Alphabet Dice

My daughter was playing with my husbands DnD dice and I thought it would be fun to make a set for her to play with! I thought she would have more interest in a set of dice with letters and pictures on them rather than normal dots, so this will show you how I've made my set along with the files to print your own. These are really easy to make using Tinkercad and I used JON-A-TRON's tutorial.

Of course, in the end, she is more interested in her dad's than the nice set I made for her but I'm going to share mine with you regardless :)

Instructable 331

To make these, all you really need is Tinkercad, a 3D Printer, and your filament of choice. When it comes to colors I recommend not using one that is too light (white) or too dark (black) but ones in between seem fine and I actually found this Marble Filament to look really nice.

If you want to color the dice you will possibly need:

• Clear Coat Spray
• Sharpie Marker
• Acrylic Paint
• Resin (I haven't tried this and it would take quite a while to do, but resin could be a nice way to color and fill in the numbers/letters)

There are two things to consider when making your play dice, how big do you want them and what do you want on them.

I decided to try two different sizes. The large die is 1" cubed and the smaller die is .75" cubed.

I used the dice shape that is already in the Tinkercad basic shapes menu. You could also use a cube and mess around with the edge curves but the premade dice shape is so nice, I just went with that.

Next pick out the shapes or letters you want to put on the dice. I made this pretty straightforward and my dice have:

• Dice 1: A, B, C, D, E, F
• Dice 2: G, H, I, J, K, L (I added a line to the top and bottom of the I as I tend to do to make it look nicer)
• Dice 3: M, N, O, P, Q, R
• Dice 4: S, T, U, V, W, X
• Dice 5: Y, Z, !, ?, Tree, Star/Sun shape
• Dice 6: Star, Car, Heart, Little person, Butterfly, Flower

Once you have your dice, have it sized, and have the images you want on the dice, you just need to make the letters and shapes into holes, line them up so they are centered, and group them.

To make things easier on myself, I lined all my shapes up with the top of the dice and then just rotated the dice to add them to it instead of trying to rotate all the letters around the dice.

For the two color dice (for a multi media printer) I just made sure to copy all the shapes and letters and line them back up after cutting them out of the dice.

If you are doing the dice one color, they are perfectly fine as is, or you can try to make the letters and numbers stand out more.

There are a couple ways to do this. I attemped this with sharpie and with paint.

Sharpie:

What I found was that sharpie was quick, easy, and would cover well but it would bleed. One way to prevent this is to first spray the dice with a coat or two of a clear coat. Then, when that is try, use the sharpie. You can spray on more clear coat if you want to really seal that color in.

Paint:

Paint is pretty easy, as long as you can stay in the lines, but you have to wait for it to dry so it can take longer. I don't think sealing it first will make a big difference but you can if you want. I would recommend sealing after painting through so it doesn't flake off.

Resin?

I mentioned resin in the supplies because I think that would be a nice way to finish these, but you could only really do one side at a time so it's not practical. You would have to use a dropper and fill in the letter with a dyed resin and then let it sit before doing the next side.

Just another look at the dice and comparing the large 1" one to the smaller .75" one.

Also shows the 2 color versus 1 color.

Just a look at a couple dice I did with marble filament.