Recently ordered some stuff form shapeways, a big marketplace where designers upload designs that are then printed at some pretty advanced factories and shipped to the customers - rather a nice system.
Among other things, I got this delicate Elven scenic piece from our very own Miniman:
http://www.shapeways.com/product/5GBNW6 ... d=21129588 Very nice and certainly easier than making it myself.
The popular game X-Wing is served well by the website too, with various people having designed whole fleets worth of parts that aren't (yet) included in the game, but are loved by fans and can be purchased there:
http://www.shapeways.com/shops/mel_miniatures Details are probably not quite up to the quality for actual figures, print lines are still noticable on some parts, unless the material is polished, which wouldn't work for intricate parts either. Sharp lines and relatively simple shapes makes these much more suitable for 3D printing than a Moria goblin would be.
Another interesting thing is metal jewelry, which cannot be printed itself, but instead they produce the design in wax, make a mold, and as with normal worksmanship, melt the wax to fill the mold with molten silver (or whatever) to produce the piece, and then manually polish it.
@abcdefg: although I too like traditional crafts, there already is overlap between traditional and digital - GW's Smaug as a prime example, was of course not 3D printed, but still digitally sculpted. Probably because physically sculpting every single scale on that massive body would have driven even M. Perry mad. Without digital sculpting, we probably would never have seen that model.
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