Welcome to Part 2 of Goonhammer’s Bambu Lab A1 review. Let’s talk about fine detail printing with one of these. I’ll cover the strengths and limitations of the platform, and elaborate with personal experiences using this machine. Half a year of personal experience, to be precise.
Where Does Home Miniature Printing Stand?
Any discussion of 3D printing miniatures is incomplete without talking about resin printing, or stereolithography. For about as long as printing minis at home has been feasible, resin printing has dominated. Resin is more expensive and a pain-in-the-ass on every level than filament, but it brings excellent detail. Hobbyists crave detail. I’m not surprised that resin printer manufacturer Elegoo has partnered with us to do giveaways. They know their target market.
In a shootout between modern filament and resin printers, resin printers bring:
- Smaller build volumes relative to cost.
- More overhead and safety concerns.
- Higher cost of printers and materials.
- Smaller range of materials.
- Much higher resolution and detail.
Looking at those characteristics, you’ll quickly see that small build volumes and higher per-print cost are largely irrelevant to tabletop hobbyists. Safety and overhead are manageable. But high detail? That’s a prerequisite for miniatures and display pieces. Tabletop users crave detail. Using a resin printer compromises on everything except detail. For hobbyists who are accustomed to high prices and extra work, it might be worthwhile.
I won’t detail the mechanics of resin printers here, but you’re just gonna have to trust me when I say that consumer resin printers easily compete with plastic injection molding in detail. Meanwhile, consumer filament printers are just catching up to very old resin printers and can reach an acceptable level of detail resolution in some areas. With considerable effort. 3D printing is never a print-and-play endeavour.
Making Miniatures Isn’t So Simple
Enthusiastic newbies to 3D printing don’t consider how many secondary factors are needed to achieve consistent, high-quality printing. The term 3D printing makes it sound like you can just load your file, confirm a few small settings, and go. This can be the case if you have a reliable printer, well-tuned presets, and knowledge of how to orient and arrange the print.
But there’s much more. 3D printing is much more about small-scale fabrication than using a printer. Even a very user-friendly printer like the A1 requires mechanical maintenance. Lubricating the rails and clearing clogs are a routine part of owning my A1. There’s no way to avoid maintenance.
Setting up a print also requires a working knowledge of how printers physically make objects and translating that knowledge into the slicer UI. I use the open source Orca Slicer. Even though my print profiles and settings are drawn from other people, I make adjustments to the settings on a print-by-print basis. It takes time and learning to understand which settings matter, how to implement them, and how to troubleshoot failed prints.
The slicer can’t prevent you from loading an unprintable file. It will generate g-code and that code will be its best-guess at how to make your head-in-the-clouds idea happen. Small errors can quickly compound and lead to a print failure. As projects get smaller and more detailed, the failure rate increases. The A1 is an especially well-calibrated printer so your print failures will at least seldom be mechanical. That alone spares a mountain of frustration.
I’ve had dozens of print failures in my experimentation with miniatures. None of these failures were inherent to the A1’s construction and operation. They’re the inevitable result of trying to balance everything that goes into a project. Ambient humidity and temperature. Nozzle acceleration. Support structures. Extrusion speed. Line width. Line height. Brim width. Infill composition. Wall generation algorithm. It goes on.
It’s entirely possible to get workable miniatures out of the A1. That’s a stellar achievement for the medium. But despite months of accumulated skill, it’s not usual for me to reprint miniature-related projects two or three times and lose hours in between each print. Granted, my standards are high–I expect a product that will be indistinguishable from plastic injection molding after I’ve post-processed it. If you’re satisfied with more mediocre detail, it’ll be much easier.
On home-assembled kits or printers that aren’t well-calibrated out of the box as the A1, things get downright bleak. Forums are filled with kit printer users who gave up in search of one completed print and dropped out of the hobby or bought a different machine.
For what it’s worth, my A1 was so functional that my first ever print attempt resulted in a completed (if visually unappealing) object. I was using off-brand filament and the A1’s default profiles, which would have been disastrous on an older printer. But the object came out intact. By my third print, I had satisfactory benchmarks and could try making functional objects. This success rate would have been unheard-of 7 years ago. Even as Bambu’s competitors claw back some of their lost market share, this success rate is still impressive.
What I’m trying to convey is that you should put to rest the notion that you can buy an A1, slot in filament and files, and just have a T-34 platoon. Miniature printing on a filament printer is a skill. To put it more palatably: It’s a hobby you can explore.
Using the A1 for Hobby Work
The golden question: What can you get out of an A1 for those tabletop hobbies?
