If your pieces are detailed I’d recommend a resin printer. I just got an anycubic photon mono x2 and I’m finding it excellent. I printed this x-wing a couple days ago.

"Makerspaces" exist for a reason.

You should be able to get access to a higher-quality 3d printer (or CNC mill, or Laser Cutter) from a typical makerspace. It'd be basically a club (often near universities) where people effectively pool their money together for collective ownership.

My local makerspace is at a community college. It requires a safety class before you can use the equipment, so there's a few weeks of spinup time. The rules will be different wherever you are. In this case, my local State sponsored the funds for the 3d printer, but I still have to pay for resin costs and whatnot when using the printer.

Good software costs a ton of money too, and you might want to find a Makerspace just so that you can get access to the $4000+ class software that engineers use. Or at least the $1000+ software? Thinking like Rhino CAD, Autotools, or a few other professional tools.

Blender is more of a 3d graphics (think Toy Story movie) kind of workflow. It can do 3d designs but its not the original design.

Check with your local libraries! I work in a public library makerspace, we do this kind of stuff all the time. Most libraries do it either completely free or for the price of materials

It seems I'm too late to offer advice on your initial question, but I'm in the Elegoo family ane can say I've been enjoying my Neptune 3. There is a channel that you should check out on YouTube, guy goes by "The Feral Engineer", he has done a ton of work on these printers and if you find his profile on Reddit he was insanely fast to message me back with a question I had for him.

Happy printing!

If you're planning on doing more than one, then definitely it's amazing and useful. If it's just the one, then there are 3d printing services that have a decent turnaround and relatively reasonable prices. One benefit for really small runs is you don't need to learn how to set up the printer, they'll figure it out for you.

One thing to remember is that 3d printing manufacturing constraints are much different than injection molding manufacturing constraints.

3D printing has become really accessible over the past few years. Many affordable entry level printers come with automatic bed leveling and direct drive extruders, which previously only came on more expensive printers. IMO, it sounds like your use case is perfect for 3D Printing. There’s a variety of great entry level printers you can pickup right now for fairly cheap. I don’t have experience with them myself, but the Elegoo Neptune 3 or 4 seem to be well regarded for their price point. As far as getting started, Thomas Sanladerer has a great intro to 3DP that can get your started on the concepts. It’s not hard to pickup. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDJMid0lOOYnkcFhz6rfQ6Uj8x7meNJJx

This is what 3d printing really shines in. Churning out prototypes for minimum cost.

If you're already familiar with blender, you would only need to learn how to use a slicer, which is not that hard in comparison. Just import the model and fiddle around with print settings if needed.

I came into 3d printing as a complete noob, and most of my time has been spent learning to do modeling in blender/cad. Slicing and printing itself is simple in comparison. Resin might be more involved.

For figures, and especially testing things that will compare to injection molding, going FDM is a really bad idea. It's superior for engineering parts and rapid prototyping in basically all cases, but is has terrible dimensional accuracy by comparison, and it has a ton of trouble with thin features and overhanging shapes. This is mainly because the nozzle width is orders of magnitude wider than the pixels on a resin printer, so the slicer has to get very creative with dimensions to make complex models work at all. I am a huge FDM enthusiast, but this really isn't the right place for it.

I suppose as you are a builder ( a game designer it's most probably is) it would be a great help to have a 3d printer at hand.

Bambu printers,
Elegoo neptune 4 series, Prusa mk3/4s are great ones to start with.

@PeleSpirit 3D printing is fun but it can be a time sink. Consider how much done you can invest in this. If you want to push on with other things then POD may be best. If you want to have it as a tool in your bag, then buy one for sure.

One thing I would say about resin printers is they can't be left for long periods and are best cleaned and packed away if you aren't using them.

So you can get an Ender or similar printer for $100-200 and it would mostly work out of the box, but there is often a huge amount of troubleshooting that follows. I got a 3D printer originally to try to earn extra revenue but never ended up selling anything because the hobby took over for me. I spent hours learning how it works and hundreds replacing parts (trying to perfect my machine, not at all necessary). It's a bit of an investment of time and money but you may find that you end up enjoying it and using it beyond the scope of your current project. It's definitely something that takes a lot of commitment to learn unless you have a lot of money you're willing to invest towards a more no-issue printer like a Prusa.

It looks like there are a ton of makerspaces in Seattle. If you have the time, you can actually often volunteer to use the machines for free. And it would give you the ability to use other machines there, like laser cutters. I actually also volunteer about a couple hours north of you at the bham makerspace. If you happen to be in the area and want help printing stuff -- or you decide to get a printer and you want help learning how to do it, you should hit me up! I'm super passionate about it and I would be happy to give you advice or help out. :)

Shapeways.com and printathing.com

Usually can upload a file and they will print and ship to you