I’m creating a board game that has custom 3d pieces. I’d like to test out my print before I send it to the game manufacturer and also want to make demo sets. They need a huge tooling fee before they’ll do samples. There are app. 10 designs and no bigger than 45mm.

I’m not sure as to whether I should buy a starter printer or would the learning curve be so big that I should just have a POD company do it. I know blender really well but have never printed anything from a file. I was going to make the file from blender for the company too. Any thoughts? I think my SO and I would use it for other things, probably, maybe, if it’s not so complicated that I give up on it.

Thanks for any advice on this, I don’t know what direction to point on this and I have a ton of work to do already.

Edit: You guys are awesome. I went from totally lost to ordering the Neptune 3 Pro and it should be here next week. Thanks for everything and I hope it goes pretty smoothly, I’ll keep you posted. Thanks again.

  • fsniper@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    CAD software is better suited for precision designing. I don’t know if you would require that kind of presicion for board game parts. At least for early stages it may not be a requirement.

    I for one still use blender for kinda presicion 3d models.

    • PeleSpirit@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      The models are already built, I made them awhile ago. Some of them have some issues with pieces being random and I wasn’t sure how clean I need to make the models for them to print well. This is one of the reasons I kind of want to get my own printer too, I don’t know how much I don’t know.

      Edit: Sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying. Yes, Blender does great for detailed drawings as well as movies.