Dice4print

Printed Dice

Making good dice on a 3D printer is not straightforward. Simply printing a cubic shape is easy but such a die is highly likely to be biased and some faces to look poor because of highly directional way that printers work.

Six-piece assembly

This design makes a die in six identically shaped pyramidal pieces, one for each face, which can all print in the same orientation and then interlock on assembly to ensure alignment. These are glued together to produce the finished die. Letters printed on the inside of each piece match up (A-A, B-B etc.) to ensure the pieces are fitted in the correct positions.

For an ordinary die with faces 1 - 6, the internal assembly labelling ensures the faces are properly arranged such that opposite faces add up to 7 and that for face designs using text or images with a 'right way up', the labels on opposite faces have opposing orientation and adjacent faces read at right angles.

Face designs

There are models for a wide selection of sample designs here. They are all 25mm cubes but you can scale them in your slicer program over a reasonable range.

Suggestions

I welcome suggestions for designs which may have wide appeal - post comments if you have any.

Generate your own Designs

The OpenSCAD source code for these designs is available on github here under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license.

The source is very parametric and works over a wide range of sizes, Designs on each face can be text or images. They can be scaled, shifted and rotated. All the sample designs are engraved (cut into the face) which is conventional for dice. However, embossed designs, standing out from the face, are also possible although if they stand out very much, they are likely to influence the way the die rolls.

Printing

Material & Finishing

This works really well with ABS (or ASA) where you can use acetone to weld the parts together and then acetone vapour polish the finished die to get a great surface finish.

Orientation

The pieces can be printed face down or face up. Face down works well if the design on each face does not have large areas which become long bridges when printing. Face up can also work well and is necessary for an embossed design but may give overhang or bed adhesion problems depending on your printer.

Order of Pieces

You can print each piece separately or set the printer to complete individual objects and leave your printer to print them all one after the other. I would not recommend printing them all simultaneously because of the amount of stringing and disturbance as the printhead moves around all the pieces at each layer.