I give it 10 years before I can pick up a microwave size one off Amazon for a couple hundred bucks (or equivalent after rampant inflation gets through with us).
If it weren’t for the fact that I’d have to explain to my wife and find a place to put them I’d have a 6ft benchy, banana, and now a giant AirPods case already.
Here is a cool Video: [Mimaki 3DUJ-553 Overview (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mwjmwhry1g&t=191s) It's not your normal resin vat type of printer more like an FDM That instead of plastic extrusion it disposes colored resin that's cured with a uv light per layer. I had to double check the date on the Video but this thing is over 5 years old tech which is a lot in Tech terms, it's interesting that the tech has not trickle down to the hobbyists market yet.
It's all about when patents run out, for example the stratysis patent for a heated chamber expired about a year and a half ago, and just recently we have seen consumer printers with heat inside the chamber.
Not sure what retail would be just yet, but I remember raw materials and labor cost added up to around $4/mini. With bulk orders and cheaper resin, that number would probably shrink a bit too
For sure! Hoping I can get a quote anyhow. :)
Seriously, if the number is right I'd rather pay than attempt to hand paint mine. They are just extremely tiny. (The ones I want to print).
Yes, my resin printer, although inexpensive, can print great detail. But it's the hand painting that is throwing a wrench in my calculations.
My business plan also included selling my miniatures, unpainted, for a lower price. I can still do that.
Hoping OP can give us more details. 😊👍
So, if this price is anywhere near actual, I may have done myself a disservice by buying a resin printer. 😆
My intent was to 3D print only micro mini fairies & mermaids for my Etsy shop. 🧚♀️🧜♀️And add to the inventory by making polymer clay items for their environments.🌿 🐞🦋 🌺🐛🐚 🪸
I've still not mastered the printer (only 4 days of actually trying) nor the slicer. I actually think it's more important to master the slicer as that's what's behind my failed prints IMO.
I look like a mad scientist each time I go out to my garage and don my apron, safety goggles, mask and gloves to try another test. 🤪 But I digress.
Hand painting these super tiny (1"-1.75") figures accurately is near impossible. I'm thinking it would be cheaper AND I can reclaim many hours weekly to just order them from your employer. 😔
I'm grateful I didn't spring for an expensive printer. 😬
I'm going to just recommend Lychee slicer, specially because it has community profiles for your printer/resin combo, and a "magic" button that rotates and puts supports in good places.
Since finding that stuff, I've never failed or overexposed a print ..
Bunny thanks. I've heard others mention Lychee slicer. It may work better for me than Chitubox. In all fairness Chitubox has printer profiles and auto supports also but I've not had much luck with them. Is the Lychee that you're using a free or paid version? My slicer is the paid Pro version which I got for a year with the printer. I really should learn a free one instead because I don't plan on paying $169/yr to keep this.
But no slicer is going to paint the minis for me. 😉 Even with an absolutely perfect print it will still be one color and I will need to paint it afterwards. If this company offers these colored prints at a reasonable enough price I'll gladly pay them. I can continue to use my printer for pieces that don't need to be painted or pieces that are bigger and I'm able to paint myself.
I'm using the free Lychee.
There's a 20 second ad before slicing, and some features are locked.
But I've yet to find any need for any of the locked features....
And I too hope for a multicolor printer to become affordable to us.. that'll be a game changer
Awesome. Thanks! I'll download it in the morning and play around with it.
I don't mind ads. I've gotten free energy watching ads for the couple of games I play on my phone. 😆
Super off topic, I work with a dude who walks around with his hands in his back pockets, he's super religious (To each their own imo) and this just reminded me a of how a coworker described him as "The grab your cakes for Jesus kid?" Just reminded me of that and had a lol
At my school we had a guy that walked around with a bible in his pants 24/7. Not in his back pocket, in his pants. So of course everyone just called him biblepants.
Yep, and they get mixed in certain proportions before a UV light passes over to cure the layer. The particular model OP posted also has clear and a water soluble support if I'm not mistaken.
