I used to print quite a lot of toys for my kids, but I stopped doing that, since it feels mostly like a waste of plastic.
3D printed toys are rarely enjoyable. The toys are usually either not interesting enough (think static, non-movable, single-color figurines like the low-poly-pokemon series), or not durable enough or both at the same time.
My kids liked the printed toys when they got them, but they barely looked at them after like 10 minutes and then they ended up rolling around the house until they broke, usually very soon.
I love 3D printing, I use it a lot for all sorts of things, but toys are just not a very good application for 3D prints, in my opinion. It’s just not worth the plastic.
Edit: Just for context: I’ve been around the block with 3D printing. I started about 7 years ago and I’ve been the 3D printer repair guy for my circle of friends ever since, fixing up everyone else’s printers. I design most of the things I print myself. The reason I am posting this is because pretty much everyone I know who has a printer and kids prints toys all the time, and any time I’m at any event where someone can shoehorn a box of give-away low-poly-pokemon in, there is one there.
IMO, this is all plastic waste and nothing else.
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You’re right, and it’s the same reason 2d printers didn’t destroy the book publishing business. It only really makes sense to print things that are either highly situational one-offs for our own purposes or things that someone else created but that aren’t economically justifiable to physically distribute to us.
Commodity items like toys are made to a ridiculous level of cost and process optimization with large and highly sophisticated equipment and molds, which won’t pay for themselves until they’ve sold a hundred thousand toys or more. 3d printers are not competing with that at all. The goal is not to do the same things they already do at scale. The goal is to do the things they won’t and can’t do at scale, that would be cost-prohibitive to set up the process and molds for, that you don’t have time to set up a whole process for because you need it right now. That’s where 3d printing shines. Even companies are using it for rapid iteration because it would simply take too long to keep changing the setup on a traditional process. But it’s never going to replace or “beat” traditional manufacturing and distribution for most things that are done in bulk.
And yet on basically any convention that has anything remotely to do with making or toys or anything like that, there will be someone with a box full of low-poly-pokemon distributing these garbage-level toys to everyone willing to take one.
I can count on one hand how many “toys” I’ve printed. I have printed thousands of useful/needed items, though. That tool is indispensable to me. It’s crazy how far prototyping tech has come.
On one hand I think “wow I want to develop this skill”, on the other hand it seems like quite the time suck of a hobby, with quite a high barrier to entry.
it seems like quite the time suck of a hobby, with quite a high barrier to entry
That’s printer building, modding and maintenance of those
3D printing in 2025 is easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBQ-QfcY3Qs
That’s mostly outdated. Sure, you can still get an Ender 3 in 2025 and spend years fixing it up and upgrading it, but you can also spend €200, get an Anet A1 Mini and be done with it.
These things print almost flawlessly out-of-the-box and are dirt cheap.
€200 for the printer, €20 for a roll of filament and you are set.
TBH I prefer the older machines, I stay away from the proprietary all-in-one stuff. I’m all about modularity, and usually means keeping parts and processes standard between builds for production’s sake.
That’s a totally valid viewpoint, and I myself am also running an Ender 5, modified to death. The only original components are the frame, the motors and the bed, and I even have a toolchanger setup for multi-material prints.
But it’s not the right device if your goal is just to print. For that, the proprietary ones aren’t a bad choice.
It’s all about what works best for the particular individual. The majority of people want some hand-holding, and that’s ok. Not everyone is into designing their own hotends or completely rebuilding stock printers into monsters :)
And it’s not only a person-thing alone, but also a thing-thing. For example, I love modifying my printer or my phone (I designed and built a keyboard attachment for my phone). But I want my 2D printer to just work. And my car as well, same as my dishwasher, my laundry machine and my stove.
So I should buy the Anet A1 mini?
It’s a good printer if you just want to print and don’t care for hardware modding. If you fit into that profile, yes, get it.
I’m currently printing parts for a Voron on a Prusa MK3S. The fact that I can make another printer using a printer is still such a cool concept.
My fleet of ender 3’s have upgraded themselves all to direct drive linear rail dual z, etc. but they’ve also been instrumental in creating dummy and temp parts to build multiple CNC machines, which then are used to make their own final parts. It’s wild what you can do!
I’m currently rebuilding a brand new AnyCubic Kobra2 max, since the factory controller hardware is trash. I bought it for the frame and hotbed. It’s getting all new motion control, klipper, direct drive, bl touch, and a input shaping among other things.
I think it’s actually that the “toys” that can be easily printed are simple novelties, and lots of us get caught up in that. They look super cool online, then you eventually realize that they’re usually worse versions of happy meal toys.
