Absolutely! I got into 3d printing a fair few years ago now with a secondhand Anet ET4, and that thing had a tantrum twice a print 😆 in the year and half I've had the Neptune 3 Pro, I only just had to fix my first clog about month ago and that's all I've to do. Awesome tech that's only getting better.
Great blender tip and a great video! I have a Bambulab A1 and it works great once you added the proper supports. I usually print miniatures with a 0.2 nozzle to bring out those subtle details.
So have to specifically supportless STLs? I feel like that would eliminate 80% of MMF STLs. I want to get into 3D printing, and like the simplicity and safety of FDM, but also want awesome minis and don't want to sacrafice selection or time savings by redoing STLs. Thoughts?
Instead of "cooling tower" increase "slow down if layer print time is below" and decrease "Enable fan if layer print time is below" under Filaments>>Cooling>>cooling thresholds.
I love the sculptor recommendations! As someone just getting into the hobby, I was pretty overwhelmed by the amount of detaisl to paint on some of the minis I bought. The ones you recommended are not only great for FDM, but should also be so much easier to paint with the chunkier details! Thank you for these!
I really appreciate Arbiter as well. I will note, if you are able to spring for a Bambu P1S/P1P, and the $30 or so .02mm nozzle, you can get pretty amazing quality minis with very little tweaking, though the support material content of this video is still very applicable. @Painted4Combat have you tried using PVA or PETG supports? I haven't had great luck with either (PVA getting stuck and PETG just not adhering and causing the filament to detach) and they blow up the print time with an AMS as it's constantly switching filaments. Some of my best prints (of even supported models) have been done by doing careful rotating (a very fine sword can still print ok if you rotate the model so it points straight up) and putting the supports against flatter areas of the model/not on the detailed parts. I often lie a model on its back for example. I would also recommend Sunlu PLA Meta filament, Fat Dragon Games has done some great tests to show it minimizes layer lines.
Dude. I have cheats GALOR! First, get a .25mm nozzle. It will greatly increase detail Second, under advanced, "external perimeters" to 0.18mm. This will give you sharper details and will get your SLA levels of clarity. If you choose to stick with 0.4mm nozzles, set external perimetersnto 0.32mm. These are safe levels of under extrusion. Third, EXTERNAL PERIMETERS FIRST! This will guarantee that your external perimeter defines the shape, causing excess extrusion INTO the model, not outside, which will cause details to round out. If you are doing mechanical things, rotate the model in space such that planar surfaces are 45 degrees from the print bed, this will increase the resolution of planar details (think battlemechs and such). To reduce stringing, which can bond support material to your miniature, set seam to nearest and increase your rapids. Set your external perimeters to slower. This will compensate for rapid moves causing vibrations, your model will have more time to settle for critical details. This is an anti stringing strategy. The faster your rabid, the less time for oozing. Adding two more: Set slice resolution to 0 and gcode resolution to 0.001. these settings are unnaturally high for LARGE models. Most 8 bit microcontrollers can't handle the HUGE detail such high resolution, large prints will render....but for small prints, these finer resolutions are no worse than a low resolution large print. Obviously a smaller nozzle means more perimeters... Unless you cheat and set perimeters to 0.32 instead of 0.25. this is a safe level of over extrusion. Smaller nozzles mean lower flow of material. This means more print time. This also means HIGHER time in the melt zone. Turn your temperature down 15 degrees. This will also reduce stringing.
That seems to be the common comment - I find myself printing both minis and bigger household stuff so don't like the idea of having to swap nozzles often, but I'm thinking ill have to give it a go now!
@@Painted4Combattotally understandable if you don’t wanna hop between nozzles, but I found the MK8 nozzles Elegoo uses to be pretty easy to source and swap out! For larger household prints where layer lines aren’t a problem 0.6 is also a huge time saver. ;) The results you got on a 0.4 nozzle is phenomenal though, using the inflate tool in Blender is genius imo. Gonna be trying this out later today for sure.
Thanks for the input! I'll take a look at Orca. As for the 0.2mm nozzle - I print a pretty even split of minis to larger objects like terrain or household items, and don't want to go through the hassle of swapping nozzles that often; that said I should give it a try at some point!
