Pretty Darn Fly for a 3D-printed Guy

TGIF, fellow gamers! Another DnD weekend filled with 3D-printing goodness is nearly upon us. We’re doing a grab bag of sorts today, as someone forgot to bring in the featured print for its photos. No problemo – we always have a plan B for these sorts of oopsie scenarios. Let’s dig in.

Our first featured 3D print is a teaser for next week’s Train Tuesday. This one will make more sense next week, but we thought it would be fine to start with the NPC and its miniature. Besides, you know how much we love a good non-player character. 😉

Our 3D-printed miniature comes courtesy of beloved EC3D Designs. This airship pilot is from their Steampunk-centric Bolts & Brimstone Kickstarter. This support-free miniature is packed with a multitude of subtle details that truly come alive with the right paint job.

And speaking of paint jobs, we urgently rushed this mini to resident painter Kimmy Utah because we know we’re always in good hands with her at the helm. The different shades of brown made for a great flight suit. Those googles and scarf just scream airman. There are also plenty of subtle shiny metal touches and some industrial boots to complement that dashing mustache. We love it!

We’ll focus on this pilot’s “why” next Tuesday, but let’s outline the basics here:

• Name: Captain Windsor Valour
• Proprietor: Sky Runners
• Service: Air Travel Transportation
• Optional Voice Accent: German or British (the office debate was fierce)

Next week, we’ll share what this savvy veteran pilot actually flies and reveal his NPC card.

The other week, we also shared this super handy DnD Movable Jointed Chain Ruler by DolDols. We didn’t have enough bandwidth last week to show you a 3D-printed alternative that you could spin up on your own. At that point, we had only found a few potentially solid STLs but hadn’t run one through our Prusa printer quite yet. We don’t like to recommend something we haven’t 3D printed for ourselves.

We are a TTRPG 3D printer blog after all, so we felt it was important to do a follow-up entry and share the STL we liked the most from our research. Our favorite free file comes from Designs by Davyd and what he calls his Flexi D&D Ruler. The green version is our store-bought one, and the blue one is one we 3D-printed ourselves. At first, we thought the measurement was off, but it’s just an optical illusion because the first link is missing that flexible circle in front of the number.

What’s especially cool is we hadn’t really done a two-part Color Change 3D-print like this before, where you start with your core color filament and then it will prompt you to change the roll to your number color filament. That may sound odd for as long as this little ol’ DnD print blog has been around, but what can we tell ya…we print in plain ol’ gray filament and resin and then just slap chop everything.

Good ol’ Designs by Davyd even has several different versions: 30, 60, 90, and 120 d20 lengths. We’re making one of each size in different colors, and then we will probably run off a couple extra of the 30-foot versions. Pretty slick, right?

Until next time!