Normalizing Bad (and Low-Quality) Prints
There’s a narrative that pops up in almost every Reddit thread about printing miniatures: you should always be chasing the highest possible print quality.
With resin, that's a much easier goal to achieve. With FDM, getting close often takes a lot more time, tuning, and effort. For many people, that extra effort simply isn't worth the return.
Resin absolutely produces better miniatures. But it isn't always an option. Cost, available space, ventilation, health concerns, or simply not wanting another hobby to manage are all perfectly valid reasons to stick with FDM.
Likewise, trying to make FDM indistinguishable from resin isn't always a worthwhile goal either.
That doesn't mean quality FDM miniatures aren't possible.
We've all seen what people like HOHansen and ObscuraNox have achieved. Their work has shown what's possible with enough knowledge and patience, and these days I print almost exclusively using ObscuraNox's settings in Orca Slicer. (Mostly because Bambu Studio still struggles to generate support interfaces consistently without manual intervention.)
But... I also print plenty of low-quality minis.
Trying out a new printer. Printing an army quickly for an upcoming game. Testing different scales. Practice models. Paint mules. Experimenting with settings.
There are lots of perfectly good reasons to intentionally print something that isn't the absolute best your printer can produce.
In fact, I'm still a big advocate for a 0.4mm nozzle using Bambu's stock 0.08 mm High Quality profile. Hit print. Go.
For a huge number of people, it's already good enough.
There absolutely is a place for high-quality FDM prints.
But for me, they're the exception rather than the rule. I'm printing miniatures to play games with. Once they're on the tabletop, and especially once they're painted, the differences become much harder to notice than they do under a macro lens on Reddit.
The game comes first. Good-looking models are a bonus.
Which brings me to the point of this post.
There is absolutely a place for low-quality prints.
They're accessible to newcomers, require almost no tuning or experience, and can go from unopened printer to playable miniatures in a matter of hours. And they're often far better than people give them credit for.
Take the models in this photo. (OG prints)
These were printed on a brand-new X2D almost immediately after unboxing.
- 0.4 mm nozzle
- Stock 0.08 mm High Quality profile
- Filament wasn't dried
- No calibration
- Printed in Bambu Studio
- No support interfaces
Quick and dirty.
Originally I wasn't even planning to paint them. I simply wanted to see how quickly I could print an entire Kill Team— roughly two hours per miniature, about sixteen hours total.
Then I found an old can of aluminum spray paint. "Why not?"
From there... Everything went downhill.
I accidentally followed it with what turned out to be a thick gloss yellow spray. The metallic disappeared. The finish became ridiculously shiny.
Then came a homemade wash that didn't quite work. Followed by an overly enthusiastic drybrush. And finally a pretty terrible photo.
By most Reddit standards, these Strikers from Puppetswar should never have seen a gaming table.
Average prints. Questionable paint job. Game over.
Except... After sealing everything with a matte varnish to kill the gloss, they actually turned out...
...not too bad.
Not amazing. Not competition pieces. Just... good.
Good enough that I'm perfectly happy putting them on the table. They already look better than a lot of the sea of grey I see at my local game store.
All from what many people would dismiss as "bad" prints.
More importantly, I learned far more from these models than I would have by chasing perfection.
Spray priming. Washes. Colour choices. Drybrushing. Selective painting. Fast tabletop techniques.
Every one of those lessons came from prints that most people would have told me weren't worth painting in the first place.
Sometimes "good enough" really is good enough.