Militia Handgunner for FDM prints

thingiverse

This isn't a remix so such as it's Harrowtale's original stl files with the guesswork taken out of the orientation for a decent FDM printer result, as much for myself as for anyone else who's just started out printing minis. You'll often hear people advising to lay a mini back at 45 degrees to avoid snapping the mini at its ankles, and/or keeping the detail area as "clean" as possible. It turns out - at least as far as I've learned from this print - that tilting is generally good, but it also means supports are required and this can interfere with detail. and so it's not just a matter of pushing the mini over on its back by 45 degrees in your slicer of choice. The mini on the left was my first make base on the original stls, no reorientation. The minis on the right is the third attempt (supports on the least detailed side) and the helmet is what blew me away the most - a vertical orientation worked better than as it is oriented in the original stl. In fact printing vertical with the helmet down gave the best result but for printing a single head on its own, I needed a raft as the brim was losing adhesion. Note then when all three components are printed with a brim, a raft isn't needed but YMMV. If you're starting out printing minis on FDM printers, then I think it's worth the exercise of getting Harrowtale's original files and importing both his originals and my re-oriented files for a comparison. I hope that some of you may find this exercise as useful as I did.