caused clogs and the prints shrunk on the build plate causing 24 hour prints to just fail miserably and this is something that you can't expect from pretty much all FDM printers even the more expensive ones like the Prusa you're going to face different problems when you get started because it isn't just plug and play and even though the build plate on a three mega is supposed to be superior to all of the others in that price range I still had problems with temperatures some of the prints didn't stick well enough to the printer so I lost I don't know how many prints due to that and even though you think you've calibrated it perfectly you found a good plastic and you have used the same settings for months and all of a sudden just stops working things like that will keep you busy just trying to figure out what's wrong with the printer because everything's can be wrong at some point during your history of printing there are other plastics to use for FDM printers you have abs but I don't even want to get into that because that's a whole other problem you have PE TG but again I think PLA is the best one to work with it's fairly cheap and it's quite simple to work with at least compared to some of the other stuff available but as I said it's not that easy I've had some terrible terrible experiences with la where I tried hundred different temperatures and it didn't matter it just clogged up it shrank on the build plate warping and the prints just ended up unusable so I wasted probably another sixty to ninety bucks on plastics that just didn't work for my printer or probably doesn't work at all a lot of the cheaper PLA plastics even if they're decent can have these micro particles that get stuck and burn in your nozzle so you'll have to clean it up and sometimes even if you're using the most expensive PLA you switched out your nozzle to the most expensive nozzle and somehow for some weird reason it's still going to tug up but you know what with time you're going to find solutions that work for you for me it's been every time I make a new print I heat up the nozzle I clean it with a acupuncture old needle and with that I get at least 24 hours of decent printing until the next time I start a new print I have to do the same thing over again clean it before every print and on top of that you're going to have problems with different parts of the printer failing hands up everyone with an FTM printer who woke up to a printer that looked like this I'm one of them but there are other things like the stepping motor you have these different Bunji things the moves the printed in the XY axis the hot pad might break or like me for some reason there is this zip tie that's connecting the hot bed to the printer itself and this zip tie for some reason just decided to sawed off the entire freaking cable causing almost something that I would consider being a fire hazard so I had to switch out the whole freaking hop band because of it and that's not the only thing I've changed out the hot end one time I've changed the nozzles I think six or eight times I can't remember anymore it's a lot of times and make sure to keep these at home order them in good time from the producer or from aliexpress or banggood so if you want to have them and you want to have them when something breaks make sure to have a copy of everything you need at home so keep that in mind when picking up an FTM printer I love mine but it's also not my best friend so if the imprinting is it worth the effort yes if you enjoy 3d printing as a hobby but no if you're just looking for something cheap to get you stuff fast because it's not a fast process and in the end it's not going to be a lot cheaper than buying a finished product [Music] okay let's get him to rest in printing but first I want to tell you about the Lord and Savior title Forge it was a nice thing wait wasn't it blood fields is a completely new 3d printable tabletop game by titan-forged running as a Kickstarter right now with over 50 ready to print fantasy model for this fast-paced skirmish game you will easily turn these pre supported STL files into physical miniatures for all the purposes you can imagine for example running this cool game and to me the most exciting thing is that the game is just in its beginning there's a mobile app in development to help you with all of the character stats that you can keep it tidy being your phone instead of printing out papers for all of the different characters as well as all of the exciting expansion that's going to come to the game in the future they have already planned working on the rules updates once the game is out and people have the chance to try it so getting it now at 29 bucks getting all of these amazing models per game is going to give you a lot of fun for months and months to come I think that's a bargain so check out blood fields by titan-forged by following the link to their Kickstarter in the video description ok guys time to bite the bullet I have four pages talking about things that I like and dislike about rest in 3d printing let's do it resin printing can as well be wonderful it's really been a blessing for the channel as whenever I need something that I don't have at home I can just 3d print it and in a few hours I have a finished Reston model that I can paint I did that when I needed to paint swords for example 3d printed an arm or hand from a miniature and can print ten copies of it if I wanted to try out different things and on top of that for example the extra head that I printed last week when I did the how to paint face this video just printing that at home at $1 cost or less probably that's ridiculous but I spent more money obviously for that a lot [Music] and