When I received my Creality 3D printer, this was the very first project I printed!
I wanted to give Gin something unusual and unique for her birthday. She’s a D&D fiend, so I designed and fabricated this custom die set for her.
The faces are imprinted with Mayan numerals. The Mayans used a base-20 system for counting; the dots represents ones, the bars represent fives, and the oval ‘shells’ represent a zero. You can read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_numerals.
I designed the set online using TinkerCad, sliced them with Cura, and then printed them on my Creality 3D printer. To give them a more ancient look and feel, I used lignum fiber filament – the dice are more reminiscent of wood than of plastic. The inlay marks are hand-painted with acrylics. Painting the inlay on a die is not hard, but it does require great patience. Don’t rush; just surrender to the task and find your inner Zen. (Also, 320-grit sandpaper fixes most mistakes.) I recommend one clear coat of spray-on matte acrylic finish once you are happy with your handiwork.
Many thanks to the following TinkerCad users, from whose work these dice were derived:
- Gabriel Pinkalla
- hjhackel01
- harcusz16
Print them yourself, and let me know what you think! Follow the links: