Whether you’re all for 3D printing or treat those hobbyists around you like they wear a scarlet letter, it’s not going to undermine GW and Warhammer- yet.
Jstove is back to tell us about his experience with 3D printing, as he lays out the specifics on why it printing CAN’T undermine GW at its current state. Let’s get into it.
3D Printing Won’t Undermine Everything GW Has Worked For
In 2008, I was in college for a product design degree, and everything about CAD, 3D, and 3D printing sucked. It sucked to the walls. The 3D printer was the size of a washing machine, and the material was $8 a cubic inch. If you have trouble visualizing that, imagine a pot of Games Workshop paint costing 8 dollars (not hard) and that’s your 3D printer juice.
The software was even worse. When you merged objects together, it didn’t automatically chop, fit, and hollow the parts. It also didn’t automatically render the object in 3D space unless you were on incredibly sophisticated software, on a very expensive machine. Most of the 3D designs looked like a math textbook. You didn’t look at the finished, rendered model, you looked at dots and lines, at trigonometry.
Back then, 3D printing was only for prototyping. It wasn’t for finished products or making Warhammer models. The idea of any amateur going on Amazon, buying a printer, and setting up an Etsy shop in his garage, was laughable. The technology wasn’t there yet. You needed enough technology to fill a one-bedroom apartment just to make one little piece of crap part out of lousy, chalky resin to take to a Chinese factory to make a real part. 3D printing was basically only for guys like me. The ones who were in school, being taught on $2000 gaming computers with turbo-render graphics cards and workshops full of washing machine-sized printers that were also full of acid. (You had to clean the part in an acid bath after it came out of the printer to disintegrate the scaffolding).
We didn’t call it 3D printing. “3D printing” implied that whatever came out of the printer was somehow complete, like a photograph, or an essay, or things that you’d expect to be done when they come out of a printer. We called it RAPID PROTOTYPING, because a prototype is experimental, crappy, a mock-up, an unfinished ghost of a finished product… Which was what those crappy low rez $8 cubic inch garbage models were.
In the Grim Darkness of the 2020 Present, 3D Printing Actually Works
ANYCUBIC Photon UV LCD 3D Printer (left) and Photon S (right). Image theSLAchannel
Everything that is done automatically for you, in your browser, on your piece of junk laptop, on tinkercad, is something I used to have to do manually, on a gaming computer worth more than my car. The technology has come so far now that I would say that what was probably the most important part of my education is now worthless. What took a whole semester of 3D design classes in 2008 can probably now be boiled down to one month with how accessible and automated the design software is. The only thing you actually need now is time and talent.
Don’t worry though, I’m not mad, technology is going to do that to every profession except Law because lawyers are always going to make sure people need them. That’s the number one thing that lawyers do.
3D Printing is going to ruin the hobby worse than knock-off resin and you better go buy a 3D printer and become a miniature counterfeiter because you’re going to be the only guy in the game store that doesn’t have a faked out garage army.
Actually, that’s not true. That’s what in the internet business we call “clickbait” and every time you guys overreact to it, Rob Baer buys his cats another tin of Fancy Feast and we laugh about it. The cats eat well when Facebook analytics look good.
3D printing isn’t some kind of nefarious Soviet cold war plot that’s going to infiltrate your home and turn your neighbors against you and make everyone on your block into fake-army printing IP thief anarchists. There are a few reasons why.
It’s Easy to do, But it’s Still Easy to do Wrong
You can still lose a lot of time and material if you 3D print a model poorly. It’s very easy to design a model now or download a model from the internet. But the 3D printer itself still has to obey the law of physics, and if you don’t set the model and the supports correctly on the print file, you’re going to lose a lot of time and a bit of cash. Building 3D models in a computer now is easy. Getting the model from your computer to your hands is “mostly easy” but that just means that it’s easy unless you screw it up.
This is actually a place where 3D printing loses to resin casting. When you fail at casting, you can still chop a bad mold and throw it into a new mold. Because silicone is recyclable into new silicone. Or repurpose the bad model for terrain or salvage the parts that came out well. Bad 3D prints are much more useless than bad casts.
They Still Take Time, and Time is the Enemy of Knock-Off Artists
Imagine that you know a guy that just bought a 3D printer and now, like everyone with a 3D printer, he wants to go start a business in his garage printing out knock-off parts for doodads or widgets or cosplay props or Warhammer models or whatever. He’s going to go open up his own Etsy page and start running that printer night and day to fill up his PayPal account.
Well, it’s not that easy. You see, anyone who wants to monetize their new 3D printer has to factor in the time it takes for them to print those parts. That means that making your 3D printer crap out a dozen two-dollar plasma guns for Space Marines is pretty brainless…
But printing out an entire large model or vehicle? That could take 72 hours. And in those 72 hours, the printer isn’t making any money. The harder you work to counterfeit a bigger model, the more cash is going to leak out of the printer. It’s easier to make money on smaller conversion bits that will come off the printer faster.
Is there going to be some guy that prints out an entire Forge World Gorgon or Thunderhawk? Yes, there is. I know him personally, he lives 10 minutes up the street from me. But is he going to be standing behind your local GW store like a crack dealer trying to pawn off a trunk of counterfeit Leman Russes and Land Raiders?
Nope. He wouldn’t make any money doing it. It still takes too long for the production scale of any at-home garage printer to make any money for a counterfeiter.
Games Workshop knows this, and their design studio takes advantage of it.
So if you’re GW, and you know that the end is coming and that 3D printing technology gets better and better and every year we get closer and closer to being able to make perfect, cheap, plastic clones of toys in our garages, what do you do?
We’ll continue with more on that next time, with what Jstove thinks GW’s plan is to counteract the rise in 3d Printing.
What do you think about how far 3D printing has come? Do you know anybody that bought a 3D printer to sell on the secondary market?
About the Author: Jack Stover
