3D printed Dice Weapons
DND Weapons Shaped Like the Dice that count their damage.
Intro
Ever wondered what DND dice would look like as weapons? This project turns each die into a prop shaped like the weapon it represents. Fun to print, more fun to hold
Concept Origin
This again was just a project that popped into my head and I had to make into a reality. I am combining a handful of individual prints into a single post because they're all realistically part of the same art series. In DND (Dungeons and Dragons) you roll dice to determine how many damage points you inflict with various weapons. As you can imagine, each of the weapon types deal a different amount of possible damage, and as such require different dice. One day it occurred to me that each of the dice could be incorporated into the form of the weapon they represent, and that would be a pretty cool prop to have.
Design & Development
Since the constraints on this project were pretty concise I took it as a challenge to create relatively efficient models of each of the platonic solids. The dice are created by adding numbers to these solids and modeling them is an interesting CAD challenge since they have so many sides and faces. Figuring out how to incorporate them into the various weapons was an interesting challenge but a fun one since it was purely aesthetic, playing with proportion, scale and materials, to have the weapons end up being both recognizable as a dice and a weapon. The larges (and I think most fun) is what I call the dungeon Mace-ter, a 20 sided mace, which is the most iconic (and most used dice) in DND. I added spikes to each of the vertices for added silliness.
I wanted these to be purchasable files so part of the design was making it easy to 3d prints as well as making the handles (and any other accessories that were needed) were easy to aquire for someone any in the world, I ended up settling on a plunger hand for all the single handed weapons and a broom handle for everything else.
Prototype & Build
Prototyping the models was a fun challenge. This is before either myself or my partner really knew how to texture a 3d print so al of the solids were made with perfectly flat faces and then weathered and painted to look a little more beat up. This process can be fun, but is a lit more manual than the alternative. Putting them together you can either opt to weather them yourself or print them as "pristine" models never having seen combat.
Final Result
IU love the final result and have had the delight of seeing a few of them out in the wild. This is yet another one of those props that occasionally I have issues with people taking the files and selling physical prints without any form of attribution or compensation which is frustrating but the economics of chasing that down just isn't in the creators favor typically. It does demotivate me from making more of them, so for the time being the project is paused. I think I have a few more ideas for other weapons that Would make sense as part of this series, and I hope one day to find the motivation to once again work on it to finish the art series. As of right now the files are available for purchase.
