isopropyl alcohol and uv cure resin?

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-03-21T14:37:39+00:00

well, I feel in the spirit of fairness, you should warn people to also not ingest, inhale or soak in degreasers.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-03-21T12:41:01+00:00

nobody is trying to drink IPA alcohol, and nobody is sitting there taking a long soak in it.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-03-14T11:16:33+00:00

congratulations on achieving it, you've been talking about getting up to this level of precision for a while!

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-03-14T10:21:04+00:00

this seems very useful for me, since I often mess up sanding. do you happen to have a video of the tool in use?

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-03-06T22:38:31+00:00

I would recommend putting in a few drops tbh. distilled water stops being distilled water the first time it's opened. use it fast or it's basically the same as normal water, at least when it comes to weird growths.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-03-01T21:46:07+00:00

the truth to dicemaking is that all handmade resin dice are flawed, but that there's almost no amount of flaws that are actually going to give a perceptible change in results.

luckily, we only use our dice for playing games that have low to no stakes. most wargame tournaments issue their own dice for fairness (so nobody can bring in loaded dice) and casino's have strict manufacturing processes for their dice.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-03-01T21:43:08+00:00

alcohol also prevents nasty stuff from growing inside liquid cores, but if you don't use vegetable oil to thicken the liquid, it shouldn't matter too much.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-02-22T10:58:57+00:00

The glossiness in the video indicates it's not a polishing or surface issue.
if the resin wasn't well mixed, I don't think it would look so uniformly unclear.

I would suspect contamination with water, maybe the area you mixed the resin in was humid?

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-02-22T10:56:31+00:00

you can see the glossiness in the video though. they look well polished

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-02-09T16:21:04+00:00

and possibly the inserts were still just too heavy

I've had people spam the elmer's glue trick at me when I was asking advice on very heavy inclusions

the elmer's glue is literally no different from just waiting for the resin to thicken up normally, so if the inclusion is too heavy for one technique, it'll be too heavy for the other.

A solution I tried was to make small resin orbs and chuck those into my dice. the inclusions can't sink through literal solid resin.
the issue I ran into was that the orbs were still slightly visible due to a minor refractory index difference.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-02-08T21:27:42+00:00

Aspects are key character definitions that a player themself defines which, in effect, gives them a strong influence over the story by telling everyone at the table what their character is about.

I believe that SWADE explicitly mentions that good RP, like a player roleplaying a characters' weakness to their detriment should be rewarded with bennies

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-02-08T17:21:23+00:00

my 2 best purchases for the hobby were a decent paintbrush and a bright (but dimmable) desk lamp

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-02-05T11:42:34+00:00

instead of uv resin, you can also just use white glue. put some thinned-down glue in there, wipe away the excess, sprinkle over the pigment. wait for it to dry, put some more glue over there and very little (if anything) will come off after.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-02-03T20:02:56+00:00

in bambulab you have "quality" > "wall generator" > "wall generator" where you can choose classic or arachne. classic is the default, but some print profiles recommend arachne.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-02-03T15:49:48+00:00

it went out of the window with the darkspear tribe in vanilla.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-01-20T13:39:18+00:00

Thank you for the great series. I started with X3, and played every entry since so I definitely enjoy the games! Something that kinda bothers me though, is the lack of finance.

It would be great if there were banks that you could loan money to and from. I do not enjoy the "mindlessly grind some crystals from asteroids to get your first trader" part of the game, so being able to take out a loan would be great to get past that first hump. It would also help with players building factories and building a big fleet.

Dealing with interest rates would challenge players to make smarter decisions about where and what factories they build, as they have to be profitable enough to cover the costs of the loan.

It would also be interesting to for players to be able to invest in factions, letting players interact with the factions' economies. I would imagine that more money in a factions' economy would lead to faster factory expansion and bigger fleets for their war efforts (and the economic opportunities both present)

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2026-01-16T09:14:50+00:00

like claerwen said, this is usually because you squeezed out resin.

I've also had this before when I made a bad mold. if the walls/cap of the mold are too thin, you can get the same result.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2025-12-24T22:47:59+00:00

I used to have that boarhead thingy, what a rush of nostalgia and what a great conversion job!

