3D Printing
There isn’t any doubt that 3D printing has taken on a major role in the world of hobby gaming. Whether it’s scenery or movement trays, custom components or storage solutions, whether it’s out of practical necessity or just a desire to pimp your favourite game, 3D printing provides options that many of us could only dream about before. Despite the advent of affordable hobby machines, high quality 3D printing still requires good equipment as well as plenty of skill and experience. At House on the Hill we aim to bring these things together to offer you a range of products and services that we hope will meet your needs.
Our Services
We offer a variety of 3D printing services for gamers and hobbyists looking to enhance their playing experience. In addition to our own products, we are more than happy to print any game related models for you. Whether you’ve bought it, downloaded it or designed it yourself we can produce it for you*.
The cost of printing depends on the type and amount of filament required but we aim to be competitive and can usually undercut other industrial printing services by a considerable margin. We charge a flat fee of £5 per print run, regardless of model size, which covers setting up machines and the preparation of your files. On top of this, we price our prints per gram of material used, but this cost can vary depending on the type of material you require. We hold a variety of high quality filaments in stock in a wide range of colours, but we are happy to use PLA materials from most popular manufacturers as long as they are not too difficult to acquire. We can also offer advice on their suitability with regard to your projects.
* Proof that you have permission to use a particular model may be required.
Our Hardware
At House on the Hill we offer FFF (fused filament fabrication) printing services via our suite of superb Ultimaker printing machines. With these we use only high quality PLA filaments, ultra-flat Neoceram glass print beds and slow printing speeds to achieve fantastic accuracy and an outstanding surface finish. The semi-enclosed chambers of our Ultimaker machines provide a consistent environment for printing which allows us to avoid the kind of compromises that lesser machines face and lets us focus on print quality above all else. The practical limit of our printing chambers is approximately 20cm x 20cm x 20cm which is usually more than enough for the kinds of models we print. If that’s not enough, we can often produce much larger models by breaking them up into multiple parts, printing them separately and assembling them afterward.
Design and Prototyping
For those of you who want to design your own custom game components, or even your own games, we offer a competitive prototyping service to help you with your projects. As with our standard printing service we are happy to print models that you have designed yourself and can offer consultations and professional advice on the nuances of designing models for 3D printing to help you save time and money with your prototypes. We are also able to take on design work on your behalf if you feel you lack the time, tools or experience to tackle them yourself.
These services are generally more time intensive than our standard printing services and, as a result, it can be significantly more expensive, but we are always happy to provide an upfront quote. Whether you have an idea for a storage system, a custom player board, a set of tokens or anything else, we are here to help you realise it.
Our Products
All of our own products are designed in-house for games that we play and love so you can rest assured that they have all been well tested before they hit our stores on Etsy and eBay. We do offer some generic products like trays and boxes but in general we aim to produce custom solutions that go beyond the sort of utilitarian items offered by many other printers. For evidence of this follow the links to our stores and take a look at our range of upgrades and playing aids for Gloomhaven!