My advice is to use a 2mm nozzle and scale harder to print models scale up by about 10% makes then easier to print, shows the details perfectly and the minis are still mini
1. Love the video, very informative 2. I've had no luck with prusaslicer and have stuck with cura, but I will be back to use those settings after i redownload it 3. I just want to really push Arbiter minis because the artist is amazing and makes dedicated support free prints specifically for fdm that print fantastic 4. I also use elegoo nep 3 pro and their filament for my minis, good stuff 5. thank you for the new tips, i never thought of using separate towers and then merging them into the model, gonna try that out on some!
easily one of the best videos ive seen for fdm printing, ive done this for a couple years for my dnd and this is def gonna make my results so much better
I have been printing minis on my fdm for a couple of months now using my own settings in Cura. I'll have to give your settings a try. I mostly do busts, but i've had pretty good success with full figurines.
Hi thank you for your videos that help me a lot. I am into 3d printing since few months and speaking of support I still struggle to avoid scars when removing support. I used 0.3 mm z-top distance when printing at 0.06 mm but it leaves marks sometimes difficult to remove due to the size of the mini. Although my printer nozzle sometimes knock the support down (Bambu A1 mini no possibility to calibrate manually z-axe) but less when I use smooth tray. Any tip on how to my support stronger without impairing mini? I still need to test your homemade supports. Thank you in advance for your feedback
I would recommend trying to crease the z-top distance slightly. It might make supports a little tougher to remove but will decrease the blobs and poor print quality in those areas. with a 0.06mm layer height I would recommend trying a z-top distance of 0.18 - I always try and keep my z-top anywhere from 0.15 ~ 0.2mm (anything in that range that is a multiple of the layer height). Just find the right balance between ease of removal and overhang quality. as for strengthening supports, I would suggest adding "double walls" to your supports, if you're using Prusa this is "Branch Diameter with Double Walls" (just set it to 0.1). I have recently started experimenting with OrcaSlicer which lets you add infill and change the wall count of their custom tree supports, which has stopped supports breaking for me. I hope to do a video on Orca in the future if this is of interest also!
Great blender tip, thank you. As many have said, a bambu lab printer with a 0.2 nozzle and orca solve 99% of issues printing in FDM. it's not resin quality but not bad. I can easily print 6mm epic scale, 10mm warmaster scale and 15mm scale quite happily. My own tip would be to consider a heat gun to help with clean up. You have to be careful to not melt thin weapons, etc but it will get rid of stringing and also smaller issues
Happy to help 🙌 If you have any problems arise while getting into it; feel free to post questions here and I'll answer what I can. Best of luck with your new printer!
Cool to see Arbiter Miniatures out in the wild :) I print in resin but he is still my number one creator as the support free models are still just so easy to print while still being awesome and dynamic models
Woah! that doesn't sound good. It could be your Nozzle Height, but it could also be any number of things to do with machine itself. did this happen on your first print, or is this out of the blue? if i's due to swapping Slicer maybe check you're using the correct printer preset or double check the startup G-Code. Hope you figure out what happened!
I want to get into 3D printing and love the idea of printing in the same room as my office. The simplicity of Bambu A1 mini. But based on this video, i feel like FDM would limit my STL mini options to about 10% of what is available 😢 on MMF. Not sure FDM is the way to go.
Combine infill every nth layer will help with print speed, there is no reason to print infill every layer, you can also increase infill line thickness and speed, again it´s inside the model. You can do like 70mm/s speed for infill for instance. Inner perimeter can also increase by 10-20mm/s. It´s inside you don´t see it. Also you don´t dial in extrusion width you tell the machine how thick of a line it´s supposed to print and make sure your extrusion rate is correct beforehand. I print 0.8mm extrusion width for sturdy boxes vases and such with a 0.4mm nozzle. You printer can print way thicker than that as well. It just squirts more plastic faster out of a small orfice that´s it. Also technically speaking you physically can not print an extrusion width of exactly the size of your nozzle opening. So a 0.4mm nozzle can physically NOT print a 0.4mm extrusion width because it would mean there is no squish to the previous layer. Your standard 0.4mm nozzle prints about 0.5mm extrusion width ( the 0.4mm nozzle which was changed from the ancient 0.5mm nozzle to make sure your walls are about 0.5mm). You can get around it when bridging for example, you drag the material and thin it out but is not precise. So get a 0.25mm nozzle and print with 0.3mm width. Also numbers like 2.65mm for retraction don´t make any sense. No machine ever is precise up to 0.05mm for this kind of function. Those kind of settings are very unreliable because you don´t account for any tolerances due to humidity, temp changes in the room and so on and so on. If your setting is spot on at 2.65 just do 2.8mm done. For small etails like dwords and such change the minimal layer time to like 30s or so, it will do exactly the same as with the box but you won´t print an extra box.