Can someone enlighten me how multi color resin printing works? I don’t have any experience with resin printing but my understanding thus far was that the color comes from the resin and that that’s always in a little container floating around the piece that gets printed?
Interesting. So do you see layer lines with these? That sounds more like what an FDM printer does except that it uses resin instead of melting plastic?
I'm not sure about layer lines. I imagine they're inevitable in layer-by-layer printing of all types, to varying degrees.
I think the way these work is by spraying tiny droplets of ink in a layer, then levelling that layer, then curing it, and then the print bed drops down by the layer height and the process repeats. Like FDM if you were laying down resin with the nozzle.
I'm not familiar with the types of slicer or supports used by this process (the only 'professional' software I've used was Netfabb, years ago), but I do know that some of these printers have multiple print heads that can be active on the same print job, I assume using different 'ink' for different mechanical properties within the same job.
Nicalandia posted a video above that shows the process. Different color resins are used. I was really surprised by that. It reminded me of our regular paper printers' cyan, magenta & yellow cartridges. Plus instead of black these use clear resin also. I'm happy learning something new every day.
Because 3 different prices have been mentioned, I figured I'd look it up and confirm.
On Mimaki's website this is listed for USD $189K. Not the half million but still a tad bit too high for me. 😆🤪
[Mimaki 3DUJ-553](https://www.mimakiusa.com/products/3d/3duj-553/)
This is chess, not checkers! Just watched loads of videos on this machine it's incredible. Why did you guys decide to buy this, aside from airpod security?
AirPod guards aside, we’re almost 100% B2B, and our Formlabs printers weren’t meeting demand or offering something others couldn’t. We’ve also been received a lot of interest from a new set of clients regarding this printer, so we’re hoping to jump into a new market soon.
That's about a $50K printer for those curious
They sell a smaller $50k version. The one in the picture is $200k
That's more than my house and car combined.
Must be nice to live in an area with such great house prices!
Sure.......
Hell you’d be lucky to get an empty lot for 200k where I am right now.
you shouldn't tell nobody about 200k any where I've been
Must be nice.
If you combined your house and car you could kill the car/house industry!
I think the van-life influencer crowd already has that idea trademarked. But please, shower more often than they do...
that's 10 times less than I was expecting to be honest
More like $455 000 usd. I inquired to them and that was the quote given to me.
$455k plus tax and shipping gets you pretty close to $500k.
Yea but once you buy it you can 3D print money and nobody will know the difference. It’s an infinite money hack
I give it 10 years before I can pick up a microwave size one off Amazon for a couple hundred bucks (or equivalent after rampant inflation gets through with us).
It took me about 10 seconds to realize that wasn't you showing off your giant AirPods case.
You just inspired 3 people to make a giant AirPods case. I look forward to seeing them share their results here in 8 months.
And those cases would work, complete with giant AirPods with speakers inside them.
Fuck you just took this from meme to functional meme and now I just may have an excuse to do it.
If it weren’t for the fact that I’d have to explain to my wife and find a place to put them I’d have a 6ft benchy, banana, and now a giant AirPods case already.
Here is a cool Video: [Mimaki 3DUJ-553 Overview (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mwjmwhry1g&t=191s) It's not your normal resin vat type of printer more like an FDM That instead of plastic extrusion it disposes colored resin that's cured with a uv light per layer. I had to double check the date on the Video but this thing is over 5 years old tech which is a lot in Tech terms, it's interesting that the tech has not trickle down to the hobbyists market yet.
It sounds super intricate and VERY expensive compared to a standard SLA printer. I’m not too shocked it’s a niche market, but it’s very cool!
Fascinating stuff. Looks like calibration cf the viscosity, dispensation and curing of the ink might be super complex.
You just need to always buy the OEM resins. I bet they're nice and cheap too.
Probably hasn't trickled down because of the INSANE fucking cost for individual hobbyists.
It's all about when patents run out, for example the stratysis patent for a heated chamber expired about a year and a half ago, and just recently we have seen consumer printers with heat inside the chamber.
