3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: !functionalprint@kbin.social or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
Rules
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No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
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Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
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No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
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No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
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Do not create links to reddit
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If you see an issue please flag it
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No guns
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No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is ![](URL)
Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible
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Thirding this, having a clearer idea of what kind of stuff you are going to print will help you a TON.
That's why I would suggest to dabble into modelling for a while first, see what kind of stuff you find more interesting/fun to make, and dial in your decisions from there. I say this, OP, because I was in your position of thinking about doing both resin for miniatures and FDM for buildings/dioramas/useful things... But I ended up doing mostly miniatures, because that's what I found most fun to do. So I would have been better served investing the FDM money in a bigger and better resin printer.
For software, since you mention that you may get a resin printer, I assume you are considering eventually making miniatures, characters, monsters, etc. If so, you will want to look into software that has sculpting tools. Blender has them, Fusion 360 as well, there are many others. I use ZBrush but a lot of people find it weird to use. Blender would probably be the best starting point because it is free, extremely well documented and has everything you need.
As a last note, if you are not familiar with this world, you should know that even with the best of printers, you should expect to spend a lot of time tinkering, troubleshooting and tuning. If your expectations are to assemble it and immediately start printing cool stuff, you will need to adjust them. It is a really fun hobby, but requires you to be willing to deal with days in which your prints suddenly come out wrong and have to spend the whole day debugging the issue instead of having fun.