Subscribed to you. Do you have experience of manufacturing plastic mini.
And awesome sculptures! A friend of mine, who has an extensive background in rules and running games, and I are trying to get some ideas going. I would do the sculpting and some character design. This is GREAT info you have here! And I am familiar with 3D printers as I use an objet at work but the res we get out is NOT what I would say would reproduce well at that size with alot of scraping and hand sculpting after the grow. I would definetly be interested in seeing what we would get from a printer like yours once you get the printing side going for others. Do you guys do your own reproduction(casting) runs inhouse? Or do you send out for that.
@jollyjo: thx 
. Hopefully I’ll be able to identify your order - I’d like to throw some extras showing Zbrush-made items (badass orc biker has been sculpted in clay) .
@forestlonghill: while I can design the mould and prepare parts for plastic injection moulding I’d leave cutting the tool to some specialized shop. Breaking the models into parts and setting the draft is pain enough .
Atm we concentrate on resin casting and spincasting metal. While those mediums are less suited for mass production they do not constrain us in a way injected plastic does, we can cram much more complex details and textures. Well and the tooling costs are not that high 
.
That being said I may try training myself in cnc miling next year. Figuring out howto get round limits of the steel tool (mould for injection) seems fun.
@GrizzlyJake: we make all the casting inhouse. That was our starting point - pouring resin in the basement 
. Funny to look back - now we have a proper workshop and much more complex equipment .
Oh i ordered on saturday, made me a own birthday present from your shop :D. My real name is Sven S. from germany. Looking forward to this order, my real life brushes are trembling in their box.
Really amazing stuff. Thanks for posting this.
As an accomplished traditional miniature sculptor I am very encouraged to continue transitioning my skillset to digital.
A few more questions:
Is the Solidscape printer difficult to maintain?
Are the parts difficult to clean at that size in wax?
Is there a material you can print in other than wax and go directly to black rubber molds?
@Sculptdude: Yes, sadly, Solidscape printers are a tad tricky to maintain , even in their latest more “user friendly” incarnation. The software provided is on a bad side (it fails even at displaying models correctly, without some crazy refresh and the slicer is so slow), there are lot of moving parts inside, wax is raher brittle (and you have to “cook” the models in a smelly chemical to dissolve supports - a solution that has good and bad sides)… but when it works it is great :). So I’d recommend it to people that are not afraid about tinkering with stuff.
On a really good side you really don’t have to do much cleaning after printing .
With Soldiscape you can print only in wax - no other material choices. This printer has been built with making jewelry models for lost wax process.
So you have to make resin copies prior to working out black rubber moulds used in spincasters.
One of the ongoing projects we’re working on - and a pic of the print showing the scale 
. It has turned out this head is too big and we need to scale it down 
Recent prints we did for Norsgard Miniatures (used with permission, models sculpted in ZBrush, rendered in Modo):
To save the work during moulding we printed those with all the sprues/vents required.
Thumb up, another great work!
(And thank you, for the great delivery! ;))
Thx Jollyjo
Konrad has been working recently on a set of officer heads:
Again he exprimented how much “overemphasizing” the details affects the look of the real small scale model. This time it has shown us how far we should go to get the scars right.
Photo of the print - hasn’t completetly dried up after dewaxing, so taking a pic was tricky:
Great work! Love what I see… once my current project kicks off and I have some bucks, I’ll be knocking at your door, thanks for all the advice and help thus Far!
Regards Ziggy.
PS… our currency sucks at the moment therefore no orders yet!
So, on this last one it looks a little rough. Is that just the wax? Can you clean it up with heated sculpting tools or exactos/sandpaper? Carve or add to? It also look like you lose a little of the detail in the hats too, like the 4 studs above the skull and the details around the bottom. So, that seems to give you the amount of detail that you will get out of it, can you add those back? Or in casting would you lose that small of detail anyways? The skull looks like it could be pushed out a little more also to make it really pop and show up. Still, nice detail.
