It has been a year since we ordered our first Bambu printer. A whole year that flew by.After debating what type to buy and with or without AMS, we decided to buy a P1S with AMS. After 2 weeks, being blown away by the machine, we ordered a second one 😂I say we, because me and our husband both 3D print.Since it has been a year, I thought it would be fun to share some insight behind “Together 3D”.Who is “Together 3D”?We are a husband and wife duo from Belgium (Northern part, so Dutch speaking). We have 2 kids, our daughter is 8 years old, our son is 11 years old. My husband chose the name ‘Together 3D”, because we print together. I liked it, it shows the shared interest and the bond of our 21 year long relationship (married for 15 years now ❤️). In reality all designs/remixes that we posted are mine, the wife part. But I still jokingly call my husband the CEO of Together 3D, because it is due to his input and ideas that designs get tweaked to perfection and his out of the box thinking made a lot of designs better.He has been designing some tiles recently - so who knows 🤩 The beginning: why would we need a 3D printer?In 2022 my husband came with the idea of buying a 3D printer. My first reaction was: “Why would we need a 3D printer?” We watched a ton of youtube video’s: how much you could print with 1 roll of filament, if we would buy a FDM (filament) or resin printer, what type we would buy, what we would print, if it was (relatively) easy to design stuff yourself, and so on. The selling point for me was printing board game inserts. We have over 1.000 boardgames (yep, more then a thousand, I did not mistype) and before 3D printing my husband would make custom inserts for our boardgames using foam, which is a tedious process. We bought an Ender 3 pro. After 2 weeks we were tired of waiting for the other ones print to finish, so we bought another one 😂We LOVED it. Printing board game inserts, board game upgrades, household stuff, dice towers, and much much more. I learned a lot. Altering Gcode, changing settings in the slicer, bed leveling (a lot), fixing clogs, and so on. Dungeons and Dragons: the tipping pointThen about 1,5 years ago, we started playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’m not sure how it came to be, but I know it was my husbands idea and he was watching a lot of ‘Critical Role’ on youtube.But… starting out with Dungeons and Dragons, we did not have any terrain, miniatures or monsters. So our two printers went into overdrive, but could not follow our demand.Then a friend of ours showed off his Bambu P1S with AMS during a boardgame night and we were blown away. After much deliberation, we ended up with two P1S with AMS. And I am super happy we made that change. Designing: Roblox and D&DWe were already designing basic stuff in Tinkercad before we started D&D (Dungeons and Dragons), but now that our printing speed went up, a lot more was possible.Because now I could design, print a prototype, alter and print again pretty fast. I remember when I uploaded our first models, it was so exciting! I barely understood the Makerworld website, the first print profile I posted was taken down (didn’t post a picture of the print at the profile, only on the model, I did not understand the difference).Every point, rating and comment we got was (and is) such a thrill! During this time our son started playing games on Roblox. And when he asked for prints from the games he played, we could barely find any models. Since the games have very blocky texture, designs from the game were doable in Tinkercad. Although we (hubby and I) are not the biggest Roblox-fans (we love playing other videogames though), I have to admit making designs that were nowhere to be found from Roblox-games, made our profile grow considerably. And the main goal was that our kids were happy. Besides that, we were having problems with our map building in Dungeons and Dragons. The map tiles were being pushed around when played in, and you could not set them up in another room, to bring them out when needed. After looking around, we came across the OpenLOCK system. A system where you click tiles together and they are really sturdy so you can pick up a whole map without it falling apart. After looking up other tile mechanisms, we decided to go for the OpenLOCK system. Fun, fun, fun?In case you wonder if it was all fun and games: nope!I got a serious point reduction a few months back because I posted designs exclusive that was not meant to be exclusive. I misinterpreted the rules. I am much more careful about what to post exclusive now and what not and often deliberate with my husband whether or not something can be an exclusive.It was a serious downer and I was very close to just give up. Thankfully hubby got me motivated again. The next step in designing: Blender Tinkercad is awesome, but it has its limits.So in December 2024 I decided to start learning Blender. Followed the legendary donut-tutorial, quit after episode 2, and I was discouraged for a month.In January 2025 I started another tutorial, was ecstatic about the sculpting features in Blender and went crazy on it. I looked up a massive amount of tutorials, spend about every night working in the program, designing (and cursing) away.Community exposure: UsergamesI believe it was in February 2025, one of the most active users in the community page at that time was Creative User, a very good designer with a specialisation for Dummy 13 designs. He had to explain what Dummy 13 was to me, because I had no idea what it was 😅 Anyway, he hosted the “Usergames”, a friendly design competition for beginners, intermediate and expert designers where every week there would be a major and minor challenge and he would judge to pick a winner. At the end of the competition every category would have a winner. I wasn’t sure about entering the contest, but Creative User convinced me of the optionality and sportivity of the competition, so I went for it. It is a while ago, but the user games were really popular, it was a trending topic for a whole month. I got a lot of exposure competing, it challenged me in a designing aspect, and some of the designs I made for the competition are really popular and downloaded/printed a lot. Disclaimer: the rules of community have changed by now, so holding competitions is no longer allowed. I never have claimed a reward from the contest and Creative User is in no way in breach of the rules 😁 It was a super fun friendly challange!Dungeons and Dragons terrainBlender is not an easy program. It is fantastic when you know how it works, but after months of using it, I’m still learning a lot with every design I make in it. Because we played Dungeons and Dragons, there was an endless stream of possibilities to design. I knew modelling mini’s wouldn’t be for the first few months, so I started with terrain.Since my husband is the dungeons master (storyteller of D&D campaign), I could make anything I want, because every session was a surprise for me.Occasionally he would ask to make a certain something specifically, like an underwater army (which was very very tough and a whole new learning