Printing FDM miniatures

This is a practical rundown for printing tabletop miniatures on an FDM (filament) printer, based on the testing and notes in Fat Dragon Games' own guide to printing FDM miniatures. They update that guide as they learn more, so if you want the source material with all the photos, it's worth grabbing directly from them, it's a free download on DriveThruRPG. What follows here is my own pass through their findings, written up for anyone getting started with FDM minis rather than resin.

What to print on

As of their most recent update, Fat Dragon Games recommends the Bambu Lab A1 and A1 Mini as the printers to beat for miniatures, and neither needs the multi-colour AMS system to get good results. Fit either one with a 0.2mm nozzle and a Super Tack build plate. The nozzle gets you the fine detail miniatures need, and the build plate matters more than it sounds like it should, since a knock from the nozzle can pop a mini loose from a plain plate mid print and ruin the whole thing. The A1 Mini has a smaller build area than the full size A1, but the print quality is just as good and it costs less.

Orientation and cooling

Before you print, think about which way the model is facing on the plate. Rotate the model so the finest details, a face, a weapon, anything intricate, point toward the cooling fans. Cooling is what locks in fine detail, so the parts of the model that need it most should get the most airflow. If a specific area keeps coming out soft or messy no matter what you try, rotating the model 45 to 90 degrees to change how the fans hit it is worth trying before you touch any other setting.

Infill

Do not set infill to 100 percent. It sounds like it should make a stronger miniature, but it does the opposite. At full infill there's nowhere for the heat from the nozzle to go as it passes over the previous layer, so the material expands upward instead, and the nozzle drags through it, leaving zits and stringing on the surface. Infill on a miniature is only there to support the shells and top surfaces, not to add strength, so 15 percent or so is plenty. Strength comes from walls instead, four walls at a 0.2mm nozzle gives you about 1.6mm of wall thickness total, which is enough. Stick to a cubic or gyroid infill pattern too, it helps reduce the nozzle catching on the model as it prints.

Layer heights

Thinner layers are not automatically better. A 0.08mm layer height gives the cleanest results straight off the plate, especially on overhangs, and dropping to 0.06mm smooths out top surfaces but makes those same overhangs worse. The way around having to choose is adaptive layer heights: run a 0.08mm baseline, drop to 0.06mm specifically on top surfaces like shoulders and heads where smoothness matters, and bump up to 0.1mm on base areas to claw back some of the print time you lose elsewhere. This is a genuinely useful feature if your slicer supports it, and it's worth learning rather than just picking one layer height and living with the tradeoff.

Setting it up in Bambu Studio means going into the printer settings, setting a Layer Height Limit of 0.06mm minimum and 0.1mm maximum, then saving that as a separate printer profile so it doesn't affect your normal prints. From there you load the model, open the adaptive layers tool in the Prepare menu, and paint the areas you want at each height directly onto the model using the gradient bar, left click for the finer 0.06mm areas, right click for the coarser 0.1mm areas, and shift click to undo back to the 0.08mm baseline. Be careful where the boundaries land. Fat Dragon found that dropping the fine layer height onto the bottom of a sword hilt (an overhang) rather than stopping it above the hilt caused visible deformation, while keeping the whole hilt at the baseline height printed cleanly.

Filament and flow

Filament brands change their formulas sometimes without much warning, and a filament that printed perfectly for months can suddenly start giving you ragged overhangs and messy corners with no other setting changed. If that happens, it's worth confirming with the manufacturer whether anything changed before you spend hours chasing your own printer as the cause.

Flow ratio is one of the few things that can claw back quality after a formula change, but it's a real tradeoff rather than a free fix. Lowering it can clean up rough overhang corners, but push it too far and you'll start seeing small gaps on flat top surfaces (not usually a problem on fantasy miniatures, which rarely have large flat tops) and the print can end up weaker overall. If you do lower flow and start seeing gaps on top surfaces, reducing the top line width slightly below the nozzle width helps close them back up. Because this varies by both filament brand and the specific miniature's geometry, it's worth treating as something to tune per filament rather than a setting you fix once and forget, and it's worth keeping separate profiles for hard surface miniatures like mechs versus organic ones like fantasy figures if you print both.

Moisture is the other big variable. PLA absorbs moisture from the air, and the warmer and more humid your storage conditions, the faster that happens. The tells are brittleness, popping or bubbling sounds as trapped moisture turns to steam in the hot end, stringing and other surface defects from inconsistent extrusion, and in rarer cases actual clogs from the filament swelling. If you suspect this is happening, drying the filament resolves it, and storing rolls in sealed bags with the air pressed out, or a proper vacuum sealed filament storage system, keeps it from happening again.