My short answer? You can get outstanding accessories and storage, good scenery, and workable miniatures. The miniatures are deeply impressive by filament standards and are starting to compete with the resolution of entry-level resin machines. They don’t match ‘mid-range’ consumer resin printers in quality, but they still have upsides elsewhere.
But scenery and storage? It’s truly hard to beat the intersection of convenience and cost the A1 offers in that domain. I’ll elaborate.
Accessories and Storage: Trivial
The A1’s default reliability and detail excel at simple prints like storage, knick-knacks and game accessories. A machine that can handle delicate sculptures, FPV drones, and whatever moving parts abomination this is will handle practical applications without fuss. My hobby desk is now stacked with printed knick-knacks.
There are more paint organizers and brush holders than you could possibly need. When it comes to these objects, I browse for a design, load it in with my filament’s preferred settings and let it run. A few hours or one sleep passes, and my desk is a bit more organized. Game aids, too. How about an articulated measuring tool? Clicky customizable counters (with stand)? Themed spell slot tracker for the RPG nerds? Modular dice containers?
Look, 3D printing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be… unnatural. And it’s a great power to have.
If you have an A1 and print profiles that work with your filament, you can just have this stuff in hours. Literal hours. Dialing in your filament is also straightforward on an A1 because so many people have one and it’s been over a year since release. Running ‘[filament manufacturer] [filament type] [A1 settings]’ into Google will give you all the info you need. Then you knock out a temperature tower, assess it, and adjust accordingly. Orca can even generate the temperature tower for you. If your result is satisfactory, your basic prints will be as well.
The A1 has single-handedly changed my approach to personal organization and quality-of-life. And unlike my other appliances, it’s actually entertaining.
Tabletop Scenery: Solid
As for your gaming table, the A1 is really good at scenery. I’ve had plenty of success with scatter terrain, base detailing bits, and even a few larger pieces. At this point, I can also safely say that my days of buying scatter terrain kits or sprues are over. There are thousands of these scenery packs and many of them are free because creators are trying to sell more impressive things.
Tabletop scenery is an especially good use case for an A1. I firmly believe that filament printers have the edge over resin printers in this specific area. Here’s why:
- Scenery has a lower threshold for acceptable detail than miniatures.
- Scenery items are larger, increasing the odds of successful printing and support removal.
- Scenery can be printed cheaply in plastic for large projects, stores, or tournaments.
- Scenery is likely to be abused or stored roughly. The reduced brittleness of plastic filament is suitable for this.
- Large scenery objects may not fit onto a comparatively priced resin build plate in a single piece.
Another perk of printing your own scenery is that you can make it scale agnostic. STL files you download tend to have more detail than your printer can resolve. You can usually size a file up to print it without losing detail. A scenery item marked as ’15mm’ scale will almost certainly print fine if you size up to 28mm scale in your slicer. Sizing down is riskier because structural elements or details may be lost, but sizing up a static object is trivial.
Caption: This piece of scenery came off my plate at medium-high settings using inadequately calibrated settings. It’s rough, but quite workable.
Post-processing your scenery prints to remove imperfections, support scarring and layer lines is also much easier on scenery. Scenery pieces are larger and less delicate. Easier to work with. If you’re a person who already applies texture paste or thick primer over a piece, that’ll cover up most of the A1’s layer lines. If you hate assembling plastic scenery kits because of mold lines, glue, and cleaning imperfections… Great news! There’s a lot less of that here. Even if your piece is imperfect, there’s not much scrutiny on scenery and you can just print more at the cost of filament and energy.
Lastly, the sheer number of awesome creatives producing quality scenery simply outstrips anything a single company can produce. A quick search for ‘fantasy scenery’ in MyMiniFactory is an overwhelming experience. Trying the word ‘bases’ is similarly nutty. People who haven’t checked in on filament printing for a few years are in for a shock because the landscape is inundated with high-quality files for every genre, setting, and necessity. Modular dungeon kits used to require backing a $350 Kickstarter that had a sub-40% chance of shipping out. If you have an A1, you can just buy access to a set of files and start printing a modular dungeon system tonight. The files are yours to keep, too.
My best experience with using the A1 for tabletop printing has been scenery. The success rate of scenery prints is high enough that projects don’t feel like a dice roll. Filament printers tend to be much more confident with larger, denser objects.