process). Remembering our Ender 3-history, my goal with designing was always making the designs as supportless as possible. Because when using supports you have more chance they fail and you are using filament to just go into the trash. Favorite modelsThis is a tough one. I love every OpenLOCK-terrain set, but the hedge-terrain set is special to me. Because I hand sculpted that one and it was a serious learning process. I also love that we got commercial rights to OpenLOCK. This particular was inspired by multiple posts during the years showing off people making a hedge maze using sponges. Besides that, the rock formations are like the summary of everything I find important in a design: supportless, easy print and versatile. The geocache rock has a special place in my heart, because it won a participation award and I am really proud of that. I know it’s silly, but having a contest-badge on your homepage is fun 😂 And I am a very competitive person… 🙃 The future?I intend to make more Dungeons and Dragons terrain, as well as game related items. That is what I love to make and is useful (fun) for our household as well. I have so many ideas on my to-design list I’m good for a whole year - but I know I will not follow the list anyway 😅Design wise I want to create my own character from Dungeons and Dragons in miniature and I want to make full buildings that are supportless and easy to print. Mid august we started with an Etsy shop, selling the printed out designs we made. When we got a sale 24 hours after opening the shop, I was over the moon. I went straight to my kids high fiving them, because it were models I made by their request 😍 We saved up our gift cards this whole year, initially to buy a H2D printer, but after deliberation we bought a X1C with AMS2 with it, because I rarely print multi color items.The next goal is to change the other P1S also into a X1C. There are designers that can make this their dayjob and I am happy for them, but this is nowhere near the case for us. I work in a notary, my husband works in pharmaceutics.I am very happy that designing is a great creative outlet and I get great joy from people posting their print and comments and it is great that we don’t have to buy filament anymore. Because of 3D printing and designing (and connection through my day-job), I was asked to give an introduction course about 3D printing and designing in Tinkercad. Hoping to inspire others to start 3D printing and designing as well. I am really looking forward to that and I feel very lucky to have been given that opportunity. So who knows what our life will look like next year? Tips?If I would summarize our 1 year journey into tips, they would be:Design what you love and what is useful to you. If you can use it, others can too. If you design for yourself with passion, it will be better quality. And quality is important. If you design consistently with good quality, people will trust your future designs. Be proud of what you make and publish. I personally use the free app “Keep” from Google to save lists, pictures and screenshots of stuff I need/want to design. This can be a screenshot of a game, a sentence in a book, an AI generated image as reference, a picture I took on vacation, and so on.Enter the Makerworld contests, but only the ones you are passionate about. It is a great way to get more exposure and to challenge yourself.Youtube is the encyclopedia of this century. There are loads of people on Youtube that make high quality tutorials about designing and printing. The Blender-tutorial that got me going => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkP-xHYEXrI The donut-tutorial => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haAdmHqGOw&t=1889s Sharing is caring. Talk to people on the community page, give them a “congratz!” when they reach a milestone. 10 followers or 10K followers, it doesn’t matter. It is the next step in a wonderful journey and supporting each other and giving constructive feedback helps a lot. A model that might seem easy to you, might be a challenge for others. So be kind, polite, constructive with criticism and be aware that every username is a person.Requests are your friend. When someone requests a model, consider making it. If you make it, there will be at least 1 person happy with it. I was once requested to make my stone portal design modular. That was a genius request. It made the model so much better!Be patient: receiving points and gift cards takes a lot of time and work. You cannot start designing and hope that in 1 month you can buy a Bambu A1. You need to design, prototype, change your design again and again, take good pictures, spend time writing a description and so on. I spend a lot of time behind my pc tweaking designs. Taking pictures and posting a model takes me at least an hour (painting time not included). Posing the design, taking pictures from each angle, size reference, before and after painting, with and without supports, photoshopping it with a border and a title, making a gif to show off assembly or moving feature, making sure the print profile is perfect, writing a clear description, … As a reference: Our first gift card was received 1 month and 11 days after we posted our first design. And that is including the “update your profile” and the monthly “rate your prints”-points. Special thanks3D printing and designing might sound like a solo activity, it really is not.So thank you:My husband, who kept me going after we got a serious point-reduction when designs were pulled from exclusive. For giving input and ideas that make the designs better. For supporting the many (many!) hours of time I spend alone behind a PC and challenging me to create better and more epic designs.My kids: for the endless stream of screenshots and “You can print/design this right?”-questions, together with the strength-tests they do to models I made (if it survives a week of playtime, it is a strong model 😂)To Creative User, for hosting the User Games, motivating me to enter and challenging me every single week with a new theme for a whole month.To MikeGyver and Drakeforge 3D, for bouncing off ideas, giving feedback and hyping eachother up about eachother designs.And well…to be a total cliché: Makerworld. Because their reward system makes it possible to sustain our 3D printing hobby and keep creating and posting designs. The journey: thank you!The first design (a remix) I posted was on the 3rd of November.About one year, 3K followers, 26.4K downloads, 14.9K prints, 17.4K likes and 1 contest (participation) reward later, it still gives me a tremendous amount of joy when someone rates a model 5 ⭐ or posts a picture of their print or gives a lovely comment. Thank you, for every boost, like, follow, print, post, comment and rating in the past year. For constructive feedback, for sharing your prints and your experiences. Thank you for this lovely community and for giving me a creative outlet that supports our hobby. I am so happy that I can design stuff for our kids our Dungeons and Dragons campaign, that other people can use as well. On to many more years! Marjan, the wife part of Together 3D