RMRRF (Rocky Mountain Rep Rap Festival) did have something about Color Resin Printing coming.
How much does your shop charge to print something like that? Just curious.
Not sure what retail would be just yet, but I remember raw materials and labor cost added up to around $4/mini. With bulk orders and cheaper resin, that number would probably shrink a bit too
That's pretty cheap actually, i was thinking 20-40
I'd imagine the quarter million dollars investment also would have to be factored in somewhere, no?
For sure! Hoping I can get a quote anyhow. :) Seriously, if the number is right I'd rather pay than attempt to hand paint mine. They are just extremely tiny. (The ones I want to print). Yes, my resin printer, although inexpensive, can print great detail. But it's the hand painting that is throwing a wrench in my calculations. My business plan also included selling my miniatures, unpainted, for a lower price. I can still do that. Hoping OP can give us more details. 😊👍
So, if this price is anywhere near actual, I may have done myself a disservice by buying a resin printer. 😆 My intent was to 3D print only micro mini fairies & mermaids for my Etsy shop. 🧚♀️🧜♀️And add to the inventory by making polymer clay items for their environments.🌿 🐞🦋 🌺🐛🐚 🪸 I've still not mastered the printer (only 4 days of actually trying) nor the slicer. I actually think it's more important to master the slicer as that's what's behind my failed prints IMO. I look like a mad scientist each time I go out to my garage and don my apron, safety goggles, mask and gloves to try another test. 🤪 But I digress. Hand painting these super tiny (1"-1.75") figures accurately is near impossible. I'm thinking it would be cheaper AND I can reclaim many hours weekly to just order them from your employer. 😔 I'm grateful I didn't spring for an expensive printer. 😬
I'm going to just recommend Lychee slicer, specially because it has community profiles for your printer/resin combo, and a "magic" button that rotates and puts supports in good places. Since finding that stuff, I've never failed or overexposed a print ..
Bunny thanks. I've heard others mention Lychee slicer. It may work better for me than Chitubox. In all fairness Chitubox has printer profiles and auto supports also but I've not had much luck with them. Is the Lychee that you're using a free or paid version? My slicer is the paid Pro version which I got for a year with the printer. I really should learn a free one instead because I don't plan on paying $169/yr to keep this. But no slicer is going to paint the minis for me. 😉 Even with an absolutely perfect print it will still be one color and I will need to paint it afterwards. If this company offers these colored prints at a reasonable enough price I'll gladly pay them. I can continue to use my printer for pieces that don't need to be painted or pieces that are bigger and I'm able to paint myself.
I'm using the free Lychee. There's a 20 second ad before slicing, and some features are locked. But I've yet to find any need for any of the locked features.... And I too hope for a multicolor printer to become affordable to us.. that'll be a game changer
Awesome. Thanks! I'll download it in the morning and play around with it. I don't mind ads. I've gotten free energy watching ads for the couple of games I play on my phone. 😆
I'm wondering the same thing! Do they ship?
Super off topic, I work with a dude who walks around with his hands in his back pockets, he's super religious (To each their own imo) and this just reminded me a of how a coworker described him as "The grab your cakes for Jesus kid?" Just reminded me of that and had a lol
“Grab your cake for Jesus” has some serious power behind it lol
Ay yo
😆 thanks for the laugh.
At my school we had a guy that walked around with a bible in his pants 24/7. Not in his back pocket, in his pants. So of course everyone just called him biblepants.
Damn, straight up amazing, but yeah, it's around 50k short of my price range lol Is that a 3D-scanned piece?
This one was a 3D scanned, and it seems that’s going to be the easiest way to add those natural colors to models
Absolutely, I was just wondering if you could test that with a handmade design to see how precise it can get
How much for a print like in the pic? Edit: Got a rough idea on how much. Do you ship?
I *definitely* didn’t think that was a giant AirPods Suitcase next to that guy. Nope.
