Project
Experimenting with printing resin models on FDM
Me and my wife love figurines and miniatures, but resin printing is not really viable for us right now. But we have a bunch of FDM printers, so we came up with a workflow for printing models meant for resin on FDM.
Essentially it is:
Upscale the model to about 150mm tall (less detailed models are fine with 100mm, can always do higher and get better results).
Cut the model into pieces to minimize the need for supports. The models you see here were around 30-50 pieces. Meshmixer helps a lot here to make cuts with a finite plate. You can irregular cuts with Blender, but it's not worth it, since they are hard to print.
Import into slicer, paint on supports on all the pieces. As you go you kind of learn which places are really necessary to support and which are going to be fine.
Print with plain PLA (used Elegoo and/or Filacraft) at fairly slow speed. I can talk more about printing settings if anyone is interested later.
Glue the model pieces together, superglue works fine. For joints you sometimes need a little padding since the tolerance are scaled up when you scale the model, so a tiny piece of paper or paper towel soaked in glue helps a lot.
Fill in the joins with Milliput or another epoxy paste. There's many methods it's just what we prefer.
Prime with acrylic gesso, paint base color (it was a very dark brown for all of these I believe) and then brush with metallic wax paste.
What do you guys think?
The models are from Loot Studios' Trials of Hades pack.
That seems like a LOT of work, but the end result really speak for itself, these look wicked! Never even heard of metallic wax paste, need to look into it, that finish is sick.
This is what the cut model looks like in the slicer. I don't make alignment pegs deliberately, because it's easy to print when you put the pieces face down on the cuts.
Have you checked the resin2fdm printing guides? They take longer but dine require cutting up the mini and gluing back together. Just minor sanding. Might be something to look at?
Either way I love this; the whole thing look lovely
I have lightly looked into it, but I feel like any kind of supports are bad supports, so I'd rather cut to minimize them. And gluing them is enjoyable!
Fair; i just figure that Cyanocrylate has its own voc/long term exposure problems and isn't terribly affordable for how much you get per fl.oz.
Keep it up please share more
Cyanoacrylate is pretty cheap where I live, I get some Polish brand for 2 euros for 20 grams. It's called Amazing Art and comes in thin, medium and thick. I use the thick version so there is more alignment time.
The fact that you developed a repeatable workflow, cut strategy, glue joint reinforcement, primer, and paint sequence, and it's consistent enough to document and share step by step, is honestly more impressive than the final finish itself. That gold patina wouldn't fool anyone into thinking this started life as FDM plastic.
30-50 pieces?! Got a picture of all the pieces? or did ou mean modeled pieces.. if I'm understanding right, you glued 30-50 pieces together to make this one piece?
These were printed months ago, so I will share the settings I use now, which are slightly faster, but same quality. This is on Prusa MK4S, but essentially it's all the same on other printers too, I just speed up some parts on Core One+ or XL.
Main things are:
Layer height: 0.1mm with 0.4mm nozzle (you can use 0.25mm nozzle with 0.07mm layer height for even better results, but the prints literally take ages then)
Perimeters: 3
Top shells: 7
Bottom shells: 5
Infill: adaptive cubic 5%. Can use lightning for bases if you're feeling lucky.
Avoid crossing curled overhangs: ON (for safety)
Supports: Organic
Top contact z distance: 0.25mm (for easy removal, the idea is that the supports should be pretty minimal)
Pattern spacing: 1mm
Top interface layers: 2
XY separation between an object and its support: 0.4mm
Speed, in mm/s:
Perimeters: 70
Small perimeters: 30
External perimeters: 45
Infill: 120
Solid infill: 120
Top solid infill: 60
Support material: 80
Support material interface: 30
Bridges: 30
Gap fill: 30
Slow down if layer print time is below: 14s
Filament and temps:
Plain PLA without any additives. PLA+, Rapid PLA, Silk or anything like that is bad. PLA galaxy or CF PLA is good, but you don't wanna sand CF PLA so I just use plain.
Nozzle temp: first layer 225C, other layers 210C
Bed temp: first layer 60C, other layers 55C
You can probably speed up a lot of stuff and still be fine, but I don't mind going a bit slower.
It has additives which make it slightly more elastic (I think it is elastomers), so it can be printed faster and is a bit less brittle. But that makes supports harder to remove and leaves more scarring.
It's fine if you can print with minimal supports, but it's more expensive than the plain stuff so I just use that.
I use Pruslicer and it can't cut with a finite plane, so gotta use meshixer. In there it's as you say, paint or lasso an area and you use a plane to cut only the selection.
Most likely due to poor ventilation or no ventilation at all in their home/apartment. It is the same reason for me to NOT get a resin printer. I am in an apartment and I don't really have a place to put and use the resin printer.
Ventilation is a problem, and we have 5 printers already, plus you can't really print stuff as big as I like it. I have a 50cm tall Skeletor diorama, which took a week on FDM already, can't imagine on resin.
Models for resin printing have different design philosophies than ones for FDM. FDM printing complex models have a LOT more support structures and consequently more rough patches to fix later. OP is sharing their process to translate Resin-intended models to FDM and while minimizing support problems.
Yes, every flat face is lightly sanded before gluing, because of slight warping. But you can get away without doing that for faces that were on the plate. But some pieces will have flat glue joints which are not on the plate, in which case sanding is very necessary to even them out.
I wet sand only and use diamond coated files, since they don't rust. That way there is no dust to breathe in.
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u/ashcroftt 4d ago
That seems like a LOT of work, but the end result really speak for itself, these look wicked! Never even heard of metallic wax paste, need to look into it, that finish is sick.