Transcript:
In this video, I go over some of the costs for 3d printing, your minis and terrain [Music]. Hi, everyone, Danny. The thirty printing DM here. Thank you for joining me today at 3d printed tabletop. I decided to step out of the dungeon today and try something new today. Hope you like it. I know it’s a little more boring, but I like the light well. One of the most common questions asked by someone who is interested or new to 3d printing is. How much does a mini like this or a mini like this or a dungeon? Tyler or a piece of terrain. How much does it cost? And it’s a good question because you know, investing a lot of money in a printer, and so it only makes sense to want to see how much filament costs, which is our gonna be our main expense, so we’re gonna talk about that. We’re gonna talk about how much these costs and I’m gonna teach you how to figure it out on your own so that you can see how much you’re spending or how much it would cost to make a specific dungeon set or to make a specific group of terrain or whatever you want to do, but I want you to know how much it’s gonna cost, cuz A cost can add up, so it word of caution before we begin. Do not use this video to go to a XXX printing service and say 20 or 40 cents. Why are you charging me three dollars? For a single tile 3d printing services. They’re a whole other beast, okay, and there are a whole bunch of cost that. I’m not including in this video because we’re talking about home printing. That’s what this channel is about is home pretty, not commercial, and I’ll sorry own print farm and so much goes into price. You know, a thirty printing service like this that even it even in a basement operation so licensing fees, you know the quality of the product how long it’s taken cost of time and labor and even without expense like overhead, even if you factor in a little bit of profit not to mention the expertise of that company or the individual who’s providing that service And you know, it’s like you want to go to a graphic designer and say that only took you ten minutes. So why are you charging me 400 bucks? That’s that doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense to go to your printer and say, dude, you press the button and like the two minutes of clean up. What the so to just make sure that this horse is and one of the other videos in this place? I spent ten minutes talking about work involved in getting Prince to high quality and how a lot of people don’t do that because it’s hard and you have to develop these certain skills in order to do that, and that’s why 3d printing services exist to be Frank, so don’t use this video as a haggling tool. Please and grant, so how to calculate cost you calculate cost by by going into your slicer like simplify 3d or Kira and slicing the file. Then you look at how many grams of material are being used and then you do some basic math, you know, divide the grams of material by one thousand grams or whatever spool size you’re using, and then you multiply by how much the filament how much the roll of filament cost and so if you’re printing with supports, just be sure to turn those on when you calculate the cost because it adds up big time, especially for bigger prints in general. I look at a range of costs when I’m doing this type of presentation because you can buy PLA rolls for as cheap as fifteen dollars or as high as you know, twenty eight and even more than that right, but we’re gonna run down to twenty-five dollars. I’m using inland as my kind of a baseline for the for the cheap support. It’s a popular, cheap brand people love it. I’m using hatch box as my high-end tier brand of filament that people love. There’s high rolls of patch box and lower rolls of hatch box summer. 2223 Others are twenty eight, twenty nine, so I’m meeting down in the middle around Twenty five, that’s. Why, that’s my number? I personally use something in-between. A brand called tents cost about eighteen dollars to roll. That’s what I made these with. It’s the same type of principle to figure out how much a resin print costs only instead of working with a kilogram or grams working with leaders. One liter of resin will cost you anywhere from sixty to ninety dollars. Depending on what brand you use in theory, you should be able to just look at the raw grams and convert them to two liters like you would after. Yeah, but 3d printing resin is more of a process than FDM printing FDM printers literally. Do everything except scrape the print off. At the end with resin, the yield is different and sometimes printing with resin isn’t an exact science. And so you know, there’s actual yield and print efficiency because it depends on things like how much resin is left on the many any accidental. Uv curing that might happen, You know, whether you drain your minis or not, That’s not even accounting for a failed to prints, which are a lot more expensive with resin than with than with an FTM print. So what I did, I don’t have a resin printer, so I spoke with three different people who who do have resin printers and I asked them. How much a 28 millimeter mini cost the number that they gave me varied wildly? God, arrange anywhere from 15 cents to one dollar and seventy-five cents wild range. I know, but this means that resins, on average anywhere from is anywhere from five times, the thirty times, the cost of a PLA, A PLA filament print that is based on an admittedly small sample size. If anything, we know that the math for a resin print calculation isn’t always going to be as simple, At least until you do this a lot and you have some concrete numbers, experiment data or whatever you want to use, but even with my sample size of three, which is exactly representative right, and I’m sure there’s gonna be those people that are getting almost perfect year than like. I’ll get good, but you know, I trust the people that I asked. They’ve all had their resin