Wargaming and the 3D Printer Revolution

3D printing is a wonderful technology, and as a plastics engineer in the toolmaking industry. I sometimes wonder how we managed without it all these years.

A Brief Introduction to 3D Printing

3D printing has, for us, greatly altered the way we go about manufacturing plastic parts.

It reminds me a lot of other important technology leaps in our industry through the decades: CNC Machinery, 2D CAD and then 3D CAD, all had dramatic effects on the way we work and vastly increased productivity and quality.

Making rapid prototypes this way has been done for a while, with expensive SLA and SLS models being produced by running a laser through resin material.

Now however, we no longer need lasers – hence why 3D printing is really a separate ‘cousin’ of SLS/SLA stereo lithography. We put these methods under the umbrella term of ‘Additive Manufacturing’ these days. 3D printing is just one branch of this.

3D printing is very versatile, but very expensive, so the uses to which it can be put are quite limited in a wargaming context.

• It can be used to produce a master model for resin casting – you still need to produce the 3D CAD instead of the physical sculpt though.

• It can be used in the design and production of figurines as well. We 3D print figures from digital sculpts so they can be checked and then tweaked, then printed again, as nothing can replace the look and feel of a real part. Once everyone is happy with the design, we can take the digital sculpt and use it to produce the tooling for the moulding (or resin casting) process.

• Finally, 3D Printing can be used to produce one-off or limited numbers of ‘specials’; things that could never be moulded in plastic or made in resin due to moulding issues with the form. These are very expensive models though, but they do look spectacular. If money is not an issue, why not indulge yourself? You still need a CAD model to print from though.

What we do with 3D Printing at Enigma Design

At Enigma Design we have a very expensive high quality objet printer that we use to test all our products prior to expensive manufacturing. We also produce 3D prints for others to do the same.

We have been helping other companies produce wargames products in plastics for years now, and it is with a great sense of pride that we have helped them successfully bring their plastic products to wargamers worldwide over a number of years.

We have now however decided the time is right to take the plunge, and use all our skills and technology to bring our own range of low-cost, but highly detailed hard plastic buildings into the reach of the average wargamer, and we are using Tabletop Workshop to do just that – and 3D printing is an essential part of the process.

At the moment, we mainly use the 3D printer for prototyping.

Creating a 3D Prototype – An Example

The 3D printer is used mostly for prototyping, and you can see below how we have produced high quality, accurate prototypes of our building kits.

I’ve outlined the progression via the 3D printing process below.

Step 1:

The first stage is to get your CAD model ready to print – we use engineering CAD software to produce the accurate base model. Then we texture it in ZBRUSH to bring it to life.

As you can see here with this picture of a single storey thatched cottage.

Step 2

The next stage is to send the CAD to the printer and wait. In this example we needed to do 2 print runs to get the full set of parts for our 2 storey building.

You can see 4 of them on the open 3D printer in this picture, ready to come off and be cleaned up.

Step 3

The parts come off surrounded by a wax like support material which has to be washed off. This is the fun part because it involves a high pressure water jet and big rubber gloves!

Step 4

Then you have the finished product ready for showing off and testing.

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Get Ready for the Tabletop Workshop Kickstarter!

Our kickstarter for our first plastic injection moulded building range will be for 28mm Medieval buildings and fortifications – without the power of 3D printing, none of it would be possible.

Please follow our progress on Twitter and Facebook.