Research and Developement
Chess Pieces and Other Board Game Pieces
By Alex Bowen
Game Piece Research
Programs for 3D Printing
AutoDesk is by far the largest, most versatile creator of 2D and 3D CAD software, hosting everything from very expensive, professional, precision software like AutoCAD (the company's namesake) to free, easy to use online software like Tinkercad. For lack of funds and a need for speed, TinkerCAD is the software I'm using.
3D Printers
There are literally thousands of 3D printers available online, the question is organizing them and figuring out which one is for you. The school already has a 3D printer which was an easy assembly device, using shrinking monocolor plastic and not being amazingly precise, though it is very cheap. I did find a website that brings most of the online 3D printers for sale together though.
Piece Design Research
I had to look up the width of standard chess pieces to know how wide to make them, and from there I could simply build the piece up to what makes sense for the width. Google answered that surprisingly effectively, and that was all I needed to know for chess pieces, since I know the style of each piece already.
PTC launched the very first parametric CAD software 30 years ago, and remain a huge force in the industry used by professionals everywhere. Once again, they have quite a variety of programs. I'm less familiar with their programs than AutoDesk's though, so I didn't use it.
I wasn't happy with the dimensions of my first print out, so I looked my in depth at what dimensions exactly were based off of what. I based my redisigned and rescaled pieces off of this information
