Today on Voidstar Lab, we're doing 3D printing. We're doing DnD printing.
We are doing 3DnD printing. Humans, elves and tieflings, my name is Zack
Freedman, and welcome to Voidstar Lab. This might be hard to believe, but I used to be a nerd.
Back in college, I was a dungeon master - and not the fun kind, the tabletop RPG kind. I wrote
a custom campaign that saw my players cleave many a gnoll in twain, cast Fireball with their
finger in a keyhole, and fight valiantly against a giant fiendish dire badger while hungover. The players were hungover, the badger was sober. I was just too much of a cheapskate
to buy proper minis and maps, so the props and players were Lego minifigures.
Here's Jeff's cleric, Waffles' rogue - I mean shadowdancer - Twitch's mustachioed wizard, and
Riley's barbarian. Reilly actually bought himself a mini, so he stood out a little bit. Unless
the enemy was a shark, they were just bits of paper with the creature's name written on them,
and the battlefield was an Excel spreadsheet. Well, we are now in the future, so it is time
to cast Bigby's Grasping Hand and slap some sense into your DM. For less gold than a single
rulebook, you can build an entire army's worth of gratuitously intricate minis. You can populate
your battlefield with both inspirational and immersive props, and you can make custom
figures for everyone in your party that just oozes personal flair and flavor. You can
make all of this yourself on a resin printer, which are surprisingly cheap and easy to
run, even if you've never put a single point into Use Magic Device. So, let's
roll initiative and dive into the fray! Today's episode is sponsored by Loot Studios, your
monthly subscription to dozens of ultra-detailed professionally-designed models made by a
talented team of CG artists. Nearly every model you see today comes from this month's pack,
Orconspiracy, which has everything you need to orc-hestrate orcs-citing orc-counters. Stay tuned
to the end if you're curious - or should I say, if y-orc curious! I hope you like bad puns,
because that's just the tip of the orcs-berg. So let's do a quick recap of how 3D printing
works. There are two kinds of hobbyist 3D printers, FDM and resin, and they both build
up a solid model by adding one thin layer of plastic at a time. FDM machines, like these
Prusa Mk3s's, feed plastic filament into a heated nozzle and trace each layer out of lines
of material. Resin machines, like this Phrozen 4k, shine a high-powered projector through a vat of
liquid resin to harden wafer-thin layers into an orc-shaped stack. FDM printers are far more
common, but if you're going to make intricate prints like these DnD minis, resin printers
are the way to go. An FDM printer struggles with the fine details, but a resin printer's
limit is the resolution of the projector. This model I'll be using today has a 4k
resolution, so it actually prints models about 50% sharper than the iPhone on which you're
statistically likely to be watching this video! You start off with a model that
you download off the Internet, and you prep it with a program called a slicer.
The slicer automatically generates supports, those little scaffolds that brace it as it prints.
It hollows out chunky areas to save material, and it formats it for your printer. You
pour some liquid resin into the tray, you hit 'go,' and a few hours later,
your tiny orcs are fab-orc-cated. Give them a bath, snap off the supports, harden
them under a UV lamp, and you are ready to ROLL! A 500-gram bottle of resin costs about
20 bucks and prints like 75 to 100 minis. Resin printers themselves are really cheap
too, because they don't have many moving parts. While an FDM printer has motors, belts, drivers,
rods, extruders... an SLA printer is really just a UV lamp, an LCD panel, and a single
motor to lift the print out of the gooooo. So you got the printer,
what's next? Ask your party, because I guarantee you they have thought
this through way more than you have. When you play Skyrim, Fallout, or Cyberpunk,
the first thing you do is waste like 15 hours in the character creator... and those
are first-person games where you never even get to see your own character! Designing your look
and expressing yourself is a really important part of these games, and DnD is no DnDifferent.
In fact, it's probably even more so, because players can literally do anything! Players
put a ton of love and thought into their character's style, and they really put a
piece of themselves into their characters. If you have a printer, you can let them
put that piece onto the battlefield. So, HeroForge is a well-known way
to create custom character models, and you don't have to do any modeling
yourself, but Eldritch Foundry is another similar option. In between sessions,
your players can customize their looks, they can add their favorite weaponry and gear,
and then they can just send you the file. Because of a quirk of how resin printers work,
it doesn't matter how many prints you do at once - it always takes as long as the tallest
print. Just run off the whole party in one shot! The material is just so cheap, and the process
is so simple, that when a player claims the big bad's blade for their own - and subsequently
gets disarmed - you can just print fresh models that show this! This adds a ton of flavor for
players to discover on each other's models. Like, why does Megan's lizardfolk have a grimoire on
her belt? Why is Zack's orc warrior's codpiece so damn big? The former is because she's a lizard
wizard. The latter is because life imitates orc. By the way, if you have
never used minis in your DnD, I highly recommend them over
using tokens or markers. Not only can you tell which direction players
are facing and what equipment they're using, you can even print these little trackers to visualize
status effects like my personal favorite, on fire. If you also print some set dressing,
it doesn't just make the game more immersive - it makes it easier for the
players to tell which obstacles block the square, and which are just hard
to walk through. But most importantly, it inspires improvised tactics, which, let's
be honest, are the best part of DnD combat. An enemy is about to outflank your warrior
and your bard just threw her last dagger. What's she gonna do? It's a good thing the
table is covered in aerodynamic pewter mugs! [High-speed imp-orc-t] Another neat idea is hiding puzzles in real life.
