To celebrate the release of its latest World of Warcraft expansion, Battle for Azeroth, creator Blizzard staged a huge diorama featuring 10,000 3D printed figurines of real players’ characters.

For its 2017 BlizzCon convention, video games producer Blizzard unveiled something rather special. Spanning 1,300 square feet of convention space and featuring 10,000 individually printed characters, the Battle for Lordaeron diorama makes a pretty spectacular statement.

Simultaneously epic, personal and — thanks to the Guinness representatives present — world-record breaking, the battle is Blizzard’s way of celebrating the launch of the Battle for Azeroth, the latest expansion to the company’s 13-year-old World of Warcraft game.

Depicting a battle between two of the game’s factions, the Alliance and the Horde, battalions of 3D printed figures in red and blue swarm around the Undercity, which was constructed by traditional methods.

In addition to the scale and new crown as World’s Largest Video Game Diorama, the thing that makes this scene so special is that each and every individual character on the battlefield corresponds to selected BlizzCon attendees’ characters. Up to the smallest detail including armor, race and weaponry, these personal tributes were all FDM 3D printed.

3D Printing A World of Warcraft Diorama

Creating a literal army of tiny characters is no small feat. To help the company achieve their vision of a fully-realized battle worthy of their famous cinematics, they turned to 3D printing to do the heavy lifting. In the video above you catch a brief glimpse of the making of the mini warriors.

From what we can glean, the figurines are first 3D printed on a Stratasys uPrint SE Plus. There’s only the quickest of shots directly showing the printing, but the telltale blue toggles on the front of the print bed suggest it may be the professional ABS-printing machine.

Following this, the models undergo some kind of post processing bath, no doubt to smooth the exteriors and tidy them in preparation for painting. Separated out into the two armies, hued red and blue, the final piece is the meticulous placement on the battlefield.

Rather than relying on scale alone for the wow factor, Blizzard tracked the placement of each and every model. Attendees at BlizzCon (if they were part of the lucky 10,000 to be chosen) could then look their in-game avatar up and find themselves on the battlefield.

We’ve reached out to Blizzard for a little more detail on the making-of process, and hope to update the article with more soon.

Source: PCGamer