installing a resin printer comparison if the M printer is about a hundred times easier it's a lot less to calibrate on top of that the parts doesn't break it easy you don't have clogs the same way but you're going to have failures the first resin printer that I got was the any cubic photon and at that time about a year ago the any cubic Fulton was sort of the landmark that everyone compared himself to and tried to beat when it came to rest imprinting I had a friend who already owned one who came over to show me how to calibrate it how to do my first printout to do support switch software to use and how to slice the different miniatures to be able to print them and the first prints came out amazing I kid you not I was super duper impressed however the second that I have to remove the prints from the printer the head of the any cubic photon for some reason is so poorly the sign that I have to recalibrate it pretty much every time that I remove a print from it because I have to use the force to remove the print and the head is going to nudge a tiny bit and that's enough to have to recalibrate it and this health issue have been fixed all of the newer printer that comes out have a different design of the build plate so you won't have to calibrate it as much but you're still gonna have to do it at least between every I don't know 10 prints that you make and with any cubic photon that was my main issue I did not like the process of having to recalibrate that head because the design isn't good enough and the process is a bit messy but even with these newer heads you're going to have failures and that means that you're going to remove the whack you're going to have to clean everything up and recalibrate it filter the rest in and then pour the resin back into the VAT and then start it again and hopefully you're going to have good friends but who knows nobody knows when it's going to fail the printer is the only one who knows all of these problems have however been a lot less with the last printer that I got which was the frozen sonic mini I've been raving about it in a lot of videos before and that's because the usage have just been so much easier and one of the reasons why they're the frozen sonic mini is better is because of the screen all of the older resin printers have a cell phone screen that's been modified to just show the UV lights and taking something that's made for something completely else and just modifying it a little bit to work for your specific purpose isn't optimal it's caused the screens to break very easily this cost the screens to get different pixel errors that pixels on them as well as they become incredibly slow at curing resin then Kubik photon the illegal market for example they take about eight to ten seconds for each layer to cure which means that if you have 0.2 millimeter layer it's going to be I don't know a minute and a half just to cure the resin for one millimeter on a miniature sure meaning that a miniature to print would be six eight nine ten twelve hours just to print one tiny miniature the newer ones and that started with the pro's and Sonic minis have screens that emits light that's specifically made to only show the right nano frequencies of UV light so they last a lot longer they're a lot faster the frozen Sonic mini for example have about a two second curing time per layer which is about five times faster than the older ones it still has to do like the moving up and down so it's about like twice three times as fast in total and yes compared to the older ones but the main thing is that the screen is the older screens they would break after two to four hundred hours five hundred hours if you were super lucky that problem was something that I had not calculated for when I started printing but I needed to change the screen after like a month if I printed every day the newer ones last I think at least twice as long I think they say it's the average time so it's like four to eight hundred hours some of them might be even higher I'm not 100% sure of this statistics so if somebody has to info for this please let me know in the comment section so instead of getting twenty prints because it took ten hours to print the model now the same prints may will take three three and a half hours to print and the screen itself would last longer.this in total would give you about 6 to 10 times as many prints compared to the older printers so that's a reason to buy a new one and not buy one of the older ones that's a lot cheaper because they're going to be more expensive for you in the long run so we've covered my personal experiences with 3d printers let's talk about some general ones that's not specific to the ones that I have used I hate making supports they never end up as good as I want them if you want to make them good it's going to take time 10 miniatures to make 10 really good supports and test printing those with the different supports it's going to take you're probably one or two working days for just those 10 miniatures as I mentioned though luckily most 3d printing brands today example like the ones that titan-forged make for the new Kickstarter are pre supported and they are supported in a way that you can scale the miniature any way you want and still keep the same good supports and this specific thing have made 3d printing for me like a hundred times more enjoyable the second one is the smell a lot of people talk about the smell and that's the thing that everyone just takes up I don't want to get a 3d printer because of the smell and the toxic things that comes out from the printers I have a different experience for one about the toxicity if you have a good ventilated room pretty much anyone that I know