We got so over-excited for season 8 of Game of Thrones that we wracked our brains to find a great excuse to come up with some fun content…but how could we relate it to printing, so that our boss didn’t go full mountain on us??
We came up with ‘Game of 3D printing’ of course and tried to figure out the time and cost to 3D print life-size versions of various Game of thrones landmarks such as ‘the Wall’ or Winterfell.
3D printing is fun, and the applications are endless these days compared to using regular printer cartridges. It’s amazing to see the many different things creative people are doing with 3D printers such as the Ultimaker 2, not to mention the medical and industrial applications (cosplay is my personal favorite).
What could we 3D print from GOT?
For us to be able to work out how long it would take to print something in 3D and how much it would cost, we first needed to figure out its dimensions. There were only so many things from the Game of Thrones TV series to choose from. So we started with a wish list and set out to research each one.
We weren’t able to do this for everything that we wanted to, but for those things that we could, we set on our way to do the maths to figure out what it would take to 3D print things like the wall, the iron throne, the pyramid of Meereen, and Winterfell. We even threw in a few curve balls to give some perspective like the mountain, a dire wolf and Drogon!
It took a lot of hard work to come up with the numbers and put together our infographic / video clip, so please be kind and most of all feel free to share and link back to us!
Video
We created a mini video version of our infographic that just included 3 Game of thrones locations:
Infographic
Our infographic includes extra locations and characters to give you a size comparison:
How we worked it out
We based our game of thrones infographic stats on using a common household 3D printer (the Ultimaker 2), rather than an industrial machine because let’s be honest, who can afford one of those?
We first had to come up with the approximate volume of each thing we wanted to ‘print’, so we had to get the most accurate measurements that we could to estimate the volume of each thing. Naturally, some were easier than others and for some, we had to take some creative licence through lack of information available about them.
We found lots of information and help from the sources mentioned in the infographic (thank you to anyone who we mentioned). Once we had figured out the volumes, we were able to figure out how quickly the Ultimaker 2 could print them and what their cost would be by using its print speed and cost.
Can it be done quicker?
We based our stats on using the Ultimaker 2 3D printer, and if you’re wondering whether this can be done quicker and cheaper then the answer is, of course it can!
There are industrial 3D printers available on the market than can print at 4500 cm cubed per hour, and even some house building 3D printers that print in concrete that would make more sense to use (not that we could find the print speed for those). If you printed with an industrial 3D printer, at 4500cm cubed per hour then the wall would take a lot less time to print at approximately 237 million years instead of almost 13 billion years….Sign me up for that!
Whilst we can debate the sense in which printer to use, what material would be best and whether we considered wind speed or not, none of us would be around to actually give it a go, and this is just a bit of fun!
So there you have it, please feel free to share our infographic on social media or your own website and link back to this page. What would you 3D print from Game of Thrones? Comment below!
Note: we have no affiliation with HBO or the Game of Thrones franchise and its characters. This infographic / video was created for fun, discussion and commenting purposes only. All rights belong to HBO.
About Stuart DeavallI have been working in the printing industry with TonerGiant for over 16 years, and I'm the resident technical printer expert, helping people fix their printer problems for over 14 years. I have taken part in many training courses with HP, Samsung, Brother, Canon and Xerox to further my knowledge, and I'm also the Digital Marketing Manager at TonerGiant.co.uk (degree qualified).