Anvil Industry Digital Forge - gateway to 3D printing

My foray into 3D printing has been a complete doddle. 

The kit sat in it's box for a month while I made some preparations, but I was up and running in about 2 hours after opening it and plugging it all in (and that was going meticulously through all the setup configuration and tutorials)

Two things really make this easy - the Elegoo Mars 2 Pro itself, and also Anvil Industries digital forge.

Shameless plug for my pals at Anvil, they are your gateway. I'm a Patreon member and the volume of stuff and support you get for £7 a month is phenomenal. I'd highly recommend it even if your a newbie like me (more so if you're a newbie actually...)

This post on the Anvil blog with a few short videos is literally all you need to get you going in terms of guidance and tutorial.

https://www.anvilindustry.co.uk/3d-printing-miniatures-basics

I'll blog more about the printer itself (which comes with lots of the trimmings you'll need, like gloves, mask, scraper, USB stick, etc.) as well as the process, once I've had more practice.

Setting up a little printing station is a must, and I can't stress ventilation enough - there's an open window less than a metre to the left in that image. Lots of paper towels, gloves and alcohol for cleaning can seem daunting at first but once you have a little procedure established it's completely simple and no hassle whatsoever. The box at the bottom left of the shelf houses the gloves, towels, resin, etc. 

The two trays were actually box lids I bought at Homebase, very sturdy and a better alternative to flimsy plastic serving trays. (The trays are in case of any spill or mistakes on my part.)

I printed a ton of stuff, all from Anvil Industries welcome package on their Patreon... all except from those two chess piece towers, they're on the USB from Elegoo and the first test prints you do. They'll come in handy for Frostgrave terrain.

The reason Anvil are such a great place to start is that their models come pre-supported, meaning they've gone to the trouble of configuring all the struts and supports you need for printing. You literally load the file to your USB, stick that into the printer and push a few buttons to print it.

I'm slightly wary of a lot of the other fancy 3d sculpts you see being advertised on countless Patreons, pre-supported is always better... but I've read some reviews where the pre-support stuff was insufficient and people had failed prints required a bit of tweaking themselves. Anvil have always been great at this 'user experience' stuff so you can't go wrong with them.

That all said, I did have a bit of an experiment at building supports myself (I'll need to learn it sooner or later). The guy below was initially configured horizontal, a rookie mistake. I'll not do explaining the science any justice here, but if you look at the lower comparison shot you'll see the horizontal based print on the right is displaying some sag around the collar. That's gravity for you. 

This isn't the replicator on the Enterprise, there's some engineering know how required.

In summary... DO IT. I don't think I'll every buy a plastic mini ever again. And if I can get the STL, I'll buy that first instead of a physical cast.

In the long run hobbyists will save a massive amount of money. Every day there's new stuff hitting the market and the technology keeps improving. If you want a massive army, you'll pay on average pennies per miniature print. I suspect you could print an entire space marine chapter for about £200.

Lots of minis and massive armies are not my thing, for me personally the key is I can replicate stuff without sending it off to a mould maker, and experimentation is much faster.

I just need to get back into/good at 3D sculpting now. I'm sure I'll manage.