Today on Voidstar Lab, we're doing 3D printing.
We're doing DnD printing. We are doing 3DnD printing.
Humans, elves and tieflings, my name is Zack Freedman, and welcome to Voidstar Lab. This
might be hard to believe, but I used to be a nerd. Back in college, I was a dungeon master - and not
the fun kind, the tabletop RPG kind. I wrote a custom campaign that saw my players cleave
many a gnoll in twain, cast Fireball with their finger in a keyhole, and fight valiantly against
a giant fiendish dire badger while hungover.
The players were hungover, the badger was sober.
I was just too much of a cheapskate to buy proper minis and maps,
so the props and players were Lego minifigures. Here's Jeff's cleric, Waffles' rogue - I mean
shadowdancer - Twitch's mustachioed wizard, and Riley's barbarian. Reilly actually bought himself
a mini, so he stood out a little bit. Unless the enemy was a shark, they were just bits of
paper with the creature's name written on them, and the battlefield was an Excel spreadsheet.
Well, we are now in the future, so it is time to cast Bigby's Grasping Hand and slap some
sense into your DM. For less gold than a single rulebook, you can build an entire army's worth
of gratuitously intricate minis. You can populate your battlefield with both inspirational and
immersive props, and you can make custom figures for everyone in your party that
just oozes personal flair and flavor. You can make all of this yourself on a resin printer,
which are surprisingly cheap and easy to run, even if you've never put a single
point into Use Magic Device. So, let's roll initiative and dive into the fray!
Today's episode is sponsored by Loot Studios, your monthly subscription to dozens of ultra-detailed
professionally-designed models made by a talented team of CG artists. Nearly every
model you see today comes from this month's pack, Orconspiracy, which has everything you need to
orc-hestrate orcs-citing orc-counters. Stay tuned to the end if you're curious - or should I say,
if y-orc curious! I hope you like bad puns, because that's just the tip of the orcs-berg.
So let's do a quick recap of how 3D printing works. There are two kinds of hobbyist 3D
printers, FDM and resin, and they both build up a solid model by adding one thin layer of
plastic at a time. FDM machines, like these Prusa Mk3s's, feed plastic filament into a
heated nozzle and trace each layer out of lines of material. Resin machines, like this Phrozen 4k,
shine a high-powered projector through a vat of liquid resin to harden wafer-thin layers into
an orc-shaped stack. FDM printers are far more common, but if you're going to make intricate
prints like these DnD minis, resin printers are the way to go. An FDM printer struggles
with the fine details, but a resin printer's limit is the resolution of the projector.
This model I'll be using today has a 4k resolution, so it actually prints models about 50%
sharper than the iPhone on which you're statistically likely to be watching this video!
You start off with a model that you download off the Internet,
and you prep it with a program called a slicer. The slicer automatically generates supports,
those little scaffolds that brace it as it prints. It hollows out chunky areas to save material,
and it formats it for your printer. You pour some liquid resin into the tray,
you hit 'go,' and a few hours later, your tiny orcs are fab-orc-cated.
Give them a bath, snap off the supports, harden them under a UV lamp, and you are ready to ROLL!
A 500-gram bottle of resin costs about 20 bucks and prints like 75 to 100 minis.
Resin printers themselves are really cheap too, because they don't have many moving parts.
While an FDM printer has motors, belts, drivers, rods, extruders... an SLA printer is really
just a UV lamp, an LCD panel, and a single motor to lift the print out of the gooooo.
So you got the printer, what's next? Ask your party,
because I guarantee you they have thought this through way more than you have.
When you play Skyrim, Fallout, or Cyberpunk, the first thing you do is waste like
15 hours in the character creator... and those are first-person games where you never even get
to see your own character! Designing your look and expressing yourself is a really important
part of these games, and DnD is no DnDifferent. In fact, it's probably even more so, because
players can literally do anything! Players put a ton of love and thought into their
character's style, and they really put a piece of themselves into their characters.
If you have a printer, you can let them put that piece onto the battlefield.
So, HeroForge is a well-known way to create custom character models,
and you don't have to do any modeling yourself, but Eldritch Foundry is another
similar option. In between sessions, your players can customize their looks,
they can add their favorite weaponry and gear, and then they can just send you the file.
Because of a quirk of how resin printers work, it doesn't matter how many prints you do at
once - it always takes as long as the tallest print. Just run off the whole party in one shot!
The material is just so cheap, and the process is so simple, that when a player claims the big
bad's blade for their own - and subsequently gets disarmed - you can just print fresh models
that show this! This adds a ton of flavor for players to discover on each other's models. Like,
why does Megan's lizardfolk have a grimoire on her belt? Why is Zack's orc warrior's codpiece
so damn big? The former is because she's a lizard wizard. The latter is because life imitates orc.
By the way, if you have never used minis in your DnD,
I highly recommend them over using tokens or markers.
