Lately i had an inspiring discussion over at the Stoneharth Forums where i recently did share some voxel art of mine. Stonehearth is a sandbox RTS game under development that i recently backed on Kickstarter. The game will be very user content friendly so the crowd can create their own figures, equipment etc. and will be able to integrate their stuff into the game as a mod. Now the Kickstarter campaign was a huge success but a playable beta is far away. So an enthusiastic guy like me just can’t wait to start creating my own content on this awesome playground! For modeling the figures and the assets i did work with an amazing well designed voxel editor called “Qubicle Constructor” by mindesk. If you want to give it a try you can head over to mindesk and grab yourself the free basic version of QC, but be prepared to get immediately voxelized! ^___^
I have worked sporadically with different 3d modeling software like Z-brush, Autodesk Inventor or SketchUp but i think for a person who doesn’t have any experience in this field, modeling with voxels is by far the easiest approach to dip a first toe into creating 3d models. You do nothing more or less than adding a bunch of 3d-cubes together. You don’t have this usually pretty a steep learning curve to get to know the overwhelming palette of tools and functions to start with, there are just a few simple tools. Of course this means this technique has its limitation so you can’t do round edges or real organic designs and the look of the models is usually pretty 8bit age style, but as i did mention, it’s great zero point to think and create with a software in three dimensional space… and hey who wouldn’t love 8bit pixelated stuff anyway! :)
Now after a few really fun sessions of creating stuff for Stonehearth with QC i had some digital files slumbering on my disk and a long time ahead of waiting till i can use them in-game… so what to do? I wanted to go one step further and was wondering how my models would look like in real life. I did export a few models as STL files and did feed these to our 3d printer at the workshop. After an hour i had the first little sword and bow pieces in my hands and immediately continued to load and print more stuff over night. Below you can see some of my voxel models and the appropriate 3d prints in white ABS plastic. The sword, bow and knight are straight out of the printer and only coated with a white acrylic primer. The tiny taverna scene pieces are sanded, primed and then painted with acrylic colors.
While playing with my new gadgets i was thinking it would be amazing to create customized digital models (figures, board tiles, tokens, etc.) that can be 3d printed at every gamers home (or ordered trough a 3d-printing services) and be played as a board- or tabletop game on a real table right away. I’m aware that this idea is not new at all but i really do see a great potential in using 3d prints for creating custom board- or tabletop games. At least for me as an avid tabletop gamer since childhood it’s a very interesting field to do some more researches. I hope i didn’t bore you too much with my way of getting into this field but this is how it has all started for me. And no worries you can be sure to see a lot more pictures than words in my future updates as i’m usually more the WIP picture sharing guy.
What do you think? I would love to hear from you what you’re thinking about 3d printing and board games or maybe the change 3d prints could bring into the gaming culture in general?