So I got myself an Anycubic Photon Mono resin printer and for the past 6 months now I've been testing and trying miniatures, specifically to further my smaller scale projects.
My journey began with the most basic approach: search for 15mm miniatures in the various stl sites. Unsurprisingly, there's not a lot of them, in fact there is pretty much just one creator that dabbles in this glorious scale, dutchmogul.
The minis are great, not overly busy and print without a single issue and I quickly amassed a nice 15mm collection.
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| Pretty imaginative concepts going here. |
While great, I wanted more, and for that I had to find a way to turn "normal" scaled miniatures into correct 15mm.
My first experiment was to scale them down to 50%'ish, using some fantasy minis:
Other than the heroquest necromancer, the other miniatures are way too detailed and slim for 15mm (not to mention how fragile they feel).
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| These dry brushed examples show the amount of detail the printer can pick up. |
My following attempt involved deforming the miniatures to make them chunkier. I used something along the lines of 50% on the Z scale, and 60-65% on the X and Y axis. With that approach I got these much chunkier results.
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| dutchmogul's Green, red and small alien, Clockwork Beholder and Vidovic's Kuo-Toa |
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| Any similarity are mere coincidence. A Vidovic's Orc nex to to a Jazzmantis Orc |
This is not a one stop recipe though, as I got some failed minis (mostly breakage when removing supports) from minis with more fiddly bits.
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| Broken hands and feet were the most common issue. |
Another experiment I made was upscaling 6mm 40k epic proxies which found a very healthy ecosystem in the 3d printing community.
At this point, I can't provide % of scale, your best bet is to just scale it on your slicer of choice against a miniatures that you know is the size you want.
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| Acadian Infantry. These should have been taller, but variation is the spice of life. |
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| I really like these Solar Troopers miniatures. |
Overall, I see resin 3d printing as a fantastic complement to the hobby (even for 15mm). Thingiverse is amazing in handling remixes, and how it allows everyone to bash miniatures together to make new models (more on that in a future post). The site has major navigation issues though, but that's another can of worms.
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| 3 3D printed miniatures, Cultist and Alien from Alternative Armies and one thesceneuk's trooper |