Has anyone on the Forum used a 3d printer for creating buildings, roads, pavements, etc.
I would be interested in your experiences and what software you used to create your 3d prints
I am especially interested in any information on any scale drawings or real drawings for that matter of French buildings pre 1940
Not what you’re looking for but my company is a architecture and engineering firm and we model sites for construction. Our models are done in Civil 3D and are exportable to Fusion. One of our designers has a 3D printer. She worked on projects that covered 5 to 10 acres and would export her finished surfaces to her 3D printer, scale them to fit it’s output size and print them. They look pretty cool and you can see the site layout perfectly.
Ha! Had I the money to spend into a good one I would immediately buy one, but alas thus far they are still very expensive for my pockets and considering the cost of resin as well it would come to an even heavier burden. I can though understand your desire to acquire one just because it would give by far more options to build your own original stuff rather than to rely on the good will of the market out there. So I wish you good luck and hope to see some of your work with it in a near future.
I’ve not done buildings or other items for dioramas but have printed terrain for 1/24 and 1/18 RC crawlers. And a couple of 1/10 scale RC cars. A FDM or filament printer is well suited to this type of print as it’s relatively fast and is cheap and easy to run. It can also print larger buildings but detail can suffer as well as having layer lines that require post processing.
On the other hand, a resin printer is more suited to figures, items with fine detail and smaller things like personal possessions for the inhabitants of the diorama. I’ve never even seen a resin printer in real life. There are nasty chemicals and more post print processing than I care for.
As for software, one of the biggies is Autodesk’s Fusion 360. There is an open source 3D software called Freecad. Some people use OnShape. I can’t figure any of these out, I stick with Tinkercad. Sources for files include Etsy, Cults3d, thingiverse and printables. You can probably get printed items from Etsy, skipping buying the printer and software altogether.
I usually buy such 3D figures from Aliexpress. Especially when they are in a bundle and have interesting postures. So far I have just had problems with one shipment which was really terrible because the figures were subprinted and sported various defects. Among them, being too small in 1/35 scale. Said that, I still managed to add those missing details and fill some gaps in them.
And for the size? Well, not everyone is a tall blonde soldier and among them there were some shorties and those usually showed some true grit in battle and therefore I still welcome them despite their size. The only thing I had to modify on them though, were the weapons they were handling and with a little help from my racks of additional weapons I only had to change the appropriate ones to fit them to the figures.
The cost of those coming from Aliexpress is by far lower than those you find in our normal marketing venues and they match any sophisticated ones and this is also true for any diorama items I may need. Only occasionally do I buy stuff in Switzerland, Germany or Italy and only if I cannot find them on either Etsy or as said, Aliexpress.
I used to be a faithful client with Hannants in the UK and many modeling stores in the United States, but after the rise in postage and handling, and the constant blowing up of prices I cannot afford to order from them anymore.
This stupid commercial war among Nations is ruining many businesses and I regret that very much since it is just a capricious political game and nothing more.
So, if I cannot order there, then I have to resort to those markets that do not break my budget unnecessarily. I hope you understand my problem.