>>6131374I bought a Printrbot Play which is around $400ish.
The spools of PLA filament are like $25 per color.
It takes a solid week to really figure out all the bumps and pitfalls of printing, breaking it, fixing it, tweaking settings, getting everything to look nice.
As far as 3d data, there are various exporters and converters for file formats. Eventually you import them into Blender. Blender itself is a huge learning curve but with enough google searching you can learn the basics. From there you fix them up and export as .STL or .OBJ and then run them through Netfabb to clean up holes. Then they should print fine with a slow enough speed and lots of supports.