Transcript:
I want to show you how to set up your dice for 3d printing, but I’ve already used all the 3d printing intro puns. I’m going to need some support to get through this one. My words aren’t going to hold up on their own. So if you play any support classes in your sessions, my pun game could use some lifting up settings aside the dicey puns. Let’s make some masterful dice masters. Today I’ll be showing you how to set up your dice 3d printing file so that you can get quality prints every single time I’ve shown what to do with your dice after you print them before, but I’ve never shown how to set them up on the computer, so I thought that was worth exploring today. Now I’m not going to pretend to be an expert as to why this happens, but for some reason, whenever you’re printing dice on something like an elugu mars or a any cubic photon, you’d probably assume you could set up a die just like this and print it just fine. However, I think it has something to do. With the precise geometry of the dye that whenever you’re going up with the layers, it starts to create these weird inconsistencies in your dice, and you’ll get these weird, droopy corners, anybody. Who’s tried to jump right into 3d printing? Their own dicemasters knows exactly what I’m talking about with the power of computer technology. I can show you with the droopy. Droop tool, exactly what it will look like in premiere, the corners essentially start to look like this after they are printed, they get rounded. They’re kind of off angle, and they’re not going to be balanced at all, Which is no bueno, and we want to try and fix that. I want to preface this by saying. If you have a really expensive 3d printer like a form labs or a Formlabs 2 you’ve probably never experienced this issue and that first image that I showed of the print will work just fine. However, a ton of people myself included use budget, 3d printers and want results that mimic the big dogs. So let me show you how to avoid those droopy corners so that you can make dice that rival the expensive setups. My original plan was to just put supports on one single face of each die and then just pray that it would work and that would work for about one out of every 10 dice. But I was tired of the randomness of that After that I tried. Putting fin type supports that go all the way up the edges of the dice, every few spaces and supporting all of the islands, and that actually worked really really well. This method worked every time for me, but it didn’t work. Every time I had other people test it and so I was trying to improve upon the process. When I came across a Youtube channel called imagination Labs with Rev Chumley revs channel is fantastic, and his video was exactly what I needed to find for tweaking my support setup so huge credit to him. My video is going to draw a lot of parallels to his with changes that I feel are super important, but if you’re still struggling, go check his out. 3d printing is finicky and what works with his method and settings may work better for you than mine, so always try different things until you find what works best for you. The program that I’m going to be using to set up The supports is Chittoo box. The first thing that I’m going to do is flatten it by a face. I’m going to use the one’s face. You don’t have to use that one. But it’s generally best to keep it near the low numbers. The reason that doesn’t matter all that much is because we’re actually looking for a point here. I’m gonna rotate about this face until I find a corner that I like you can do this with any corner. If you have a six sided die, you should have four corners instead of three. That really doesn’t make a big difference here. You want to get the die looking like it’s balancing just on one single corner. Rotate your die around because sometimes it’ll be leaning and you want to make sure it’s standing pretty much straight up for this technique to work, but don’t stress too much. It’s not that big a deal. What is a huge deal? However, is the settings that I use for the supports. Take a look at the right side of my screen. I’m using only light supports on this and they are extremely thin. We’re going to create Fin style supports by adding light supports as close to each edge as possible. On my old method, I did about 10 to 12 supports for the length of an edge, but what I learned from revs videos. If you place a ton of supports essentially touching each other along that edge, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get zero warping on your corners and edges. It’ll essentially give your printer no other choice, but to print those edges and corners in a straight line. One thing you really want to zoom in for and watch out is that those supports don’t. Go over those corner ledges there. If you do so whenever you remove these corners, you’re probably going to chip a corner and not get a nice, sharp edge. You want to put supports along each edge that touches the bottommost corner of your die? This covers all the corners that typically droop or misalign. And so you should be good to go. Sometimes you may have to add a support to the dot in the center of Sixes, Nines zeros eights or any number that has an island of material. You can see the difference. In the fins we just created and the fins that I used to make. I think the combination of revs supports that are nearly touching and my very thin contact Diameters makes for an ideal support setup and after adding supports to all of the edges on all of the dice, We have a fully set up set of RPG dice. You can see that I did. Add some supports to some of the islands on the numbers like the 18 on the d20 or some of the numbers on the d100 But you probably don’t need them and you might be thinking. Yo, Ribonator’s! Some of these dice are looking dope as heck, and you’re right. They’re actually dice made by the blue mimic, and he’s one of the OG custom dice makers out there, and he’s actually got his stuff on the my minifactory store now, and this is kind of important because this is the first time he’s put dice stl’s out there that you can use and recreate in resin that he’s not gonna like sue you for if you take his stuff and sell them, so that’s really awesome, and these are some unique shapes that allow you to have that opportunity that you otherwise might not have, so if you’ve been looking for some masters or an excuse to get some of those, he actually has a store on there now, so that’s pretty dope the dice on there come pre-supported because you just saw me make the supports for them. I actually made the supports for his store, but I don’t have any financial tie to a