Which scale and which material for miniatures

What scale means

In tabletop, scale is usually given as a height: 28 mm or 32 mm is the height of a standing human figure, measured to the eyes or to the crown, depending on who you ask. Heroic scale has thicker hands, weapons and faces than the true proportion, so they stay readable on the table; true scale keeps human proportions and is therefore finer and more fragile.

A file has no scale of its own. An STL is a shape in units; on upload we measure it and you see the size in millimetres. If that is wrong, you scale it in the flow to the height you want, and you see right away whether it still fits the printer.

Resin for the figure, FDM for the terrain

At 28 to 32 mm a face is a few millimetres tall. A 0.16 mm layer on FDM is then visible as steps; a 0.05 mm layer on resin is not. That is why we print figures in resin. Terrain, walls, buildings and scatter do not need that detail and are often larger than the resin build volume of 127 × 80 × 160 mm; those we print in FDM, up to 250 × 250 × 250 mm.

Thin is pretty, until it breaks

What makes a miniature fragile is not the scale but the thinnest spot: a sword tip, a plume, an outstretched arm. Below roughly half a millimetre, resin becomes brittle when removing supports and in normal use. If you design yourself or adjust a file, it pays to make such parts a little thicker or lay them against the body. Raw grey resin is the standard for painting; tinted resin gives one tint throughout the piece. How resin printing works and what a print costs per size class is on resin 3D printing.

What you supply

For your own miniature:

• An STL or 3MF, up to 100 MB, at most three files per order.
• Preferably without supports: we add those ourselves, to suit our printers.
• A closed model; open edges we see on upload, and then we look at it by hand.
• The height you want; the file can be in any unit, we scale along.
• Only your own work or work you hold a licence for; we do not print models of protected characters.

Frequently asked questions

Which layer height does a miniature get?

Standard 0.05 mm; that is enough for most figures. The printer can also do 0.03 mm; online we print at 0.05 mm.

Can a miniature be in more than one colour?

Not in a single print. It can as separate parts that each get their own colour and click together, or raw grey for painting yourself.

Do I need to supply supports?

Preferably not. Supports depend on the printer and the orientation of the model; we add those ourselves.