Using my A1 to print scenery has also been the only area where I can claim it’s saved me money. Manufactured scenery can be prohibitively expensive if you’re trying to fill a table (or several). Store-bought scenery is constrained by scale and you might not be getting the exact number of an obscure piece you need for a project. People who want to reduce costs turn to card stock or MDF scenery, which have their own downsides. The fact is, no tabletop scenery holds detail as well as plastic or resin. It’s now possible to access most of the plastic perks via a printer.
Almost all the downsides of store-bought scenery are eliminated with a reliable printer. You can get a deeply personalized scenery collection at the exact scale you need. I’m no longer spending sizable sums on barrels, crates, and ruins when I can print the exact number I need on-demand. And yes, the volume of scenery you can potentially get out of a standard 1kg roll of filament is fuckin A. That 1 kg of filament is usually under $22.
Honestly, if you’re a scenery/basing nut and your projects are constrained by access to quality scenery, I’m prepared to recommend an A1 to you outright. It’s little sibling, the A1 Mini is also great, but you won’t have the same build volume. My A1 didn’t make store-bought scenery obsolete, but it’s made my entire hobby experience more comfortable. I love the feeling of having more scenery and terrain pieces than I can paint without feeling like it costs a substantial sum of money. It’s awesome.
Miniatures: Challenging, but Possible
Getting good miniatures out of a filament printer is something of a holy grail for the 3D printer-tabletop nerd crossover demographic. The supremacy held by more expensive resin printers has kept the dream of affordable miniatures on demand achingly out of reach.
Well, I’m glad to tell you that filament is catching up in quality. Somewhat. It just takes a lot of testing and patience. But the cost-effectiveness proposition is here!
The main challenges of getting miniatures out of a filament printer have to do with the difficulties of open-air plastic fabrication on a moving platform. At high resolution. The novelty of open-air 3D plastic fabrication in my living room has yet to wear off, but resolving satisfactory details for miniatures is difficult. As your level of detail target gets smaller, you start approaching the limits of what the nozzle, motors, and filament can physically produce while keeping the thing from encountering any number of curious errors.
Getting good miniatures out of a filament printer is one of the final bosses of owning one. It’s certainly possible on the A1. I’ve gotten some really good miniatures. But that road is paved with plastic waste, frustration, and setting adjustments.
Starting to remove supports from a freshly-printed miniature makes me feel like a sculptor unveiling a masterpiece from marble. It’d almost be pleasant if not for the stress of damaging my details.
The starting point of printing miniatures is having a printer capable of doing it. A silly thing to emphasize, but listen closely. A filament printer can only handle miniatures if the whole machine is well-balanced and well-calibrated. Having fewer issues with your printer gives you control over other variables like settings and troubleshooting. If your printer is unpredictable or unreliable, it’s intensely difficult to assess whether a failed miniature was due to the printer, the software, or any step in between.
The Procedure
The A1 is that kind of printer. The reliability and user-friendliness I discussed previously really comes into its own with a challenging task like miniature printing. Its reliability eliminates variables to do with the poorly-leveled beds or inadequately tightened screws you’d get on a kit printer. If you oil the moving parts as instructed and run the automatic calibration, An A1 should be up to task. It’s a 30-40 minute endeavor and you won’t have to do it for every print. On more… Manual machines, this calibration process can cause hours or days of frustration before printing even begins.
Aside: a filament printer’s nozzle width determines the maximum theoretical detail it can resolve. The Bambu Lab A1 arrives with a 0.4mm nozzle suitable for typical projects and even most scenery. Miniature printing favors the narrower 0.2mm nozzle. It’s fairly cheap and you’ll be thankful for the A1’s easy tool-free nozzle swap.
After that, you need software. Different slices have different features and not all are made equal. Orca Slicer, my preferred (open source) slicer, is a favorite for miniature work due to the large number of adjustments you can make to a print. It’s also become an unspoken standard among miniature printers so that people can more easily share settings and exchange feedback on prints. Miniature printing really is about managing variables.
Next are print settings. Prints are highly configurable and a good slicer allows you to adjust and save settings for the nozzle, filament, and current print independently. There are tabs and tabs of settings with import ranging from irrelevant to utterly critical. Errors in print setup and settings account for the majority of my miniature printing failures. Don’t be disheartened because others have failed for you.
My favorite source of miniature print settings is the vaunted ‘some guy on Reddit who did this for 350 hours and did a long write-up’. The 3D printing subreddits always have a few people whose special interest is squeezing quality miniatures out of an A1. Their write-ups evolve every month as they discover new things and will almost always include downloadable settings you can import. Follow their instructions closely and read the threads. YouTube channels like Fat Dragon Games also have solid, if often sponsored insights.