But when there’s a broken part on our train set, or we have a dollhouse that needs another chair, printing is super great.
Printing is easy. Choosing something worth printing is hard.
The fragile part is easily fixed by changing the print material and/or infill percentage. You’re right on all other points though.
3d Printing can lose it’s luster over time if you don’t make the effort of learning 3d CAD software and making new designs. -This is my current struggle as FreeCAD is a painful piece of software to use.
The fragile part is easily fixed by changing the print material and/or infill percentage. You’re right on all other points though.
You can make it clunky, but then it’s not appealing any more. That’s why I said that it’s a trade-off between clunky and not interesting on the one side and fragile and not durable on the other side.
infill percentage
Btw, perimeters do a huge amount more for stability than infill.
3d Printing can lose it’s luster over time if you don’t make the effort of learning 3d CAD software and making new designs. -This is my current struggle as FreeCAD is a painful piece of software to use.
I’ve been 3D printing since 7 years now, and I mostly design the things I print myself. For functional parts and prototyping, 3D printing is amazing. I am specifically talking about toys here.
You can make it clunky, but then it’s not appealing any more.
Using pctg and more infill doesn’t make a 3d printed object clunky. It only makes it stronger.
For example a benchy in pctg is so strong that it’s physically impossible to break anything but the smokestack with your bare hands. Print in TPU and it’s completely indestructible to bare hands.
Infill doesn’t really improve strenght that much, perimeters work far better.
But any 3D printed object that has that much space for more infil/perimeters is already clunky.
Compare a benchy to an average toy figurine. The benchy is super clunky compared to most non-toddler toys my kids have.
Infill doesn’t improve strength linearly but it does improve it.
Compare a benchy to an average toy figurine.
I don’t know what figurines you are printing. Could you link to one?
And TPU makes anything indestructible.
Fair enough. I guess I can’t relate to that.
I think it really depends.
I print a LOT of barbie furniture and items for my nieces in PLA and it works great, they love it. I also print barbie shoes and jewelry in flex resin, and it’s really perfect.
I also use Resin to print other action figures like the bluey family, a peppa pig lamp for their room etc. But for action figures I have to paint them.too. Sometimes I just let them paint it themselfs and they love it.
Any toy is a “waste” of plastic in the end, it will all eventually break
Couple of thoughts.
First, what you described sounds like most of the toys I’ve bought my kids growing up so if it brought them joy, probably about as valuable as anything else.
Second, my experience is a bit different. My sons have 3d printed nick nacks displayed on their shelves and both have fidget toys they play with on the regular. Also I’ve got a chain fidget in my pocket I’ve been playing with all day.
I’ve also got a box of less successful toys I’d love to recycle if I could but definitely some wins too. So I think there are a lot of toys you’d be right about but also a lot of them are actually pretty interesting and fun to the right person
I much prefer printing mechanical things, and stuff that does stuff (or fixes stuff) is where it’s at for me. For me to print a static model it has to either be sufficiently hilarious or fit with some inside joke in my household (penguins and ducks feature prominently) or I ain’t doing it.
A word to the wise for anyone printing static models or figurines for your kids, or whatever. Print these in TPU instead of PLA. TPU is functionally indestructible except via heat, can’t shatter, won’t hurt as much if you step on it in the dark, and its moderate amount of squishiness means that it’s significantly less likely to deal damage when younger brothers throw it at older sisters.
TPU is a total game changer for kid’s toys - I switched to it last summer and my daughter’s outdoor prints haven’t melted in the car like the PLA ones did (TPU’s heat resistance is around 100°C vs PLA’s sad 60°C).
To some extent I agree, however I do have some examples with staying power:
- bath toys, like boats and stuff
- video games props, like pokeballs, Pokédex, ocarina flute, majoras mask prop, wind waker wand
For the latter, it was a father-son project to sand and paint them, so that probably has to do with it. For bath time, it’s probably because the selection is more limited in the first place.
Hot take but video game props just for having them, is just trash
I mean I guess but that sounds like just defining all toys as trash to me
I agree, but with exceptions. More complicated projects made of several separate parts (especially ones not 100% 3D printed) can be hella cool.
Heat set screw inserts, embedded hardware (nuts, magnets, springs), electronics, etc. can all be used to create toys that can’t be purchased.
Most of the stuff people print, is crap that will go in the garbage in a week. I get it, I went through that phase when I got my printer too.
If you learn how to design your own stuff, suddenly it becomes a really useful tool.
I got into 3D printing 7 years ago and I design most of the things I print myself, so I know what kind of useful tool it can be.
