When your partner randomly announces one day "I think we should get into making dice"
When your partner randomly announces one day "I think we should get into making dice"
Get into making dice we did! We started off just trying to make basic moulds from store bought dice, and somehow that ended up with investments into a 3d printer, pressure pot and compressor, learning to CAD our own "dice mould moulds", and so many hours spent polishing the damn things by hand.
There are now more dice in our house than we could ever use in a lifetime, but they are very pretty, so success I guess?
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What’s the process? The dice don’t look printed to me, so are you 3D printing molds and then pressing material onto them?
So we designed our own set of master dice with our font and logo in Fusion360 CAD software, then 3d print them on an Elegoo Mars 2 Pro. The masters need SO MUCH polishing, it's a nightmare, but otherwise you're just gonna make more work for yourself in future stages.
Then we also designed and printed what we persist in calling our "dice mould moulds" we use to make silicone moulds from the master dice. This pic shows us doing a set without numbers (for making fancy insert dice) but you get the idea.
THEN once the moulds are made we can actually get to the fun part of pouring pretty resin into them (and then spend hours more polishing the resulting dice, phew!)
That is very interesting and also sounds extremely tedious. I am familiar with quality resin molds, but even then there are small printing imperfections. The kind of thing I don’t process out but I can see why you’d have to do it for dice.
Do you measure or calibrate weights and the end to ensure truly random dice or is that part kind of YOLO?
Tedious is definitely the word. They're just so pretty though... 😍
As far as testing goes, see my other reply here https://lemmy.world/comment/11503 which I have no idea how to make into an instance-agnostic link so sorry about that
I read your process. That sounds more tedious than I could have possibly imagined.
I’m also going to test my dice now because I sweat some of them are statistically off.
Chances are you're right, even if they're "normal" mass produced ones!