Filament is next. There are a vast array of filaments on the market and the A1 can use plenty. Anti-microbial filament for medical applications. Carbon fiber reinforced filament for high strength-to-weight ratios. Wood-infused PLA for aesthetics. Numerous manufacturers produce variations of common PLA, PETG, and ABS with enhanced strength or aesthetic finishes.
Miniature printing ignores the majority of those. Your chief concern in miniature printing is a filament’s ability to print very consistently, hold excellent detail, and be strong enough. Creality PLA+, Sunlu PLA+, Sunlu PLA Meta, Hatchbox PLA, and a few others appear regularly among miniature nerds. The settings you downloaded from that deeply obsessed Redditor will specify the filament you need. Follow it closely. Deviating from the filament required for the settings will invalidate the print. Even using a different colour in the same filament family can cause issues if the settings were painstakingly tuned for the dye composition of one specific colour. If the settings call for x manufacturer’s y material in z colour, you ought to match it.
Miniatures are not a load-and-launch endeavor. With such fine detail at stake and small parts at stake, anything can cause a failure. Even successful miniature prints are prone to scarring due to the necessary supports. Each miniature print (whole or disassembled) is its own project. Pieces must be oriented to minimize support scars and maximize mechanical strength. It’s ideal to start with individual parts until you have experience with a file and its settings. Don’t attempt a full build plate of miniature prints unless you’re deeply confident in your process.
My rule of thumb is to angle the model at 15° with valuable details facing up and outward. My infantry models tend to get sliced leaning backwards with supports crawling up their legs and back. This preserves the precious frontal detail. Angling the model ensures that every layer is slightly angled once the model is set down onto a base. This reduces the likelihood that parts will snap horizontally on the seams between each layer. The strength of these seams is a quality called layer adhesion and is one of the most common structural failure points in a filament. As that video shows, a small, well-configured plastic print can hold dozens of kg. However, layer adhesion has some of the worst resistance to external forces. This problem is magnified when the layers are tiny due to a narrow nozzle and fine detail of a miniature.
Then you hit Print and hope for the best.
If things turn out well, you get a workable print. You’ll remove the supports and post-process the print much like a miniature. Cutting, carving, sanding, finishing, and polishing are the usual steps. Finishing removes blemishes, smooths out layer lines and brings out fine detail. Damaging printed parts during finishing is very common (and frustrating). Most filament miniatures are less durable than injection molded plastic. Injection molded plastic parts are internally uniform and more solid. 3D prints are layered and always semi-hollow. A printed miniature has dozens of weak points. I’ve lost so many miniatures during support removal. I’ve lost miniatures while drybrushing. I’ve lost miniatures to drops from small heights. This is much less problematic when using injection molded plastic.
Oh, and the PLA we print with doesn’t respond to standard plastic cement. It’s not styrene plastic. Cleaning and assembling 3D printed miniatures has more in common with handling resin models. It’s finicky, fragile, and gluing parts together is inconvenient. Those of us who’ve had the misfortune of working with Forge World resin or Finecast have no happy memories, but could still transfer the experience to printed miniatures.
If you aren’t sickened by the prospect, let’s look at some of the results.
Bits and Pieces
I’ve come to rely on my A1 for vehicle bits and addons. They’re a great stepping point for someone still working their way to printing miniatures. The pieces tend to be denser or larger than individual details on a miniature, but they’re small enough to develop skills and troubleshooting knowledge.
Take the missile launcher from Nate Feyma’s Hevonen truck. The details are resolved clearly and layer lines are only visible very up-close. If the piece is primed and painted, the layer lines will be entirely invisible. Brush painting will make them even less visible, since brush painting applies thicker layers than airbrush.
The resulting launcher will go entirely unnoticed as a conversion piece save for the customary cool, where’d you get it! This was a simple two-hour print using my 0.2mm nozzle at well-tuned high detail settings. The settings were refined after that rough bit of barrel-and-wall scenery I showcased above.
I love armoured fighting vehicles. I love accessorizing mine and I had a consistent issue acquiring enough ERA blocks in the correct scale and number for my vehicles. This is entirely resolved by the A1. These models were actually an excellent test for the printer and my then-filament. They’re small, detailed, and needed to be highly uniform. The result was more than adequate for the purpose of dressing up my vehicles.
Eventually, I decided to torture-test the A1 for this article. Enter Trench Crusade’s Lion of Jabir.