store and to prove that those dice that I put out there for free Those STL files that I said, I’m not gonna sue you for if you take them and go make a whole store out of them. I pre-supported those and put them out there as well. So if you want those, you can check the download link in the description down below if you want regular die shapes and not his cool, unique new ones as far as print settings are concerned. I’m going to show you on screen my print settings for my elegumar’s pro, as well as my print settings for my elugu Mars. Now this is for using ameralabs resin. If you’re using regular elugu mars resin, I would add probably about two seconds to each exposure time, and you should be good to go. Honestly, that’s it for the settings. I even gave you some pre-supported dice. If you don’t want to support your own. But that makes for an unsatisfying end to a video, so I’m going to show you my process of actually printing them out and what I have to do there for my prints. I’m going to be using Amerilab’s amd3 printing resin. It’s a really expensive resin. You don’t have to use it. I just really like it and have a bunch, so I’m going to, and I’m going to print it on my my mini factory. Elugu Mars Pro. They sponsored this video so huge, thanks to my mini factory and Elegumar’s pro prints, just a little bit quicker than a regular elugu Mars. That’s why I have different settings for my pro and my regular since I have both, and so you want to make sure that you get settings that are according to whichever printer you’re using, though. I don’t think this is going to be that different than using something like a photon as is my duty for being a youtuber. I have to get a really awesome looking. Time-lapse shot of the dice being printed from the resin printer. And I think I did my job. One six hour time lapse later and we’re ready to take the dice off of the build plate. The reason I stress my light Support settings with tiny contact Diameters is the cleanup involved with the dice. Resin printers can get super tiny details, so let’s use that strength. We’re going to treat them like we would any normal printed miniature like you see in the footage. We should be able to pop the dice into alcohol. Snap the sprues off cleanly without worrying too much about spruce cleanup and then cure the resin with UV light or just out in the sun. If you really have to after the resin is done curing in your UV setup, this is what it should look like, and you might be thinking. Whoa, those don’t look perfect and ready to go, but you’re right. We do have to do some sanding to them. You’re going to see a bunch of dots on the edge like you do here on this d20 and you’re going to think that’s not great. But those will absolutely go away in sanding its divots or chips into the edges or corners that you have to worry about because we can always take material away, but we definitely can’t. Add it back to sand dice. I like to use zona papers, which is essentially very fine grit. Sandpaper, we’re going to start it around the equivalent of 800 grit, sandpaper and go up to what is the equivalent of sixteen thousand grit, It’s very fine. I always do wet sanding to make sure I don’t burn the resin and reduce the amount of dust and I’m doing my sanding on a pottery wheel. All this does is spin my sandpaper around, so you don’t have to worry about this. This just reduces the amount of hand sanding I have to do. You can see the 3d printing build lines on the side of this d6 here on the ones face. So I’m going to go ahead and sand that down until that’s smooth. We will do this to every single side, but I’m just going to show you this one here so that you can see the difference between an unsanded and a sanded die. This result is only after the first level of zona papers. If you go even further, you can get this thing. Mirror-like or almost like glass. I only use the first grid of zona papers, and you can see that all of the dots along the edges of this d6 are gone and we have a perfectly sharp d6 Since this video isn’t about making a completely sanded set of dye. I only did the d6 and this odd shape d12 from the blue mimics set that I showed off earlier and there’s a reason for that. I left all of the rest of them unsanded. Because I want to run a little experiment Later on dice printed via SLA resin printers like elegumars and the elugu Mars pro have a problem curing in platinum-based silicone. So if you’re trying to re-mold these, that’s a problem, you might have heard me talk about a product called inhibit X before that eliminates this issue with SLA resin-based dice. Well, inhibit X is expensive as heck, and supposedly there’s a better solution, which is to just have patience and wait. Apparently, if you just leave your dice sitting out the coating on the resin that inhibits the curing of platinum-based silicone will just evaporate. And you should have no issues so to test that we’re gonna mold. These two sanded dice after a few weeks or months, and then at that time, we’re gonna sand and then mold the other dice to see if they still cause curing problems this way, we’ll know if this truly is an issue at the surface of the dice or if waiting for a few weeks will fix the dice that have yet to be sanded, which hopefully will lead us to some molds that will give us crystal clear dice just like these, which, by the way if you’re more of a 3d printer and not a dice maker, you might be wondering, why can’t we just use the 3d printed dice? Well, the reason you want to remold them is. You can see here. When I’m trying to scratch one 3d printed dye with another, it actually can scratch. The surface. 3d printed resin is far softer than the typical casting resin that we use for making dice so that’s. Why we generally do that anyway? Thank you for watching this video. I hope that you found it educational or at least somewhat helpful. Thanks again to Rev Chumley at imagination labs for coming up with the connected fin idea. At least I think it was his idea. It really was kind of the missing link that I had to get a really nice set of supports for dice. I’ll put a link to his video In the description down below. I’ll also put a link to the blue mimic super cool, unique dice on the my mini factory page as well as a download link to the dice that I put out there for free and both of those sets of dice. Come pre-supported! So, hey, that’s good for you. Subscribe if you might want to see some more videos like this in the future or to learn how to make your own resin dice from scratch like the video. If you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it and I hope that you have a fantastic day.