Supports and cleanup

Well designed FDM miniatures are built to print without slicer supports at all, and where support genuinely is needed, built in supports with clip style connection points that a flush cutter can remove cleanly are far better than anything the slicer generates automatically. For the print order itself, printing infill and the inner wall before the outer wall gives the best overall balance of outer detail and overhang quality, though if you're assembling multi part models and the fit is coming out too tight, switching to outer wall first can help.

For gluing multi part miniatures together, gel superglue applied generously enough to squeeze out of the seam, then spread with a toothpick and wiped clean, covers most seams well, and any dried excess sands down afterward. Larger gaps are better handled with plastic model gap filling putty. Fine stringing left on a model comes off two ways: a heat gun on a sweeping motion (never held still on one spot, it will damage the model) melts away the finest hairs, and a cone of tape, adhesive side out, rolled up and worked back and forth like a sanding stick pulls strands off in places a heat gun can't reach.

Basic troubleshooting

Most FDM miniature problems trace back to a short list of causes.

Stringing, the thin wispy filament strands between parts, usually comes from retraction settings that are too low or too slow, printing temperature that's too high, or wet filament. Increasing retraction distance and speed, lowering temperature in small 5 degree steps, and drying the filament all help, though on a well tuned Bambu Lab profile you generally shouldn't need to touch retraction at all.

Small bumps or zits on the surface, usually right at seams or layer changes, point to the same low retraction issue, plus over extrusion or inconsistent print speed. Randomising or aligning the seam placement in your slicer hides them, reducing flow ratio slightly helps prevent the over extrusion causing them, and a small Z hop stops the nozzle dragging through the surface as it travels.

Gaps or thin patches in layers usually mean under extrusion, which traces back to a clogged nozzle, a dirty extruder that can't grip the filament consistently, or an incorrect flow rate. Cleaning the nozzle and extruder, running your printer's flow calibration routine, and checking the filament path for tangles all address this, and a small temperature increase can help filament flow more consistently too.

Brittle prints that snap too easily are usually wet filament again, alongside weak layer bonding from print settings that are running a touch cold or too fast. Drying the filament, raising temperature slightly, and slowing the print speed down all help layers bond properly.

If your nozzle keeps knocking the miniature over mid print, work through this in order: switch infill to gyroid if it isn't already, drop infill percentage down to around 5 percent, reduce flow ratio slightly (no more than 3 to 5 percent), and slow the print speed down. On a Bambu Lab A1 or A1 Mini specifically, if none of that helps, check the four screws on the back of the hot end assembly, they can work loose over time and let the nozzle shift just enough to catch the model.

What Fat Dragon found testing filament brands

Fat Dragon Games ran a proper comparison across several PLA brands, printing the same test miniatures at 0.06mm, 0.08mm, and 0.1mm layer heights plus adaptive combinations, all on Bambu Lab A1 Mini printers with 0.2mm nozzles and freshly dried filament. Their findings, in short: eSun PLA Pro/PLA+ was their clear top pick, giving consistently good results across a wide range of miniatures without needing to fine tune flow between organic and mechanical subjects, best run around 220 degrees. Sunlu PLA Meta used to be a favourite of theirs too, though they found more recent rolls (as of spring 2025) don't hold up on overhangs the way older batches did, and they hadn't found a way to fully recover the old quality at the time of testing. Elegoo Rapid PLA gave very smooth side surfaces but struggled with overhangs at 0.08mm and worse at 0.06mm. Hatchbox PLA needed a slower print speed to handle fine adaptive layers well, but did nicely at a 0.08 to 0.12mm adaptive range run at full speed. Anycubic High Speed PLA held fine detail well but had overhang problems at every layer height they tried, so they don't recommend it for miniatures despite that. Hobby Lobby's own PLA struggled with overhangs at the finer layer heights but produced some of the smoothest sword and blade details of anything they tested, so it may be worth a look for terrain even if it's not their first choice for detailed minis.

Fat Dragon didn't test Bambu Lab's own PLA Basic in this comparison, but it's worth a mention if you're already printing on a Bambu Lab machine. It's tuned specifically for Bambu printers, with its settings embedded on an RFID chip that the AMS reads automatically, so it's a sensible default to reach for if you'd rather not tune flow and temperature yourself while you're still learning.

As with most filament testing, treat these as a starting point rather than gospel. Brands change formulas, as the guide itself points out, so what works today is worth rechecking every so often.

Based on Fat Dragon Games' Guide to Printing FDM Miniatures, a free download on DriveThruRPG that they update periodically. Go to the source for the full guide with photos, their recommended parts list, and their video walkthroughs.