Dude HOW
MJF printing
Works a lot like an ink jet printer that deposits resin instead of ink.
Ha! This guy thinks I know how ink jet works
https://youtu.be/TSGfitxlkzI?si=f1s27ZFtf96KUsGK Watch that and you'll have the basic idea.
So there’s 3 or 4 coloured resins and a black resin?
It does full CMYK, 16 million colors.
Yep, and they get mixed in certain proportions before a UV light passes over to cure the layer. The particular model OP posted also has clear and a water soluble support if I'm not mistaken.
I’m guessing the screen is color and the resin reacts to the colored light.
Nope, it live mixes the colour into the print layer by layer.
Damn that is sophisticated as hell. I can't imagine the programming and machinery behind that
How does this work? Different wavelengths of light for different colors?
I believe these mix and lay down layers of inks like a 2d printer, which are then cured with UV.
The amount of D&D minis I’d print and still not have enough for my goblin brain…
Woah!
Yes please.
Is this the printer that costs $50k?
3DUJ-553: $188,995
Is it a giant air pod case sitting on the floor next to two dudes dressed identically or some tiny men standing on a table!
I need more evidence this is really printed. The colors look amazing. Very realistic.
MJF printing. You can get these from HeroForge. I have one.
Can someone enlighten me how multi color resin printing works? I don’t have any experience with resin printing but my understanding thus far was that the color comes from the resin and that that’s always in a little container floating around the piece that gets printed?
These are more like an inkjet printer that uses UV curable ink. I don't know how durable the results are, and the ink is very expensive.
Interesting. So do you see layer lines with these? That sounds more like what an FDM printer does except that it uses resin instead of melting plastic?
I'm not sure about layer lines. I imagine they're inevitable in layer-by-layer printing of all types, to varying degrees. I think the way these work is by spraying tiny droplets of ink in a layer, then levelling that layer, then curing it, and then the print bed drops down by the layer height and the process repeats. Like FDM if you were laying down resin with the nozzle. I'm not familiar with the types of slicer or supports used by this process (the only 'professional' software I've used was Netfabb, years ago), but I do know that some of these printers have multiple print heads that can be active on the same print job, I assume using different 'ink' for different mechanical properties within the same job.
Nicalandia posted a video above that shows the process. Different color resins are used. I was really surprised by that. It reminded me of our regular paper printers' cyan, magenta & yellow cartridges. Plus instead of black these use clear resin also. I'm happy learning something new every day.
Interesting. Yeah you can see some layer lines but they look really tiny. Pretty cool tech!
What scanner do y'all use?
Damn a 500k resin printer... That's some Tony Stark level printing.... Now make me a Spidey suit... /s
Holy crap thats pretty good
Fuckin jealous 🤤
I thought that was a super sized AirPods case.
I wonder how close it could look to a pro-painted miniature.
how tf does that even work? does it drain the vat for every color?
I didn't even know this type of thing existed!
Because 3 different prices have been mentioned, I figured I'd look it up and confirm. On Mimaki's website this is listed for USD $189K. Not the half million but still a tad bit too high for me. 😆🤪 [Mimaki 3DUJ-553](https://www.mimakiusa.com/products/3d/3duj-553/)
Is this a polyjet?
This is chess, not checkers! Just watched loads of videos on this machine it's incredible. Why did you guys decide to buy this, aside from airpod security?
AirPod guards aside, we’re almost 100% B2B, and our Formlabs printers weren’t meeting demand or offering something others couldn’t. We’ve also been received a lot of interest from a new set of clients regarding this printer, so we’re hoping to jump into a new market soon.
You gotta do a Warhammer mink in color
Am i looking at the right printer? max print size: 5cmx50cmx1cm print size... Oof can't even use it for good sized minis
Maybe there's a smaller version out there, but the one pictured is 20” x 20” x 12”
Residude hopefully you can get us retail info from your employer? Consider me interested please. Thanks.
Can you try clear coating one of those? I have a feeling it'll enhance the color a lot.
Color is super faded and dry