Welcome to a world of infinite possibilities! Veteran bunker readers will be aware that I’ve been dabbling in 3d printing warhammer bits for a long time, despite the fact I do not have a printer myself. I recently shared some photos of newly acquired bits to fellow bunkerites, and a few asked about how I went about acquiring them, so I figured why not write a little post to share that knowledge. Honestly there’s no mystery to it, but these things are often easier if you don’t have to work it out for yourself.
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| Unlike Charlie, I hate freehand, so these lovely raven icons on their shoulders are custom printed |
Worth noting here that a lot of sites these days are selling 3d printed products, what I’m talking about here is the process of finding or making 3d models and getting them printed for you on demand.
Finding Bits
There’s two obvious options here, you can find some online and download them, or you can make them yourself. The key thing is the file type you will need to give to a printer is .stl.
Finding bits online
There are quite a few sites online where you can download 3d models for printing. In general the file format you’re looking for here is .stl, that’s what a 3d printer needs. Something to remember is that Games Workshop very legitimately have copyright on their own designs.
Personally I’m quite happy to buy 3d parts to accessorise or modify my GW models, but I don’t go in for wholesale replacing GW models with cheap copies. Opinions differ, however, and the world of .stls is swamped with copies and knockoffs and is essentially a running battlefield between new models being uploaded and GW issuing takedown requests, with plenty of perfectly innocent models getting caught in the crossfire.
If you see a model you like online there is no guarantee that it’ll still be there next week. This however could lead to a hoarding tendency of downloading all the models you might one day want, which is probably not a good idea either, especially as many of the better models are paid for. Browser beware.
Another side effect of this is that modellers will often avoid using GW names for things, to make them harder for GW to find, so expect to see “shoulder armour for interstellar jarhead crow legion” and similar.
There are loads of sites online for 3d models, but here are a few I’ve browsed a fair bit:
Cults3d
Probably my favourite site, it’s easy to navigate and I think the vibe is more of the passionate hobby creator, rather than more commercial designer. This is where I’d expect to find people making legion specific bits because they’re passionate about them.
My Mini Factory
In comparison, MMF is where I expect the big name modellers to be, who typically are producing “legally distinct” models, which I’m personally not interested in. It’s very much focussed on miniatures, but most of that is D&D etc, so it can be quite hard to search through for something specific simply because of volume. But if you have the patience, there’s some amazing in stuff there.
Thingiverse
Going in the other direction, Thingiverse seems to be a place for people who like playing with 3d printers and there’s not much of a wargaming crowd there.
Making bits yourself
The only way GW will accept any 3d printed parts at an official event is if you design and print them yourself, and then only if it’s a component and not a whole miniature. Essentially treating the process of 3d modelling the same as if you sculpted bits with green stuff. Anything else is considered third party and thus not permitted at an official event. Instore is a bit less clearly defined, and would be at the manager’s discretion.
But how?! There are a couple of free tools out there. Personally I like using Autodesk Fusion, which is commercial grade design software, but has a free version for limited personal use. This is very much geared for solid engineering, not sculpting, so best for hard angular shapes. I’ve previously posted about my custom Bladeguard shields which I designed using Fusion, but I later pushed the design to create these scaled shields for Salamanders Bladeguard.
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| My 3d model |
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| Printed and painted by Boris |
That was definitely getting into the realms of the quite tricky, with curves upon curves upon curves. Much easier has been taking existing models other people have made and extruding chapter symbols onto them, such as Repulsor doors and BFG ships, but I don’t think GW would accept that as tournament legal. Of course making your own doors from scratch to qualify wouldn’t be hard, I’m just lazy.
For those looking for a more digital sculpting experience, rather than engineering, Blender is the go-to free software. Personally I’ve used it very little, just a bit of customisation work on Anvil Industries Light Assault Mech with switching on and off layers, but it’s a pretty thorough tool. You’ll find people on YouTube falling over themselves to teach you how to use either of them.
Getting them printed
Obviously if you have your own printer you can just print them yourself (the world “just” doing some very heavy lifting there), but this article is not aimed at those people. For those of us without the space, funds and/or patience for printing ourselves, custom printing services have been popping up.
Unfortunately I think this new commercial space seems to be somewhat unstable still. My first stuff was through Photon Fabrication, which is sadly now shut. Next I moved up to Hammerline Miniatures, who were great but have currently paused taking new business. My latest find has been Crafted Campaigns. If you hit up their custom miniatures page you’ll see a flat rate for standard D&D miniatures, but the bit you’ll want is the email for a custom request. Other than the different email addresses, my experience has basically been the same for each company I’ve used.
You just have to email them your files, either attached or with links to a file sharing service such as Drive, explaining what you want (i.e. ten of these, five of these etc). If you ask nicely you can probably get them to do basic things like flip the model, as that’s a one-click option in most printing software (for example for some reason the Raven Guard Terminator pads I got were for the left shoulder, even though we all know the crux terminatus goes there, so I needed them flipped to the right).
They’ll get back to you with a quote for printing and postage, and send you a payment link. Then it’s just a case of waiting.
The results
Eventually a happy little package will arrive. Generally, although of course with different companies your mileage may vary, you’ll receive them cleaned and with the supports removed. 3d printing resin is nasty stuff, and the cleaning process is pretty horrible too, so if you do find somehow they’ve sent you something wet or oozy, be sure not to touch it and contact them immediately.
Natively models come out of the printer with a support scaffolding. With the nature of printing resin being somewhat brittle, they generally remove the supports to make sure they can come off without breaking the models themselves. You’ll still need to to a bit of cleaning up of the printing scars, and the fact you will have those scars is something to be aware of. Hopefully your printer will be sensible about what angle to print them at to minimise the impact.
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| An experimental print I received a long time ago with the supports still attached |
You’ll probably still need to clean them up a bit yourself though, and do be very careful filing resin dust, it’s nasty stuff. The usual “well ventilated area and wear a mask” rules apply for working with resin.
Here’s my latest order, which came to £10 printing plus £3.50 postage:
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| Wonderfully packaged |
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| A couple of plastic terminator pads included to check the scale match |
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| A few of the support scars are still visible here and need to be cleaned up |
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