who is a scientist and uses 3d printers says that if you place the 3d printer in a ventilated room that should be enough and if you have it in a separate room with a ventilation that shouldn't matter so I have it in a storage room here on my side it's ventilated I sit in the room next to it I didn't have a door for that rule for about half a year and I never noticed the smell but I think this problem with the smell origins from about two years ago and further back the first resin that I got for example was a green any cubic one and it smelled a lot pretty much the whole house smelled opened up the bottle but the newer ones that I've used like the any cubic soy resin and the frozen aqua green as well as the pure poly resin it doesn't smell nearly as bad as that did now that I have it in that room that's ventilated don't even notice when I print something I can't feel the smell so that's not as big of a problem as I thought it would be however we do have problems of smells with alcohol that we're using to clean I'm using IPA but first if you buy a 3d printer now it's going to be hard to get alcohol you can either get IPA for example or denatured alcohol but it's going to be tough to find and those often smell more than the rest in the US especially if you have like all the resting residue in the alcohol that you've used for cleaning already when you open those bottle it's going to smell if I have like half an hour where I clean rest imprints my wife always complains about the smell on the top floor she never complains about the printing itself number four the mess seriously the resin causes a mess you're going to need nitrile gloves that's must because the mess is a toxic mess even the soy resin that is supposed to be more eco-friendly and friendlier for your health it's not good to get on your skin and this resin it's going to get everywhere when you pour resin into that you're going to get spinach when you clean your VAT when you take prints off the printer when you clean your resin prints when you put a resting back into the bottle for filtering it you're going to have resin everywhere I try to mitigate the spillage of the resin by putting the magazine papers pretty much everywhere where I have the printers and that has been really helpful because I can just remove like one piece of paper and throw it in the bin and then I can keep going but it's getting everywhere it's a mess number five and that's the hidden costs we talked about this for FDM printers but you also have this for the SLA printers some of the hidden costs for example can be things like a curing light here in Sweden for some reason it was almost impossible to get a curing light that has two right NM wavelength so I ordered some from wish to get it cheap like a nail polish light and when I got it it only had a 90 second light it didn't have a continuous light so that one is pretty much unusable because I can't stand there and press the button every 90 seconds I didn't got one from pure poly which is a hundred times better but even with a good light I needed to make a homemade solution for curing I have an old garbage bin which I covered completely in tin foil and in there I placed spinning this placed and with a mirror on it and with this the miniature spins and the light hits it from all angles and it just balances really well with the tin foil these are the type of solutions that you have to go to unless you're willing to pay another two 300 bucks for like the any cubic cleaning station a lot of people rave about that one they say it's amazing I don't know I am trying to get but the problem is still you have to spend about as much money as you spend on the printer just to get that cleaning solution if you have the money just go buy it but if not they have to do these homemade solutions and on top of just buying like the rest in itself which if you want a good quality one it's like thirty to sixty dollars per liter the alcohol itself the cleaning alcohol some use ultrasonic cleaners I mean all of these things are extra costs that you need to calculate before you decide if it's worth for you to pick up or not [Music] and number six the post process I do not enjoy the post process for one when you clean the miniatures that's what I call a post process the second one would be to sand the files to remove the supports to get all of the things clean enough to do the paint job afterwards you need to make sure that all of the rest in is gone you need to make sure that all the alcohol has dried before you go to curing it and if you print multi-part kits like for example a model that has a hand separate and a weapon separate you're going to have different warping on the different parts so some of the parts won't fit as well as you might want it to very similarly to forge world resin but sometimes it's ten times worse so you're going to have to use different boxes to fill out the different gaps or knives to cut different things and the resin doesn't cut very well with knives so be ridiculously careful when using knives on this resin number seven the quality of the prints we talked a little bit about this and the quality can be quite amazing I got amazing results both from the ANA Kubik Fulton and from the frozen sonic mini but none of these come even close to the purchased miniatures that you get from Games Workshop for example or from any of the other brands that make resin cast miniatures the reason for this is because they use a completely different technique or use a completely different type of 3d printer I'm going to make a video in a few weeks where I talk about the quality from these printers they cost about ten thousand dollars so it's not something that you have