I recommended more focus on supports but did not expect it to get this interesting. You are basically confirming my own observations and experiments on manual supports. Started for me with a backpack for a miniature. Parts of the bottom kept drooping a lot even with supports. I added two manual support in each corner and then it printed with perfect results. You could probably do a series of videos just where you slowly add supports to different, simple and difficult. miniatures :) I am really gonna experiment with this in Lychee but what is the diameter of your supports? Your explanation makes it sound like 0.4 mm but looks in the video like it is closer to 0.8. Just want to skip past some unnecessary experiments that you have already solved :) Looks like "supports" in general is the nr1 thing that is holding back mini printing with MDF.
Great to hear that this helped! My current towers are 1.6mm for the main shaft, enough to maintain a sturdy support, and then tapering to 1.2mm at the tip - most slicers will make this a single loop as mentioned, but some will add a dot of filament to the center, overall this is the best thickness I have found. Otherwise sometimes a slicer will cut the top off the support or there wont be enough material to actually support the model. And i recommend a minimum of an 6-8mm base/rim for the supports for connecting to the build plate, otherwise they are too easy to knock over.
I like your ideas. I use ABS with 25% fan. Squirt down with acetone in a needle, seals layers and makes it very strong. Try printing two or 3 models at a time for cooling. PLA is weak in thin extrusions. PETG is stringy. I print with many shells for strength. I put the model in Meshmixer, Increase size 5 times make solid, then add .1mm offset to model. Then I rescale back to 32 mm scale. Push the maximum edge of the scale for FDM success. This will thicken the model an hopefully not ruin the detail too much.
I've been printing fdm minis for a while now, and I'll definitely try the blender tip, it seems easy enough to unscare me of this software 😅 The game changer for me has also been to change nozzle. Using only .4 nozzles is like buying a power drill and using only 1 bit with it. I heavily recommend everyone to buy a cheap kit of nozzles and experiment on your printer. Personally, I switch nozzles depending of the use case : .3 for miniatures (.2 is useless on average 3d printer, it cranks up the print time A LOT without too much improvement on details), .4 for terrains and vehicles, .6 for everyday life 3d prints. Switching nozzles is super easy and takes like 1 or 2 minutes maximum. All those on RU-vid that recommend you do a whole mechanicus ritual to change nozzle is bs. Just preheat, remove filament, unscrew, put a new one and you're good to go. Hope this helps. Again, great video !
defo trying this on my ender 5 plus with SKR pro. i will try with default speeds, then regret and load the second copy of the profile i made watching this video with your speeds 😅
Oh man this is a great tutorial! I've been dabbling in FDM printing for my minis to avoid resin/IPA fumes. I've had mixed success. I was a little frustrated that the FDM slicers did not allow me to manually place supports. Had no idea you could disable the automatic supports. Thanks!
This was a great video. Having the same FDM printer makes this video super helpful for me. Made sure to save it so I can come back to it. As I will certainly forget things. I can't wait to try getting into mini prints and seeing the results. I definitely would love to see your settings for larger models.
Your video is amazing you cover too much in little time and the best thing is you gave use your settings and why did you pick them. Thank you very much.
Awesome. I do have a issues with supports being knocked over and ripping up brims so I'll have to try the manual ones. I'm already using Prusa Slicer and love it. I don't often have issues with very narrow parts though so I just leave swords, etc alone and don't pick or skip models just based on that. I already assume that I'll lose fine surface detail due to resolution but it sometimes surprises me
Awesome to hear; Let me know how your use of the manual support go, definitely want to continue developing those to be as user-friendly as possible! - and I totally agree, modern FDM printers are shockingly good at picking up most surface details, but its more often a 'nice surprise' when it happens, rather than an 'expected outcome', at least for me 😅
2:24 I dont fully agree with that statement, you can rotate the model so the spear is perfektly horizontal, this way you can print spears and they are still very strong.
Wow this is great. Been printing since February of this year. Have solely been doing miniatures. I've managed to get some okay results with resin styled STLs, but its mainly because I've been adjusting the xy compensation in prusa to make some things thicker. Guess I'll have to pick up blender and play with that
XY Compensation is actually a really great, quick option! But picking up some basic blender know-how will open up a bunch more options when picking out minis.
Yes this should totally work for larger models - I might recommend perhaps increasing layer height to 0.1 or 0.12 so that it doesn't take forever to print a larger model - otherwise everything else should be applicable!
