A 3D printer can be an absolutely fantastic tool for people who do a lot of traditional gaming. By traditional games, I mean pen-and-paper Role Playing Games (RPG) like Dungeons & Dragons, or wargames like Warhammer 40k. While the quality of a 3D printed mini using a cheap fused filament printer like mine doesn’t come anywhere near the quality of a sculpted and injected molded model, there is still a lot you can do.

For the most part, our PC minis are normal, traditionally manufactured minis. We print set dressing, special items, or monsters; things that either can’t be had exactly the way we want them from existing stores, or things that are simple enough that we can model and print them ourselves. The first example is set dressing and terrain.

The watchtower was printed in brown filament. It’s actually four separate prints; one for each of the three sides and one top. The pieces were then all glued together with superglue. Next to the watchtower is a knockoff Dwarven Tile, printed in grey filament, placed next to an actual Dwarven Tile. The crate was printed in brown. We actually have enough crates and barrels to make a nice looking storeroom or to add a little flavor to any dungeon. Finally, the barricade was printed in three pieces and glued together.

The Space Marine is an actual GW mini, not printed. The goblins and wizard are all Reaper Mini bones from their first kickstarter.

There are all sorts of things you can make to support your wargaming or your RPGs with readily available models; bases, templates, buildings, monsters, or even traps. However, the fun stuff starts when models that someone else has made just don’t fit with what you need, and you start making your own.

These minis, from left to right, are Evangelion units 311-316 of the UAS Boston, for our AdEva campaign. Each is individualized to reflect the special traits of each Eva (for example, unit 313 is hulking and huge), as well as the specific weapon that the player has chosen to wield. Units 311 and 316 have been vandalized decorated with silver sharpie.

Here are the Evas arranged in combat against an unhelpfully similarly colored foe. Three of the red models there look different from the ones in the picture above; those are the enemy robots. The idea was to paint them so that they’d be easier to pick out from a distance, but it ended up not being necessary to pick out the individual units on a table. Photos are a different story; they are kind of hard to tell apart in these pics. We also have those cool elevation bases that we bought at PAX East, for when Evas grow wings spontaneously and start flying around. It happens.

Since this is Season Two of our AdEva game, we have exhausted the supply of Giant Space Aliens/Angels from the anime, and our DM has had to get creative. Here is the lineup of a few of the Angels that he designed and printed for us to fight. These are all single-color prints; the extra bits of color are painted on. For those minis we have painted (and we haven’t done a full paint job, only highlights here and there), we have skipped primer and just use Reaper paints. It appears to work.

Most of our custom minis can be found on TinkerCAD, the webapp that they were all modeled in.