at home but the miniatures that's coming in my Kickstarter the the busts are printed using these soulless printers so I kind of want to show you the quality difference when I print it compared to these professional printers and number eight the repairs even though these machines break way less fep film and the screens is a must to have a spare copy at home and these can cost you as much as 85 dollars to pick up but it's definitely worth having at home because when something breaks or the screen has had its time it's worth having one at home so you don't have to order one and wait for a month for it to get home to you but guys it's not all negative as I mentioned I really enjoy having 3d printers it really makes my process a lot easier and a lot of people who play didi games for example and instant gratification to plan a game and to be able to print an encounter the day before or even the same morning as you're gonna play that's quite fantastic and 3d printers is just going to get better and hopefully a lot of these tedious steps can be skipped with new products and new printers coming to the market and as I mentioned for my videos to just be able to have an idea and three hours later have a finished bus that I can paint for the specific video or if I'm missing some material for my videos I can 3d print it in no time and have a video ready in just a few days instead of having to order products from a line and wait for the stuff to arrive etc and printing terrain for gaming table that's a whole nother story I've had so much fun with that especially because I can print whatever I want whenever the time it takes is a lot longer than the rest imprints as I mentioned before it could be 24 hours for one part of a house so some of the houses that I printed have been closer to a hundred or even more than I had hours of continuous printing to get one single building so it saved me a little bit of money with that but again with all the repairs and everything and probably breakeven but I still enjoy it there is something about the gratifications of printing miniatures that keeps me coming back to it however when that first sort of initial crush of getting into printing you get sort of this adrenaline when that is over you're going to see that your printers are going to just stand still for longer times for me now I don't print just to print whenever I need something I use them to print stuff so if you're expecting to have it running 24/7 it's probably going to be that in the beginning but the more you use it the less interested you're going to be in just printing something to have stuff printed but terrain for me was sort of the gateway drug and I still enjoy that probably the most compared to like buying terrain as I still enjoy buying models more than I like printing models but I enjoy printing terrain more than buying terrain so to conclude this whole video what do I think about 3d printing should you get one if you have the money if you have the time and you have the patience patience is the big one if you have that 3d printing can be incredibly rewarding you can get amazing miniatures of great quality and the sculpts that some designers do are fantastic but the reality is 3d printing is a hobby on its own you're going to have to spend time to get good on it just as much time as you have to spend on getting better on painting or playing the specific game you're going to have to spend as much time on getting your 3d printers to work the way you want it if not it's probably best to ask a friend to 3d print your stuff or just buy miniatures because purchase miniatures are still amazing but let's end the video on this please let me know what you think about 3d printing are you interested in starting with 3d printing picking up one maybe what's your idea what's your worries are you already into 3d printing what are your biggest peeves with it or what you enjoy the most let me know in the comment section down below don't forget to check out this week's sponsor titan forge and their new game blood fields if you want to support this channel there's a couple of ways you can do that you can either join my patron and pledge a few dollars every month like these amazing patrons are doing we hang out every day in a discord chat where we talk about gaming and painting or just life in general passive shout out to my top patreon supporters Joshua Chris Robin Jess mark Richard Christian mark L mark and Ray Daniel astral claw Jonas Brandon and guy you guys are such amazing beasts thank you so much if you wonder about any of the stuff that I use the 3d printers or the airbrush or the paints I have all of that listed in my video description or on my website squid marcom if you pick up any of that stuff amazon kicks a little bit of money back to my channel so it's a great way as well to support this channel so guys with this said I hope it didn't take more than like 30 minutes I have no idea I'm gonna check the time when it's finished with that said guys echo point point point I could punch echo point chiral needles yes but no sneaky oh but that's ridiculous

Channel: Squidmar Miniatures

Views: 259,815

Keywords: warhammer, miniature painting, painting warhammer, age of sigmar, squidmar, warhammer 40k, dungeons & dragons, d&d, how to paint warhammer, space marines, squidmar miniatures, emil nyström, airbrush, vallejo, 3d printing warhammer, 3d printing jazza, 3d printing miniatures, 3d printing, 3d printing for beginners, 3d printing tips and tricks, anycubic photon, phrozen sonic mini, elegoo mars, i3 mega, anycubic, peopoly, longer 3d, 3d prints, best 3d printer, 3d printer review

Id: HbJ6DqvAn1M

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020