3D prints of yourself

CMOTD · 6th-Jan-20, 11:12 AM

Reading a model railway magazine over Christmas I came across this firm offering to 3D print a scale figure of yourself. LINK

Not cheap at £30 for the scan and another £15 for the actual figure but a novel addition to the layout perhaps?

While we are on the subject of 3D printed figures can someone enlighten me why they are so expensive please? As I understand it one figure will use about 20p worth of material. Adding in a bit of electricity cost, designer's time and effort creating it, a selling price around £2 should give an acceptable level of profit but they cost from £7 upwards to silly money. Is it anything to do with the time it takes to print them?

Mr Modifier · 6th-Jan-20, 11:19 PM

It might be the length of time to print but once started the printer can be left to do its thing.

I think if is probably more to do with market forces and actually print time is a factor - long print times means limited production capacity and so to limit demand you set prices high enough to maximise profit whilst not creating a backlog of demand.

dvd3500 · 7th-Jan-20, 11:10 AM

So if they are scanning people maybe they scan other parts of cars?
Like maybe a 1/24 scale model and downscale it to 1/32...?

GregK · 7th-Jan-20, 08:29 PM

I had this demonstrated to me at the Swindon swapmeet; the quality of the printed figures was stunning.

Scuderia_Turini · 7th-Jan-20, 11:51 PM

Do they give you the file so you can print yourself - albeit not as finely detailed. Presumably they could scan a model car and produce a copy of that.

Leo

dazee · 8th-Jan-20, 12:47 PM

(6th-Jan-20, 11:19 PM)Mr Modifier Wrote: It might be the length of time to print but once started the printer can be left to do its thing.

I would never recommend this on a filament printer. You pretty much need to keep an eye on them all the time. Do a quick google for fires started by this type of printer.

The filament printers are slow and take many hours to print. I think these will start to disappear as resin printers become readily available. Faster prints and better detail, should drop prices for items created this way.

A good 3d scan is hard to do without going to big budget scanners. I am playing around with software for this now for converting photos into 3d models, trying to get me a good render of a Chimera 500 I want to build.

MrFlippant · 8th-Jan-20, 04:10 PM

(8th-Jan-20, 12:47 PM)dazee Wrote: I would never recommend this on a filament printer. You pretty much need to keep an eye on them all the time. Do a quick google for fires started by this type of printer.

Check the date on those articles. This was before thermal runaway protections were put in place. Any decent printer these days will be quite safe to leave alone while printing. Heck, sometimes the protections are an annoyance, as if the garage is too cool, it will lock in a "min temp" error that is meant to prevent thermal runaway, though everything is fine to print.

Anyway, technology moves fast, so don't let a bunch of old horror stories scare you from current technology.

As far as type of printing, they all have things they are good at. For example, it's simply not possible to change the color throughout the print on any other printer, like you can with an FFF (hot glue gun) printer. But, you can't beat the detail achievable on a nice resin printer.

Fluff · 8th-Jan-20, 05:26 PM

A dentist friend of mine has a resin printer and is up to printing figures for me
,even able to do reverse image but they will work out to about 8pounds each due to the cost of the resin he uses The detail is amazing though and no print lines

Steve

UshCha · 10th-Jan-20, 04:57 PM

My son is in the busness in a small way. The biggest cost in printing is time. Printers are getting cheaper, a good one is probably about £800 for one that lasts a commercial timescale. Using a safe value of say 3000 hrs life for the printer that gives you 26p an hour so just the printer alone so a 2 hr tank costs £0.52 p just in capital cost. add another 10p at least in spares,then probably 5% for the odd failure and its £0.70p Time is not small 5 min to load, unload, clean and package so add al least another £1. By this point its up to £3.0 with real estate and material. Other costs , overheads and profit and its closer to £4.0 a go. Now if you own a printer and do the maintenance yourself, don't charge man hours and don't consider real estate, its in your house, and profit is not an issue it is cheap.