The players are on the hunt for Percy Pinkpike, who mysteriously vanished during his monthly
pilgrimage. The bandits camping out in the ravine said they never saw him pass through, but when
you take a closer look at their barrel of weapons, you perceive Percy the Paladin's
precious pink pilgrimage polearm! When the minis are only like 20 cents each, you
can get creative with these one-off surprises and throw players who are used to just skill checks
for a loop. Of course, printing enemies is the fun part, because A) players don't really
change their equipment all that often, so you end up using the same minis for a
really long time... and B) Monsters are cooool! Players can size up the enemy's orc-quipment
at a glance, which means less brainpower spent visualizing the battlefield, and more creating
overcomplicated strategies that force the DM to calculate the ranged touch modifier for
throwing an unwilling celestial monkey. For instance. It's an incredible feeling when the players finish
hacking down all the mooks, and you get to unveil that super special big bad boss and literally slam
it on the table. The players have heard Orguss the Tall's name whispered by townspeople and hollered
in w-orc cries, but finally getting to face the orc warmonger head-to-head will fire anyone up to
cut that head OFF. This goes double for those big showpiece models. These are, like, big bad dragons
that cost like 30 bucks off the shelf, but for you, are just, like, 89 cents of plastic. It turns
out that burly orc who just got a free French haircut wasn't actually Orguss - it was Orgug.
Orgug Lots-of-Bolts is an orc. Orguss the Tall is the specter of a bloodthirsty ancient dragon
and the shamans just finished invoking his spirit! [Deep draconic voice] FEAR ME! RAAAAR!!
[Screaming] Oh no!! [Roaring]
[Desperate pleas]
[Explosions 'n stuff] [Whimpering] Mercy!!
[Deep dragon voice] Mercy is for the living!! RAAAAR! RAR! Rar. So where do you actually get models to
print? Well, you have lots of options, and you just need to remember three letters:
STL. That is a standard format that every CAD and 3D-modeling program can output, and
every 3D-printing software can handle. You can grab files at sites like MyMiniFactory,
Cults3D, Thangs, and even Etsy, and you can also find models on, like, maker-centric sites like
Thingiverse. There are a lot of free STL files out there, but you will need to buy the best ones
from the artist, and on these sites, these files actually get pretty orc-xpensive, especially
if you're buying a whole campaign's worth. That's why I partnered with Loot Studios,
a subscription to dozens of brand-new, preposterously-intricate models, ready to print, with a different theme every month. This month,
you get everything you need to co-orc-inate an orc-based campaign. There is an orc shaman,
there are orc warriors, a rodeo orc on a cow, and there are assorted orc pals like a big ass-dragon
and a troll straight out of my comment section. Here are the heroes that can desp-orc-ly struggle
against the impending cat-orc-clysm. You also get a selection of orc-hitecture, like an orcs-tower,
a barb-orc-que, and a p-orc-cullis begging to be sab-orc-taged. And also, there's a wereboar...
There's like a p-orc pun in there somewhere. Each set includes heroes, enemies, and props in
both 35- and 75-millimeter scale. You also get cool bonuses, like paintable busts of the best
characters, and even some lore and battle maps to mix into your campaign! You just download it,
print it, and die to it, because for chrissake, Jeff, why'd you have to waste all your Cure Wound
spells on the zombies?! Like, killing dudes with healing is neat, I get it, you read the rulebook,
but COME ON! Our wizard could have Fireballed them to death, and now I'm BLEEDING OUT because I can't
ROLL A GODDAMN ENDURANCE CHECK TO SAVE MY LIFE!! Anyways, it's just $15 a month, links in the
description, and it helps sup-orc the channel. Ha haa! Speaking of filthy skull-wearing
savages with green skin, a huge thanks to my patrons for supporting
Voidstar Lab! We're AAALMOST at our very first goal, which is to upgrade this wearable computer and
then put the plans online for everyone to become cyborg! Our supremely generous lab assistant
supporters are, in no particular order: Super-special, extra-juicy
thanks to our very first Co-Lab-Orator, i'm not Bcore! I've hidden his, her, their, or its name
somewhere in this episode, so go Easter that egg! Super special thanks to Brooke,
the lovely lady behind the camera, and for our dedicated Discord mods, Billie
Ruben, My Fair Julie, and Techniack. Thank you so much for watching, and I hope your
future campaigns are simply unf-orc-gettable.
