Dwarven unit from 3D printed miniatures

 I have been in possession of a 3D printer -- well, two to be honest -- for a couple of years now, and have used them to print terrain and vehicles, of which you can see some in action in our Crisis 2019 game.

So far, I have not printed any miniatures. Both my printers are FDM, or filament, printers and they are considered less suitable for miniatures because their resolution is too low. You can consider the theoretical limit to resolution for detail on these to be 0.1mm. In practice you can only count on 0.2 or even 0.3 mm, depending on how much you want to fiddle with your printer and slicer settings. For miniatures, that is scratching the bottom of the barrel detail-wise. The holy grail of 3D printing for miniatures are resin printers, but I have not made the plunge to buy one of those yet, for various reasons, mostly to do with resin handling & curing.

Nevertheless, I decided it was time to print some miniatures. I got some dwarven models from various sources and printed the next unit for my dwarven army on the highest resolution and settings possible on my printer.

Allow me to introduce the raw version of the Forge Guard of the Watch of the Seventh Deep:

As you can see, it was not an unqualified success - the black material is the filament I used for the print, the grey are plastic bits I had to use to replace broken parts or incomplete prints. About half of the figures lost part of themselves.

For those of you familiar with FDM 3D printing, anything that is overhanging by more than 40 degrees or so needs to be supported during the print, or the printer is printing in 'thin air'. These supports take the form of light, but still solid, pillars of filament that reach up from the build plate (the flat plate the 3D printer prints on) to the object being printed. In the case of these dwarves, the objects that needed supporting are the axes. If you zoom in on the photo and look in the back, you can see a model with its axe still supported.

To get the finished model, these supports need to be removed. And that's where the problem is - removing them from the very thin axe hafts more often than not results in said axes breaking off of the model. To a certain point, you can work around this issue by printing the models on an angle (rotating them so the axes lie directly on top of the build plate) but then the problem still remains that the axe hafts are very thin and vulnerable. An FDM 3D printed model just does not have the strength (especially in the orientation I printed them in) for that. Again, you can fiddle with the orientation so that the layers of the print are along the haft and not across it as I printed them, but that will still not be as strong as necessary.

So on about half of the models, I lost the axes while cleaning away the supports and they needed to be replaced by various axes & shields from my bits box. The majority of the replacement axes (and sometimes entire arms and hands) came from Orc sprues from Mantic Games, who used to do (and maybe still do) a grab bag sale at the end of the year where you can buy a bunch of random sprues for next to no money. I can highly recommend this for your bits box.

The conclusion? While I am happy with the detail and the lack of visible printing layers (although we'll see about that again after painting them), I doubt I'll be printing any miniatures like this again. Vehicles and buildings are fine, but for miniatures let's wait for a resin printer.