Shoot! Totally forgot to include that in this video - it was listed in my last one 😅 Its one of the 'Space Bears' STL files from TableTopTime that was a part of their kickstarter, you can find their STLs here: www.itstabletoptime.com/pages/minis
You should be able to set a minimum layer time to let the previous layer cool instead of adding a 'purge tower'. Unless you're worried about oozing of course. Then I think the prime tower works well.
I looked into this but I think that Prusa is limited in this regard, as in it doesnt allow for a proper minimum layer time function, it only lets you slow the print on quick layers 🤷♂️ I could be wrong though!
@@Painted4Combat Thanks for the reply. I'm unable to download your support towers from MyMiniFactory, it sends me to a 404 error page. Would you be able to upload them anywhere else?
Their minis aren't designed for it, so I can understand the 'no'. a first-timer couldn't load them up on an FDM printer as easy as a resin printer - so the folks there probably don't want to say yes. but its possible, just not ideal 😆
@@Painted4Combat Also, a video on larger models would be super appreciated!! I've been hammering away at a Zariel from Descent into Avernus model for 3 days now and just cant seem to get it right... Thank you!!
If it gets cheap enough, maybe? But the labour and material-handling costs for SLS are almost as bad as those for resin, whilst the printers themselves are still nearly ten times the cost - 3K USD is very very cheap for an SLS printer but a *lot* more money than an SLA. When it comes to minis, I expect desktop SLS will be more useful for companies selling physical minis than for individuals printing a few characters here and there - to really make it worth turning the machine on, you want to fill the entire build volume. That means printing a lot of things at once. And to make it worth buying the printer, you want to be doing that regularly.
I would love to see a video about support-free models! Bonus points if you have any recommended viewing for learning how to sculpt support-free models lol
I had to give up resin when I moved to a smaller apartment that didn't have sufficient airflow. Frankly, The Elegoo Neptune 3 pro was coming out around that time, so I decided to pre-order it to make the most of a pre-order discount from my local seller. (this was done after confirming the printer was living up to its claims via reviews on YT, primarily watching Uncle Jessy but also others who were not sponsored 😆). To be honest, at that point in time, many printers were coming out in this rough price range and all advertised very similar features, some having more than others. I settled on the Elegoo because it appeared to have the most of those features in a single printer, at a price in the lower end of that range (pre-order discount helped), and was a brand I had some level in trust in; the main features I wanted was robust auto bed levelling, a built in flex plate on the print-bed, dual z rods and a direct drive extruder; and this printer had all that as well as a bunch of additional nice-to-have features. So in short, it had all the features I was looking for, under a brand name I trusted to deliver a quality product at a reasonable price. I've never had any issues, in the year and a half that I've owned it, using it often daily or at the very least one a week; I finally had to clean my first clog about a month ago and other than levelling the bed every so often, that's the only maintenance I've had to do. It really is a great printer and I've put it through its paces, that's for sure.
Yes this should totally work for larger models - I might recommend perhaps increasing layer height to 0.1 or 0.12 so that it doesn't take forever to print a larger model - otherwise everything else should be applicable!
Minimum Layer Time is the setting your looking for that will slow the printer down when printing tall, thin, objects so as to not be printing on gloopy hot layers. Also, Use ORCA SLICER instead of the older Prusa Slicer. Orca slicer has more printers supported and combines features from both Prusa and Bambu slicers. You also want to make sure you have Archane enabled for the wall type generation. Classic will ignore the small details, Archane will print more smaller details, to the point where it can be pretty close to first gen Resin qualities, better results when using a .2 nozzle instead.
Yeah, this is definitely aimed at people who have a little bit of experience playing with the settings of their printers and slicer, but even just pausing the video and copying the settings should yeld some nice results!
I see! Yes, the blender portion is for people wanting wanting delve into that and open up a few more options when it comes to picking models. Not a necessary step, but I reckon if you follow those steps a few times you'll get the hang of it. I tried my best to keep it as simple as possible, just touching on the most necessary menus and controls, it is just such an in-depth program that even a simplified workflow like this can be daunting.
@@alexgallegos6777 His point is that OPs examples of good prints are not good results even for FDM printers. And honestly he isn't incorrect. OP goes through a lot of useful stuff. But his endresult is not that good even when painted. Maybe his motionsystem isn't dialed in perfectly. Probably his leadscrews. And looking at his recorded printing I'd also say he should print slower and that his filament is probably a bit wet. As there seems to be a lot of stringing too.
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