I print quite a lot of small miniatures with very thin/delicate parts – arms, hands, swords, etc. – and recently I started getting a lot of failed prints.
The typical failure is that one part of the model simply doesn’t continue printing and I’m left with a flat “pancake” of cured resin on the build platform. Quite often it is a small feature such as an arm, weapon or hand, but not always – I’ve also had larger, completely ordinary sections of a model fail in exactly the same way, without any particularly thin or delicate geometry involved.
I’ve had some models where I tried printing them 4–5 times in a row, and each time a different part would fail like this. I tried changing the orientation, adding more supports and supporting the problematic areas more aggressively, but in some cases none of that really helped.
My setup is:
- Form 4
- Grey V5
- 25 µm
- Supports V2, downloaded from the Formlabs support page here:
Supporting a model in PreForm | Formlabs
As far as I understand, Supports V2 is essentially the same support system/profile that was previously referred to as Reduced Density.
One important thing about my use case is that my goal is to use as few supports as possible, with the smallest practical touchpoints. I print miniatures for painting, so I care a lot about keeping support marks away from the most visible and important parts of the model.
Because of that, my orientation is also not always the orientation that would be optimal purely for print reliability. I often orient a miniature so that faces, front-facing surfaces and other important details can remain completely free of supports, even if that makes the print somewhat more demanding. I would much rather make the printing process a little slower or more conservative than cover important areas of the miniature in extra supports.
After getting frustrated with the repeated failures, I asked AI for suggestions and it recommended experimenting with two advanced settings and i tested first:
- Post Expose Cure Wait: 0 s → 2 s
- Squish Intensity: 55 → 30
These values were somewhat arbitrary starting points rather than the result of any systematic testing. They worked surprisingly well, so before I start changing them and testing different combinations, I wanted to ask what Formlabs would recommend and whether these values make sense for this type of printing.
The difference has been pretty dramatic. Prints take considerably longer, but since making those changes I’ve had zero failures so far, including models that had already failed multiple times before. i even made supports touch points smaller ( tested 40->30 ) and still works great
So I’m curious what people at Formlabs think about this.
Does this make sense for small miniatures in general, especially ones containing thin or fragile geometry, but also considering that some of my failures happened on larger and fairly normal sections of a model?
Which of these two changes is most likely responsible for the improvement – the additional Post Expose Cure Wait, the lower Squish Intensity, or potentially both?
Is 2 s / 30 more than necessary for this kind of print, and are there any disadvantages to using values like these other than the significantly increased print time?
I’m also curious whether there are any other advanced settings you would recommend specifically for this kind of miniature printing, where the priority is reliability while still being able to use relatively light supports and orientations chosen to protect the most visible parts of the model.
For my use case I’m perfectly happy to trade some print speed for reliability if it means I can keep support count and touchpoint size down without having to reprint the same miniature several times because one section failed.
