Are you a dice maker with a 3D printer and want to design and print your own custom dice? This is for you. It’s actually not feasible to just print out set after set of dice, but the best way to do it is to print out a set, make a mold out of it, and recast it in resin. One mold can last for many sets of dice, and it’s pretty cheap to make molds and remake them out of masters you’ve printed.

Tip: Make your masters last longer by casting new masters out of epoxy resin as soon as you’ve made the new mold out of the original printed dice masters. Epoxy resin is much more durable and will last a lot longer and not scuff up like 3D printed resin will.

Here are a couple of  things to consider before printing your own dice:

1. You need a resin printer, not a filament printer, to get the details needed to recast the dice into molds.
2. You need some basic 3D modeling skills to design the dice, but there is an application called Dicemaker I recommend. You still need to be able to put custom supports on your dice. I’ll explain more as to why.
3. You have to polish and perfect the dice masters before mold making because every single little thing on the master will be replicated with the mold. You are going to print and throw out a whole lot of dice. 
4. 3D printer resin is not compatible with platinum based silicone. You need tin curing silicone or something  like Siraya Tech to get your molds to cure with 3D printed resin. Some brands/colours work with platinum based silicone, but to make your initial mold, you need a tin cured silicone like Smooth-On. The bonus is that tin-cured silicone is cheaper.

Part 1: Designing The Dice

This really depends on how experienced you are with 3D design. I’m not very experienced, and wasn’t at all when I started, but had a decent idea of graphic and 2D design, so I started off using this program called Dicemaker. It saves everything as an OBJ or STL file, and all you need to do is prepare it for printing in your chosen slicing program. It’s super simple to use and has a lot of customization options. It can be limiting, but as you grow, you can edit the STL files in other programs like Blender (there is a $20 add on for Blender similar to Dicemaker) or FreeCAD, or any paid for 3D modeling software.

For fonts: Try and use a thicker font that doesn’t have any really thin sections. Keep the depth around 0.7mm. Go crazy with your designs, but realize these need to be readable when they’re printed, and they’ll be a lot smaller than on the screen.

Tip: If you’re printing out huge chonkin’ D20’s for something like a display, use your slicing program (I use Lychee) and make that chonker hollow with the hollow feature. It saves a whole tonne of resin, if you roll it, it won’t damage your table or floor, and it will float.

Preparing Your Dice For Printing

This is where I’ll get into what goes wrong most of the time with printing and the absolutely most time consuming digital part of this process. Supports.  Supports are what prop the 3D Model up while the printer prints it, and keeps it together, basically, in my inexperienced description. They’re good and bad.

You can’t print dice without supports, and you can’t print dice you want to remake with automatically generated supports.

Why? You’ll get a mess of dots and imprints all over the face of the dice like in the picture to the left. Click in to view in more detail. The slicing program you use (I use Lychee) knows where to put the supports to best support the object while printing it, but not where to put them to make it look the best. So you’ll get a mess all over the face of the dice.

Here is what an automatically generated support looks like in Lychee. See the orange supports sticking onto the numbers 1 and 3? That’s going to make a huge mess when you print and later remove the supports.

However, there are ways to remove the supports with less trauma to the dice faces but there still may be some. Some people soak the dice in water or isopropyl rubbing alcohol (99% is the best) for water washable and ASB-like resins, this softens the supports before curing them, and if put in an ultrasonic or cleaner, will shake off the excess resin.

I definitely recommend this step for printing anything, and leaving the dice to soak for a few hours can help with the supports, custom or not. You can take a surgical scalpel (you can buy them on Amazon, I recommend a number 11 blade) and very carefully, and please wear gloves because these things are really really sharp, and if you knick yourself you’re going to bleed a lot, and you don’t want toxic resin going into that, the glove might barrier it a tiny bit, slice each support off each dice with surgical precision.

Most of us aren’t surgeons. It’s incredibly hard to do that. So the easier way is to strategically place your supports and do a lot of polishing and finishing of the dice after.

Adding Supports

First, I use the default settings. Supports are different for every printer and every type of resin you have. For example, I find Siraya Tech’s Smoky Black FAST resin really lightweight and I can print a D20 with only using 5 medium supports placed around one d20. This doesn’t work with Sunlu Water Washable Ceramic Gray resin, which just falls off the support and fails a print. I really like both resins to print with, and they’re both really great to use and work with after.

So I start off with default settings and a medium or heavy support in “anchor”  places, like each corner of a D4 or D10. Your slicing program only let’s you place supports in certain places, only so high/low/etc.

I place one “big” support on each “big” part of the die. For a D4, it’s on each corner. I put it as centered as possible. Smaller is better for finishing your dice, but bigger is often better for printing. So compromise!

Then I click and switch to Light (see picture under “Adding Supports”) and make a straight line across and add supports connecting from one big support to the other, like this. Keep clicking.

Tip: I do each die’s supports in it’s own (separate from it’s initial) STL file. I do this so I have a copy of the original die, and also so it’s easier to manage the scene in the slicing program when I’m arranging everything on my plate. It’s much easier to add supports just one die at a time, rather than dealing with a plate full of dice.

Eventually, you’ll finish all your dice, and then import them, and then you’ll have a scene like something like this.

Then it’s time to print and polish it. Polishing takes even longer! Cheers!