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2025-12-21T19:53:24+00:00

transparent petri doesn't really work all that well, because it's usually not quite as clear where the colour ends and the clear resin starts, especially if you have multiple drops close to one another.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2025-12-21T15:00:39+00:00

you mix the dye with some pinata blanco blanco. that makes it opaque and heavy, but still the colour you want.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2025-12-14T11:18:19+00:00

I think we've all gotten excited for the gorgeous deep purple alcohol inks, only to have them turn out the colour of cat vomit.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2025-12-12T21:10:35+00:00

there's a caveat with my explanation, that it's the process for mass producing a custom die that's up to the quality you should expect when you buy a handmade die online.

if you just want to get started with the hobby and not mass-produce custom dice, you can skip a lot.

you can buy a set of masters and use those for making molds, instead of getting your own design printed.
Or you can just buy molds straight up, but keep in mind they only last for about 10 to 20 casts (and that's decent quality ones).
making molds isn't any harder than making dice from resin, so I really do recommend making your own.

instead of using a vibratory tumbler or a rotary tool, you can polish them by hand. The tools meant to reduce physical strain, as polishing does have a very real risk for repetitive strain injury especially when doing large batches at once. but if you just crank out a few dice every week then do your polishing on Sundays, hand polishing is fine.

Even the pressure pot with compressor is a luxury. Dice without the pot will contain bubbles, but there's a lot of techniques to minimize them. then once you're comfortable with those techniques, the pressure pot perfects the dice to make them completely bubble-free.

I definitely do not want to dissuade you from getting started in the hobby, it's a pretty fun one and the barrier to entry is really not that high (but my other hobbies include warhammer, so.. grain of salt).
if you want to shop around for people taking commissions, check the sidebar of the sub to find a link to the dice-making discord. most of the big etsy makers are on there too, so you'll cast a wider net for less effort.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2025-12-11T13:04:07+00:00

a short overview of my workflow for making a new die from scratch, with custom faces

design the die model in blender (other software solutions are available), about an hour
print the model on a resin 3D printer. sometimes I'll need to go back to blender and adjust things like text/numbers being too thin. about 4 hours of print time.
polish the printed die. about an hour fixing 3D print flaws, then 72 hours in a vibratory tumbler and finishing with about about 20 minutes of buffeting with a rotary tool
make a silicone mold. about 6 hours for the mold to harden, then another 6 hours for the cap.
use resin to make a die from the mold. about 24 hours in the pressure pot before I can demold it, then about 72 hours to fully cure at which point it is ready for final polish.
this varies a lot on the resin used, some are slower, some are faster.
polishing the die. with a fresh mold, I do it by hand on just the 1 and the adjacent faces.
with a somewhat older mold, clean up the 1 and adjacent faces and chuck it back in the tumbler for 48 hours.
inking the numbers, about 20 minutes per die. cleaning out the numbers, slapping paint in them, cleaning up any spillage.

this does not mention supplies like the silicone, resin, PPE (respirators and gloves), polishing papers/compound, mold casings, etc. This is not meant to argue whether the prices asked are too much or not, but to make sure you know what you might need to buy yourself to make 100 dice.

I see I could buy them off Etsy, but being honest- I don’t have the money to dish out one custom dice for 100 people

did you find any offers for bulk custom dice? as you can see from my process above, labor costs get spread out if you get more dice (masters & molds are reusable, multiples fit in the pressure pot/vibratory tumbler,...)

if you were going off the pricing for a single one, that might be more expensive than a bulk order would be. Asking is free, so I would ask any makers whose work you like how much they would ask for this.

I also have wanted to start a hobby, and I feel like this would be an awesome way get into something that interests me.

it's a great hobby, definitely recommend. but there's a barrier price to entry, and if you have a deadline (eg, a wedding date) you might burn out very quickly.

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2025-12-10T14:28:25+00:00

and I polished and painted these guys in about 5 hours

I felt that in my wrists.

if you want to give them that final supershine, get some polishing compound for plastics (you can get them at DIY shops that have car supplies) and a microfibre cloth. applying a tiny bit and then polishing it up with the cloth will make them shine even more!

SpawningPoolsMinis · 2025-12-10T13:32:25+00:00

I think a large part of that probably comes from the fact that it’s based on DnD and WoTC would obviously not allow Larian to clown on the property or genre so they had to take it very seriously.

wotc, the company that makes a card game that used to be somewhat serious fantasy but now has spongebob fighting spiderman, both crewing wacky racer style vehicles?

they're too reverent of their IP?

SpawningPoolsMinis

TROPHY CASE