Transcript:
Hello, guys! This is Penny from karma, cosplay and welcome back to one of my weird 3d printing videos a few days ago. I politely parts with Lana’s phone and made a post in her Instagram. Asking you what you wanted to know. Most about using 3d printers for cosplay. And you all wrote a lot of interesting technical questions. So thank you for that. I collected and wrote down. All of your suggestions and now have actually planned to make a couple of videos telling you all about the different printers and materials and techniques we use to make our own cosplay projects, so please look forward to more videos from me in the future. And yes, since last year’s with Ann and I have actually been working on a book about 3d printing for cosplay, and hopefully we will get that done soon too. But when looking through your comments, I noticed that there was one thing. I should probably get out of the way first before. I talk about anything else. One question. A lot of people seem to have in common and it’s. What 3d printer should? I get and oh, boy, I know where you’re coming from. I was at the exact same point just a few years ago to show you what I mean, let’s do a quick experiment, just type 3d printer into Amazon and you’ll get around 700 results. Now that’s just a stupid amount of printers to choose from and Amazon doesn’t even sell them all. Okay, maybe this will help go on Google and try to find a list of the best and most affordable 3d printers, then just pick a couple of lists. Take a look and you’ll notice every single one of them will tell you something different like, what the hell it’s like when you walk into the supermarket to buy a yogurt, and then you see how many yogurts there are and it’s just too damn many, and you can’t make a decision and then you start getting depressed. This type of choice overload is very real in a 3d printing community and the more printers. There are, they’re harder. It is to make a decision and in this video. I finally want to give you an answer to the question. Which printer should you start with? Luckily, if you’re like me and don’t care much about brands and just want to print a few couple of cool things for cosplay, there’s a really easy answer to this question. Just buy any printer you can afford. I know this probably sounds stupid, but hear me out When you want to buy a 3d printer for cosplay. You just need it to give you a good base to work on anyways. It honestly doesn’t really matter that much if your printer was very expensive or very cheap, if it prints in PLA or ABS, because no matter what you use, you’re gonna have to sand it for hours, apply spray primer and glue the pieces together and seal them and paint them before they finally look the way you want them to now. If you have some money to spare and want to buy an expensive printer. I say go for it. Chances are, you might reduce the time. You have to send your pieces before they look good, but you still have to send them a lot on the other side. If you buy a printer for dirt cheap, you just need to send a little bit longer before your pieces. Look good, But the results are still the same to prove my point. I did a little experiment. I bought a random cheap printer off the Internet. The Zetas mark 1 Why this one well, no particular reason, really? I just wanted to test if I could make some cool cosplay stuff with this relatively cheap machine. It was not any best printer lists, nor was it the first one that was recommended to me. It’s just an overall pretty average 3d printer. You can actually find good quality printers for even cheaper than that, But I thought 350 bucks is pretty average. You know, like the price of a decent sewing machine. OK, so let’s try it out. The Zetas prints in PLA, which is the cheapest and most common filament around one kilogram of it, usually costs around 20 bucks and can be bought pretty much anywhere. It’s based on corn starch or sugar cane, so it’s relatively safe to use If you have the option, though I still recommend putting the print away from your desk and in another room, they can get a bit smelly for the first test. I chose to print this, which I medallion from the my mini. Factory website, it’s a relatively small and detailed costume accessory. Something you often need for different cosplays. It would also have to test. How fine, the print quality is like many printers. The citas comes with its own software, So I decided to just stick with that. For this example. I loaded in the model rotated. It scaled it up a bit and left the rest of the settings on standard then. I hit print and waited patiently for around two hours until the medallion was done. Now, let’s remove the support material and take a look at the model. PLA is a really hard material, so I definitely recommend using a sturdy clipper and some eye protection to remove it. The model itself looks a right. I think all the details are there, but you can definitely still see a lot of visible layer lines. This is pretty normal, though. And even if you buy more expensive machine, you still have to work a bit over your model before you can paint it, but since. Pla is really really hard, though. Sanding is at least for me. Not really an option here. I tried it with sanding paper as well as a sanding machine but didn’t get far at all. This is not a problem, though, just apply a good layer of automotive spray primer. Wait for it to fully dry and then send it down again to the pla layer. Now it will look much better. I repeated the step one more time and the model was already smooth enough to paint. I then just applied a bit of dark silver and used an old sock and some rumba and voila, the wolf medallion. Looks like it was made out of metal here. You can see the difference again. Pretty good, right as you can see at the end, the original printing quality didn’t even matter that much anymore now. I quickly wanted to test if this printer would also work on entire costume pieces for this. I grabbed an old breastplate model! I made for salanas a low costume. Some time ago you can click on the info button here to see the whole costume video again By the way, then I send it to print and it took around 4 hours for each side and it worked like a charm. I just had to remove the support again and flew the pieces together with some super glue. The printing quality is definitely good enough. It only needs some spray fillers, sandpaper, a bit of paint, and you have a really cool-looking armored piece for your costume. Even though we printed all the original armor pieces for this costume in ABS, which is a lot easier to send. I think this experiment should prove that you honestly. Don’t need much more than a small and cheap PLA printer to make an entire costume, and I think that’s pretty awesome as you can see in the end, the original printing quality. It doesn’t even matter that much anymore. Now, if you still want a specific tip about which printer is the best and most affordable right now let me just quickly call someone up. Who knows more about this stuff than I do. Just hope I’m not interrupting him with anything That guys always so busy. Hey, hey, good to talk to you. No, no, you’re not interrupting anything, sure. I could give you a few starters. Why don’t you have people look at the kree allottee under three? Why don’t you have a look at the artillery genius and throw in the Prusa Mini As well? All of these are affordable machines that should be able to build whatever they want for cosplay. No, no, no, that’s not an exhaustive list. There’s gonna be machines that I haven’t had the chance to get to. That list. Should really get your users started. Yep, love you too, bye. Bye, so there you have it. All of these printers should be a good place to start and all of them can print in ABS and in PLA, which is great. I think I put links to all of them down in the video description. No matter which printer you end up getting, though, always remember, the tool is never as important as the person working with the tool so. I hope you found this video helpful, and if you did, please consider to subscribe or leave a like and a comment to help us out with the algorithm as always. Don’t forget to check out our cosplay, crafting books and our armor patterns on common cosplay comm and I will be back soon with more interesting 3d printing videos until then. Take care of yourself and do something nice for us. Bye bye!