The reason I am posting this is because pretty much everyone I know who has a printer and kids prints toys all the time, and any time I’m at any event where someone can shoehorn a box of give-away low-poly-pokemon in, there is one there.
And all that is plastic waste and nothing else. These things often make a happy-meal-toy look like quality by comparison.
I don’t think this is a hot take at all. This is the main reason why I’ve printed fewer than like 5 non-functional prints in my entire life, and most of them were requests from friends. I make lots of custom mounts, replacement parts, custom cases, shims and jigs, custom measuring tools, etc.
Yup. Most of the time yes. Parts to repair toys were useful, though. Especially one time when the part that broke was a plastic horse (part of a bigger toy) and there’s no way I could make one without the printer, or buy in the scale I needed.
Toys that worked for my kid:
- kazoo, it’s a shitty instrument but pretty fun
- logic puzzles, not a favourite toy but used once in a while
I have had a good experience printing games. Stick man balloon head, Ninja cats, Prusa Dragon balance, and Cascade Connect 4.
They play with the games as much as any board games. We have a closet full of board games. It’s not waste if they got an experience out of it.
I dunno. I agree with this to some extent for sure–I don’t print a lot of the meme models that are everywhere on 3d printing forums. But there are toys that would not exist without 3d printing that I think are pretty great.
I designed a kaleidoscope that reflects things not to tile a plane, but instead to tile the surface of a disdyakis triacontahedron: https://imgur.com/gallery/i-made-kaleidoscope-P4atHey I had to cut the mirrors from acrylic by hand, but the templates for them and the shell that holds them in place are all 3d printed. And that thing is a pretty great toy.
This thing: https://imgur.com/gallery/make-of-cyclidial-iris-by-vergo-henry-segerman-XHN4MC0
is a math sculpture that I didn’t design, just printed, but it’s completely beautiful, and it’s had real staying power as both a toy and a decoration. It sits out on our coffee table all the time, but my niece plays with it every time she’s over here.
And this puzzle box I designed: https://imgur.com/gallery/i-made-puzzle-box-nieces-birthday-U1q408R
was a big hit with her too. I’m not sure if she’ll continue to play with it long-term, but based on my own tendencies as a kid, I think she might end up investigating the mechanisms involved for some time to come.
Things that you could buy at the store you’re generally better off buying at the store. But there are things it’s not economical to mass produce, and it never used to be possible to design and make your own toys. Both ideosyncratic toys and bespoke toys are pretty great uses of 3d printing in my opinion.
3D printing was always 99% garbage, sorry.
Yeah, most of the time it’s not necessary. It’s just generating trash because they want to print stuff
Is it fun? I guess. I never saw the appeal.
“Wow, you mean I can spend more time and headaches to “create” my own parts instead of knowing a supplier’s offerings? And still end up with an inferior product that took all night to print? And it’s just simple CAD software like for the last 40 years but now it requires Windows 11 and 64G of RAM? Joy!”
“Sure! Why do you want to limit yourself to gears and enclosures from professional companies that have been doing it for 50 years?”
It really comes down to the user, as with any tech.
I use mine to exclusively print functional parts to keep old things around the house functioning. But I also took mechanical drafting for 3 semesters and feel both comfort and enjoyment from drafting my own models. That’s not the case for everyone.
My functional prints are almost all still in operation, some for years. Many of the parts literally do not have commercial replacements, or solve issues that exist in the commercial versions.
I understand that I am an outlier though
I’m curious about these old things around the house you keep functioning.
I’ll give an example of an old thing I want to keep running: a 1980s cassette deck.
Between the metalized plastic buttons, the belts, the wheels, the gears, the pressure rollers, there is nothing that can be 3D printed that even remotely approaches the finished look or function of the parts I’d need.
That definitely sounds like an intensive project
I have some simple buttons and knobs, drawer handles, drawer slides, dryer pest guards that no longer seem to be made, cabinet shelf supports for weird old peg sizes/shapes, plugs for holes to block sharp edges, etc
Your example is going to be really tough in part because the tape itself is fragile. I would absolutely not print things that will touch the magnetic tape itself if you care about the tape. Most 3d printed plastics are not ESD, and I would not risk a magnetic tape. (Though polymaker does make some ESD filaments)
But the buttons, and possibly even the gears can likely be functionally printed as long as the features arent too small. That’s the biggest issue your example has most likely: minimum feature size
Metalized https://youtube.com/shorts/wnUjFzN3by8
Gears: depends on pitch. Cf nylon on a good printer can go relatively fine. https://youtu.be/S12MAkV29sQ
Belts: There’s TPU at a variety of shore hardness to match the original.