printers for a while. Some have the photon. Some have the d7 and none of these people are 3d printing newbies, so add to the fact that their yield results are wildly different. It’s at least indicative that process is so important with getting the most of your resin and lowering your cost for your prints when you’re printing a resin print. You know, you need to have it down, Pat in order to save that money. So take take my resin costs in this in this video with a grain of salt. I’m doing the best that I can, and I’m working with the least reliable data set that I have access to for this video am over very confident with my PLA numbers, that’s months and months of me printing and confident in the general ranges. I’m just gonna be calculating resident costs using a simple formula. I’m gonna be conservative and say that the resin will be 5 to 15 times more expensive than than PLA. So when I show PLA, that’s how I’m getting my resin cost now. Let’s get to the actual cost. Probably the most popular style of terrain that new folk sprinter, our dungeon tiles, right eyelid Jordan Forge and the expensive scale or DM Scottie Blackmagic craft and while ox crafting vids on the cheap right this single piece of 2×2 dungeon tile with both the wall and the tile will cost anywhere from 20 cents to 40 cents. So you can get an idea of the of what a small set of this would look like in cost. I’ve loaded the set of tiles into my slicer. And this set is just a bit more in actual terrain pieces than the unpainted Jourdan Forge set that equivalent of it. It comes out to about five hundred sixty six grams of filament and will cost me anywhere from $8.50 to fourteen dollars and seventeen cents for those curious how long this would take this whole set fit within my CR Ten build plate and even though it says, sixty hours due to travel time of the nozzle would probably take somewhere around eighty hours or straight non-stop printing time. This is also why a bigger build volume can come in handy because all these files in a single print instead of a bunch of smaller prints that I have to go back and forth and and prep it and then put it in or just prep it all before and then every single time I finish to scrape it off and then put it on, it can be a lot of extra small tedium that adds up over time and can be kind of annoying when you compare it with drove an Forge and a few of the other competitors that I’m showing on screen, you can see why even a two hundred dollar printer can pretty quickly pay for itself after just a single mega dungeon. This is the future people, it’s amazing being being conservative like. I mentioned this tile will probably cost somewhere between $1 to $3 either way. Yes, it’s pretty expensive. When you compare to the 20 cents, right, buildings are also pretty popular. This three level building that you see here is the Abbott house from the Whitewood Abbey kickstart alive as of the release of this video. If you’re still interested, it cost me between $8 and 74 cents and $13.24 the print. I used 18 dollar filament. So in reality, it came out to about $10 for me. It took me about 60 hours total to print since I since I period Each level. Separately in resin, it would have cost me 40 few dollars and 70 cents at the 5 Times Mark. I am not even gonna go to the 15 times. Mark with this one, it would be way too expensive and way too cost-prohibitive you can buy resin cast 28 millimeter skill train for about the same price. So I mean, you could, in theory print these in resin. If you really like, if you really like the models, you want this extremely high fidelity, but for me personally, the cost savings of the PLA is very attractive and the trade-off of quality isn’t too bad for me. I am totally comfortable dropping this on my table. Vinny’s so these 20 millimeter minis, This is, uh, this is a little monk modeled by Miguel. Zavala, this guy cost me between 3 cents and 6 cents. Depending on what filament you use? It took me somewhere between one to two hours to print in resin. This would cost me anywhere from 15 cents to dollar eighty, but the real advantage to FDM are resin with pretty minis, at least for D and E and F Finder is the ability to print any one of those those one-off monsters that are that’s coming up in a module that cost maybe four dollars online or more in some cases, not even including shipping. But you only want to use it like once or twice, and so it’s difficult to to feel worth doing that, but you can print a decent mini for that and just load it up on within one or two hours. You boom you have your mini, and you just paint it up. Ready for the table for the next night. Great for demons like me who can’t make up their mind about what their players are gonna face or have a couple of different options for things like this with bigger Minis like Miguel Cevallos dragon with supports and a raft total cost in this filament was 2 dollars and 79 cents to 4 dollars and sixty-five cents, so between about three to five dollars for resin, This would cost 13.9 T five cents, or 89 dollars And seventy five cents. So if you’re able to get good yield with their with with your resin, that is still a pretty good price for many of this scale-free painted. Dragons at Michaels are more expensive than than this in that at that cost. The dragon took close to thirty hours for me to print when I printed it. So that is the long-winded answer to how much it costs to print your average minis and train pieces. If you enjoyed this video and you would like to see more, please like and subscribe and remember to hit that little bell. If you do if you’re interested in trying out some of the filament brands that I brought up here, I have included some affiliate links down below, which is a great zero cost way for you to support this channel and to keep or start 3d printing for your tabletop once again, thanks for being here and happy printing [Music].