Printing Miniatures/Printing Tips & Guides

General printing tips and guides for printing miniatures via FDM.

Community Profiles

• Tim's Presets Shared Drive
• BlockBadger's Shared Drive
• Fat Dragon Games Profile

Layer Height

Start with 0.06mm layers. You may see a lot of advice online for 0.08mm layers, but they struggle due to how bad their overhangs are. 0.06mm is not a lot slower, but the quality increase along with better overhang performance I believe it worth it.

If your happy with your profile at 0.06mm, then you can try lower. But take it slow, and things will start to get strange. Badger thinks 0.05mm profiles are the perfect balance of speed/quality/workability as 0.04mm profiles often crash slicers and take so long to slice and print.

Model Orientation

One of the first decisions you make when preparing a model for printing is what the orientation will be. It may be tempting to orient it vertically, with its feet on the ground, but this will often have suboptimal results. Instead, you will generally orient the model so that it is leaned back. This allows you to take advantage of the greater detail on the Z axis and to have supports on the back of the model, so any support scarring is less noticeable (all supports leave at least a little scarring).

Other considerations are to minimize the amount of supports needed, to minimize the appearance of layer lines, and to align the layers for stronger parts.

If you are unsure of how you should orient your model and it came with a pre-supported file, you can check that file for the orientation. Note that pre-supported files are generally not suitable for FDM printers since the supports are designed for resin printing.

Supports

How you support your model is a major factor for how well your print will turn out. FDM printers cannot print directly onto thin air, so anything with enough of an overhang will need supports. Below you will find some supports settings that you can use:

• timnolte supports v5 (current)

Supports Related Questions

• What about the Resin2FDM tool?
  • The Resin2FDM tool is a plugin for Blender that allows you to convert resin supports (on pre-supported files) so that they work with FDM printers. However, our experience has been that well-tuned tree supports (see the links above) provide better results with faster print times. This is because resin printing has different support requirements than FDM printers. Since the tool works by thickening the supports so that the FDM slicer can pick them up, you will need to cut most of them to free the model, which creates additional scarring, and with the density of supports generated, it is easy to accidentally cut part of the model.
• How does this differ from the Fat Dragon Games (FDG) support settings?
  • Since FDG only does support-free models their settings do not have optimized settings for supports.

Advice for making your own supports

Concentric support interface and two interface layers allows the supports to create good base for critical overhangs.

z distance wants to be around 0.04 plus your layer height. A rough guide to give you a starting point for minis. Keep in mind closer can sometimes be easier to remove, but this should already be quite tight compared to other advice.

I recommend hybrid, slim or strong trees.

You want small support branch diameter. ideally around 1mm, but increase it a little if you have generation issues.

I recommend one wall, and rectilinear base pattern of around 2-3mm

Manually paint on supports to tips of critical overhangs, often supports won't generate as well as they could there, and its critical you don't have failures on these tips.

Cooling Towers

When printing models with thin sections at the top (think a model with a sword held vertically above their head), a layer of filament may not have time to cool before another layer is added. This can result in the the print head pulling the previous layer out of alignment. The easiest solution to this is a cooling tower. In essence, a cooling tower is a sacrificial object that forces the print head to do something else long enough for the layer to cool. The general process is:

1. In your slicer, add a generic box object (often you can do this by right clicking and selecting “add object” or something similar from the context menu).
2. Resize the box so that its X and Y dimensions are 5mm, and so that it is the same height as your model. A quick way to set the height is to move it so that it overlaps the model and resize the height until the top of the model no longer pokes through.
3. Set the infill for the box to 0%. Make sure that you are only adjusting the infill for the box, not the model. This is often done by right clicking on the box and selecting “infill” from the context menu.
4. Set the walls and top and bottom perimeters to 1 loop/layer. Again, make sure that you are adjusting only the settings for the box, not the model. This is often done by choosing the walls/perimeters option from the context menu for the box.

Note that if you are printing multiple models and using the “print by object” setting in your slicer, you will need to create and join a cooling tower for each model so that the cooling tower doesn’t print totally separately (which would defeat the purpose). However, if you are not using “print by object”, the additional models may act as cooling towers (though the chances of print failure go up).

It may seem that this is a waste of filament and time, but in reality it uses very little filament (due to being the thinnest possible shell with no infill) and adds a negligible amount of time to the print.

Printing Multiple Models

It may be tempting to fill a print sheet with models, but this has the major drawback that if one model fails, it will almost always ruin the rest of the sheet. Since FDM printing tends to be slow, this can mean that you have a 10+ hour print fail at 90% completion.

A much better approach is to use the “print by object” setting in your slicer. This setting allows the slicer to calculate where to position the models on the sheet so that it can print one, then move and print another, and so on. Since it has to leave sufficient room for the print head, this will greatly reduce the capacity of a print sheet, but the benefit is that if one model has a failure, it won’t impact the previously printed models (and maybe not ever the subsequent models).