Trench Crusade’s models are extraordinarily-detailed and were designed for resin printing. The range has plenty of fine details and delicate overhangs that are positively nightmarish for a filament printer. Remarkably, the A1 was up to the task and pulled off this challenging model in a single piece.
I expected the A1 to struggle in the face of chainmail, fur, and battle-damaged armor. All of these details were rendered on the model. Not at the same level of detail of a more expensive resin machine, sure. But the A1 managed it with much lower cost and toxicity. That’s quite impressive on its own. Pay special attention to the fur and armor. The A1 did not mess around even though my settings still aren’t optimally tuned.
The Lion of Jabir model also highlighted one of the shortcomings of high-detail filament printing: support scars. Overhanging areas of the model require printed supports because the nozzle can’t just extrude onto thin air. The Lion’s hunched posture meant that its entire underside was a complex support network. Even after a time-consuming support removal process, the underside is very rough. A significant amount of detail was lost due to this limitation of filament printing. It can only realistically be addressed by a multi-nozzle printer that prints both the main material and a water-soluble support material simultaneously. Or not using this type of printer at all. There’s always a trade-off.
Filament printed projects with overhangs will have supports unless you painstakingly separate them into parts. Supports are a hassle to remove and damage the object’s detail. This is the nature of the medium. Resin printing generally has more supports than filament printing, but removing and post-processing them is generally easier, albeit unpleasant in its own way.
For a more substantial model, I printed this Scout Car. I’m running an RPG campaign and the players needed transport. This was a mid-sized multi-part print and came together nicely once it got off the plate.
Very purposeful decisions by the creators made it easy for the printer to manage. Straight edges that slope gently over a model. Details composed of basic shapes like cylinders and triangles. A model broken down into a simple kit. Filament printers love these qualities. The model came off the plate with few issues and cleaned up well. My support settings were still unrefined and there was significant support scarring that I worked over with modelling putty. Importantly, the constituent parts were arranged so that support scarring would be placed in less noticeable lower areas. Unlike the Lion of Jabir, this file was made for filament or resin and it shows.
The only notable flaw on this model were more visible layer lines on angled sections of the hull. Since filament printing makes a model layer-by-layer and the layers are visible the naked eye, slopes and curves can be problematic. Layer lines become visible on curved surfaces in a manner similar to pixilation or digital aliasing. The model is nonetheless excellent and could be finished to a completely smooth result with considerable effort or just kept as-is.
Where It Comes Together
The A1 is a powerhouse in its cost bracket. It’s a hobbyist machine through-and-through. It’s usable enough to get results and reliable enough for experimentation. This machine handles day-to-day printing of accessories, storage, and quality-of-life like a champ. Common shapes with low levels of detail are trivial. Routine, even. I’ve grown used to finding files I like and tossing them onto the plate with reliably tuned settings from various Redditors or personal experience. Although mechanical maintenance and occasional print failures aren’t enjoyable, I always feel like I’m learning.
For tabletop hobbyists, I’m happy to report that this thing will change your approach to basing and scenery. Multiple Goonhammer authors have bought A1s and use them for scenery projects. It handles scenery with the verve of a much more advanced machine at a surprisingly low cost. I can credit the A1’s capabilities by saying that I’ve not bought scenery since I got my A1. No solid basing materials. Ruins. No structures. No walls. My A1 has rendered scatter terrain purchases for tabletop and bases obsolete. As I gain more experience, I can definitely envision a day when any tabletop scenery is printed on-demand in my home.
Miniature printing pushes filament printing beyond its intended use. No manufacturer advertises their filament machine as a capable miniature printer because the medium struggles with it by design. Even the A1 has limits. However, it has set the bar impressively high for such an affordable and usable machine. Every miniature print on the A1 still takes effort. I’ve yet to throw a model into the slicer and hit Print to easy success. However, the successes I have found are remarkable considering where the technology was a few years ago.
It’s no exaggeration to say that this accessible desktop filament printer has resolution matching early-generation resin machines that were vastly more expensive and less flexible. This is before accounting for how much easier it is to handle a filament machine and how many materials it can use without issue.
I bought my A1 half a year ago and it’s changed how I approach day-to-day tasks and my hobbies wholesale. As soon as I have a new tool or gadget, I’m off printing accessories and storage for it. I’ve made everything from toothpick dispensers to replacement parts. And yes, this very affordable (by wargamer standards) machine has all but rendered my scenery purchases obsolete. High-detail miniatures are the final frontier for filament printers and I’m not ready to say that we’ve caught up to resin in that domain. But the gap closes every year via machines like the A1.
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