Not only can you tell which direction players are facing and what equipment they're using, you
can even print these little trackers to visualize status effects like my personal favorite, on fire.
If you also print some set dressing, it doesn't just make the game more
immersive - it makes it easier for the players to tell which obstacles block
the square, and which are just hard to walk through. But most importantly,
it inspires improvised tactics, which, let's be honest, are the best part of DnD combat.
An enemy is about to outflank your warrior and your bard just threw her last dagger.
What's she gonna do? It's a good thing the table is covered in aerodynamic pewter mugs!
[High-speed imp-orc-t]
Another neat idea is hiding puzzles in real life. The players are on the hunt for Percy Pinkpike,
who mysteriously vanished during his monthly pilgrimage. The bandits camping out in the ravine
said they never saw him pass through, but when you take a closer look at their barrel of weapons,
you perceive Percy the Paladin's precious pink pilgrimage polearm!
When the minis are only like 20 cents each, you can get creative with these one-off surprises and
throw players who are used to just skill checks for a loop. Of course, printing enemies is the
fun part, because A) players don't really change their equipment all that often,
so you end up using the same minis for a really long time... and B) Monsters are cooool!
Players can size up the enemy's orc-quipment at a glance, which means less brainpower spent
visualizing the battlefield, and more creating overcomplicated strategies that force the DM to
calculate the ranged touch modifier for throwing an unwilling celestial monkey.
For instance.
It's an incredible feeling when the players finish hacking down all the mooks, and you get to unveil
that super special big bad boss and literally slam it on the table. The players have heard Orguss the
Tall's name whispered by townspeople and hollered in w-orc cries, but finally getting to face the
orc warmonger head-to-head will fire anyone up to cut that head OFF. This goes double for those big
showpiece models. These are, like, big bad dragons that cost like 30 bucks off the shelf, but for
you, are just, like, 89 cents of plastic. It turns out that burly orc who just got a free French
haircut wasn't actually Orguss - it was Orgug. Orgug Lots-of-Bolts is an orc. Orguss the Tall
is the specter of a bloodthirsty ancient dragon and the shamans just finished invoking his spirit!
[Deep draconic voice] FEAR ME! RAAAAR!! [Screaming] Oh no!!
[Roaring] [Desperate pleas] [Explosions 'n stuff]
[Whimpering] Mercy!! [Deep dragon voice] Mercy is for the living!!
RAAAAR! RAR! Rar.
So where do you actually get models to print? Well, you have lots of options,
and you just need to remember three letters: STL. That is a standard format that every CAD
and 3D-modeling program can output, and every 3D-printing software can handle.
You can grab files at sites like MyMiniFactory, Cults3D, Thangs, and even Etsy, and you can also
find models on, like, maker-centric sites like Thingiverse. There are a lot of free STL files
out there, but you will need to buy the best ones from the artist, and on these sites, these files
actually get pretty orc-xpensive, especially if you're buying a whole campaign's worth.
That's why I partnered with Loot Studios, a subscription to dozens of brand-new,
preposterously-intricate models, ready to print,
with a different theme every month. This month, you get everything you need to co-orc-inate
an orc-based campaign. There is an orc shaman, there are orc warriors, a rodeo orc on a cow, and
there are assorted orc pals like a big ass-dragon and a troll straight out of my comment section.
Here are the heroes that can desp-orc-ly struggle against the impending cat-orc-clysm. You also get
a selection of orc-hitecture, like an orcs-tower, a barb-orc-que, and a p-orc-cullis begging to be
sab-orc-taged. And also, there's a wereboar... There's like a p-orc pun in there somewhere.
Each set includes heroes, enemies, and props in both 35- and 75-millimeter scale. You also get
cool bonuses, like paintable busts of the best characters, and even some lore and battle maps
to mix into your campaign! You just download it, print it, and die to it, because for chrissake,
Jeff, why'd you have to waste all your Cure Wound spells on the zombies?! Like, killing dudes with
healing is neat, I get it, you read the rulebook, but COME ON! Our wizard could have Fireballed them
to death, and now I'm BLEEDING OUT because I can't ROLL A GODDAMN ENDURANCE CHECK TO SAVE MY LIFE!!
Anyways, it's just $15 a month, links in the description, and it helps sup-orc the channel. Ha haa!
Speaking of filthy skull-wearing savages with green skin,
a huge thanks to my patrons for supporting Voidstar Lab! We're AAALMOST at our very first goal,
which is to upgrade this wearable computer and then put the plans online for everyone to become
cyborg! Our supremely generous lab assistant supporters are, in no particular order:
Super-special, extra-juicy thanks to our very first Co-Lab-Orator, i'm not
Bcore! I've hidden his, her, their, or its name somewhere in this episode, so go Easter that egg!
Super special thanks to Brooke, the lovely lady behind the camera,
and for our dedicated Discord mods, Billie Ruben, My Fair Julie, and Techniack.
Thank you so much for watching, and I hope your future campaigns are simply unf-orc-gettable.