It doesn’t matter if you print twice a month or all the time. The material matters.
Here we will cover things to look at while choosing which material you should pick. There are some dead giveway tips you should follow and then from there it’s trial and error.
Again this question comes up a lot too and while it mostly doesn’t really matter what you pick, as most filaments are working, here is some things that you should note when picking your filament.
Most people go for PLA when printing terrain. No weird odours as ABS can produce, relatively low temperature for printing and is ideal for our work.
Most cheaper filaments slack on their precision when making the filament.
When you are using a 1.75mm filament string you will be surprised of how inaccurate that is. More expensive ones like Prusament got a tolerance down to +-0.02mm where as some of the cheaper one can vary up to (for what I’ve seen) +-0.5mm, which heavily influences your final product.
If the printer expect a 1.75mm filament string to come through the extruder and only 1.3mm is delivered you can expect under extrusion.
If this happens in the middle of the print, you can be lucky enough for it to do nothing but slack a bit on the infil, but as soon as the inperfections hit the outside shell of the print, you can expect warps, missed details or in some cases failed prints due to places not printed fully to support items which are printed later in the print.
On the other hand, if the extruder feeds too much filament, you can get unlucky and experience clogs which is a pain in the ass to remove. On some printers it requires you to take the entire extruder apart which can set you back 1-3 hrs depending how fast you are at picking apart your extruder.
One thing you might note with cheaper filaments is their lack of consistent colour. If you are not painting the print afterwards, then make sure you have some decent looking filament. If you paint it afterwards just go with 1 colour, as they pigment grain doesn’t change too often.
I print a lot which means i go through a lot of filament. As you might have seen from my instagram, i print solely in black. Could i print with other colours? Certainly! Do i want to tweak my printer all the time to accomodate the differences in different colours everytime i change a roll? No.
Again, if you paint your subjects it doesn’t really matter which colour you are using as long as you are happy when they exit the machine.
So this is a bit more tricky as you won’t see the largest difference in the quality of different resins.
One thing you must make sure of is getting the right type of resin for your type of 3D resin printer.
Stereolithography (SLA) is using an UV laser to brighten up spots on your buildplate and curing the resin in those specific spots it hits. Compared to LCD and DLP this means the spots brightened is very tiny round spots compared to the pixels from a monitor or a projector.
Make sure your chosen resin supports SLA. We have had good experience with Sunlu´s SLA resin you can find here for little over $20 for 500gr
Digital Light Processing (DLP) is basically a projector underneath the buildplate casting UV light up against the whole buildplate at once, compared to the spots the SLA laser produces. This produces fast and precise pixel like structures in the resin. This also means that both DLP and LCD resin is basically the same.
We have good experience using Anycubics resin which you can find here for $36 for 1kg
LCD panels is what you are used to from monitors and TVs. They project white UV pixels where they want to cure and black pixels where they don’t want to cure. The higher the resolution, the finer the print. You now get cheap 4k displays and even 8k printers exist which is well within budget for hobbyists.
For LCDs we also recommend the Anycubics resin here
This is a personal choice. I prefer picking something light enough where i can see a bunch of detail without me priming or painting it first.
I usually pick a lighter grey which gives me enough detail so whenever i look at my pile of unfinished miniatures i don’t have to have a well lit space to figure out what kind of details the miniature have.
