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.