@Sigmund: look forward to it
@Grizzly Jake: as mentioned the pieces were still wet when I’ve been taking the photo (I couldn’t wait for them to dry), so it is not as good as usual (shine from fluid and fluid itself obstructs the details). As for studs on the cap - they were dropped during slicing. They had no sense - they are so small (check my fingerprints on the pic and imagine size of the stud :D) that simple thin coat of paint would mask them. SO we’ve set thicker layers for the part of the hat - removed the studs and saved us some time.
Other than that IMO the detail is fine - I’ll show you resin casts as soon as they are done (will propably make a vertical overcoat to show those even better ).
When it comes to cleaning - I’ve mentioned it earlier, as we sometimes print in lower res I found out that rubbing alcohol gets rid of the stepping effect. Also you can use all the other tools if you want - but I prefer to do that on a resin copy .
Oh yeah, no I totally understand the size. That is awesome detail for that small! I have tried it on our own Objet and you just cant get that small and get workable files. Most of the files I do for work are “christmas tree ornament” sized and go into Freeform for a clay file that we send to our vendors that make a mold from the file directly in metal. This is super interesting to me, trying to my own minature line someday. Thanks so much for showing your process and awesome sculpts!
You work on Freeform ? What are your impressions about it?
Does the haptic and software itself really make sense considering enormous cost? Apart from manufacturing related features (for example all the draft related tools) that no other sculpting app has (which is a shame really) I never could justify the price - even though I quite enjoyed playing with Freeform during trade shows.
BTW - seen some of your sculpts on your FB profile. Damn, those would make cool minis .
Freeform is just what this company has done for maybe 6-8 years? They have a few versions of it and few sculptors that use Freeform ONLY. Our vendor expects a CLAY file from Freeform for everything. Of course they use it for everything for production. I have sculpted with it a bit but not a lot. I am in awe of people that can. Great for booling out areas that need it but other than my final step of sending files out the door, I dont mess with it. The haptic arm is more of pain to me. I use Modo for base meshes and sizing…then Zbrush for everything else, back to Modo to do a glory/box shot.
ha…thanks for checking out my work! I have a couple of friends that where laid off from our company that are wanting to do some games. We want to grow a couple and test them out, thats why all the questions. They have a “vulcanizer” (sp?) also make metal minatures that they would like to try out some short runs.
thx Jake, I had similar impression, but I thought it might be because I’ve played with it only during trade shows. I only miss those manufacturing features (other I can get easily in apps we have in the workshop) - to makes things worse they are only present in the most expensive package. Last time I’ve checked it was around 30000USD - and for that $$$ I could get another hi res 3d printer . So for now I’m going around those features - the workarounds maybe are not that swift and handy but as long as I don’t have to prepare tons of items for plastic injection I’ll stick with them (especially considering the cost of software needed is 10 time lower than cost of Freeform) 
.
As for minis - unless your friends can get injection mould done cheaply sticking to spincasting at first is IMO a good idea . Few companies sell such huge amount of models to justify injection tooling costs. And what’s more with spincasting you don’t have to worry about draft and undercuts - so you can get away with much more complex models.
BTW - cool to see we’re using similar tools.
Recently we’ve been working on a 25mm “snakes” for a fellow jewelry maker (I think they’ll be used on earings). Kuba did base model in Rhino (with my little help - as I knew we had to be careful about volume/weight) and then Konrad did the sculpting in Zbrush. The render and some minor tweaks were done in Modo.
Snake looks good… 25mm in total height? I think I am on the right track then, the local guys must just get their printer sorted… in the mean time Modo/ZBrush have to continue with sculpts…
<style type=“text/css”><!-- br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;} --></style>Toy soldiers are made from all types of material, but the most common mass-produced varieties are metal and plastic. There are many different kinds of toy soldiers. I really enjot them.
@Sigmund: hehehehe - you can always shoot me an email in case local guys screw the things up
@Austin: true . Tin based metal alloys are especially funky when it comes to middle-sized batches ( as plastic makes sense only for large runs), while resin is awesome for small runs and extremely complex models.
ATM we’re experimenting with posing models in Modo. We’ll have to learn a lot about ZBrush->Modo->Zbrush interoperability .