Printing D&D minis with my new printer

I bought a new Bambu Labs P1S 3D Printer in January and spent most of February learning how to use it. This post captures my top learnings and shares some pictures of my prints. I hope you enjoy!

Why I chose the Bambu Labs P1S

After running an Ender 3 for many years (I think for at least 6+ years), I’ve been craving an upgrade for a while. Between the winter sales, watching my friends/colleagues get new printers, and having some time on my hands – I decided that it was time to upgrade my experience.

My printer selection criteria:

• Materials: I primarily print with PLA and PLU, with interest in PETG and ASA
• Bed size: I need a printer bed that is at least as big as my Ender 3
• Multi-filaments: I want to print in multiple colors/types and enabling support filament usage

After debating between the X1 and the P1 series, I went with the P1S because the additional capabilities of the X1 didn’t justify the higher cost for me. If I were printing more exotic filaments, I would likely have upgraded…but I don’t [yet 😉].

Why I love my P1S printer

I’m not sure I can put into words how much I adore this printer – it’s 3-5x faster than my prior printer and the prints look and feel much smoother. And over the last month, I’ve printed a number of things with it: stackable storage trays for Pinewood Derby cars, a playing card display shelf, a family game night trophy, assorted board game pieces and inserts, Dungeons and Dragons miniatures (aka ‘D&D minis’), and I’m just getting started.

My biggest joy has been D&D minis. I didn’t originally buy the printer for these because my Ender 3 couldn’t handle the detail – they looked like a pile of spaghetti, compressed into the shape of a small figurine. I had also previously looked at printing with resin, but the chemicals scared me. And so I had moved past minis a long time ago…but this printer pulled me right back in.

While printing a replacement boardgame piece, I was amazed at the finer detail this printer provided for small prints, and I decided to give a mini a try. While not perfect, it showed me that D&D minis were possible…and I dove into the rabbit hole last month.

The rest of this post details my key learnings from the month.

Lessons Learned…Printing D&D Minis

As I went down the path to use my P1S to print D&D minis, I’ve learned a lot. I’m not done learning, but below are my top-level learnings, with links to the parts and detailed posts that you can follow.

Below is my first ‘batch’ of minis that I’m happy with – the characters from mz4250’s Wild Beyond the Witchlight collection along with a random ‘no support’ ranger mini. Each miniature has been printed and cleaned up, but look at the detail! Specifically, it’s worth calling out the detail of the butterfly wings for the Dirlagraun (the displacer beast to the upper-right), which are so thin that light will show through them.

To date, our family D&D nights have used a whiteboard and some round tokens — I’m looking forward to raising the game with these. Specifically, the family is moving towards a heist scenario in Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and these characters should significantly raise the bar on the session.

After removing the supports, I cleaned them up using a standard hobby knife. You can see a couple of the pieces lost some of their finer elements (e.g., Mr. Witch’s cane and Mr. Light’s wand/vane) in the support removal process, but I intend to fix that up during painting.

Printer Parts

If you are going to print minis or other high-detail items, you want a 0.2mm hotend from Bambu Labs. Specifically, I recommend getting the 0.2mm complete hotend. There are several reasons for this:

• Quality – the 0.2mm hotend opens up 0.04mm layers, which provides the resin-like detail
• Easy swap – the complete hotend version is more expensive than the hotend-only version (USD$36 vs USD$16), but it’s well worth it.
  • With the complete hotend, swapping hotends comes down to two screws and unplug/replug
  • With the hotend only, you’re swapping the fan and laying down thermal paste as you swap the heating and thermistor wires over

In the first month, I probably swap out my hotends [between 0.2mm and the 0.4mm] weekly as I go back and forth between printing minis and other stuff.

I also highly recommend getting a textured PEI print plate. It improves print adhesion and I haven’t yet had to mess around with glues.

Filament

I’m not yet picky on filament, but I’m looking forward to advancing to that level soon. 🙂

• For D&D minis, I’m using the generic PLA that I’ve had and used for years – it’s a white marble from Eryone. As I work through this spool, I’m going to experiment with others. If you have suggestions, please share them with me.
• For D&D mini furniture, I’m playing around with Bambu Labs’ PLA Wood filament. I did both the look and the feel of the filament as it’s been printed.
• I’ve continued using matte PLA for other prints, although I plan on trying PETG soon.

I recommend two purchases to raise your 3D printing game by removing moisture from my PLA:

• Filament dryer – I bought a SUNLU S4, which can dry up to four filament rolls and has both temperature and humidity controls.
• Rechargeable Desiccant Packs – I also bought packs of desiccant that I can drop into the filament storage bags to keep moisture levels down. I also now use these packets in other places – for example, in document storage boxes and in with our Christmas lights. The nice thing about these rechargeable ones is that the packet changes color when it’s sucked up too much moisture…and you pop it into the microwave to recharge. Easy-peasy!

Drying out the filament reduced stringing and smoothed the prints – I highly recommend using a dryer and desiccant.

Printer Settings

Most of my time learning to print D&D minis was with settings – reading, tweaking, testing, and iterating on printer settings. Here are the high-level strokes of what you need to adjust:

• Start with the 0.06mm High Quality setting and tweak from there
• Crank your details up by using 0.04mm layers and the Arachne wall generator method
• Slow down the print-head and use Tree supports on the build plate only
• Adjust the mini’s angle to minimize supports and to keep the most visible parts clear of supports. The supports will be the source of your cleanup and it’s best to not mess with the parts that are the most visible.

Setting your settings

That’s the basics of the settings…but there is a lot to do and tweak. Of what I’ve read, below are your best starting points on printing minis:

• The Fat Dragon Games walkthrough on printing minis using the Bambu A1 and his custom A1 profiles are available on DriveThru RPG provide a good framing. A few notes on his video/profiles:
  • The DriveThru RPG profiles for the A1 continue to be updated beyond what was covered in the video. As he learns and experiments, he keeps updating them…check out the readme/changelog in the profile package to understand what has changed.
  • These profiles are A1-specific, and Bambu doesn’t present them for the P1. I had to recreate a P1 profile using his settings.
  • His video also does a good job comparing filaments, which I found useful.
• The Reddit posts by HOHansen on Reddit are There are also Masterclass-level material. They are must-reads – they go into deeper detail and show some beautiful Warhammer minis.
  • He has two posts of note –
    • One explores the general mini printing workflow
    • The second deep dives into supports, exploring layer heights, support placement, brim width details, and more
  • He also posts his Bambu Labs printer settings, which I have mostly adopted.

One innovation that I have really enjoyed using the Bambu Labs slicing application is using the tree supports, which are much easier than standard supports.

Setting your supports

Even more important than printer settings, it’s important to play with how your miniatures are positioned. And keep in mind of how you set your overhang angle. The default is 30 degrees – but I’ve had some success raising this as high as 45 degrees with some minis. But this is definitely a ‘your mileage may vary’ situation, so give it a try and see what works for you.

As you position your model, placement can also affect the time required to print, in addition to minimizing scaring/burrs. Above is an image of printing the Kenku antagonist from the Witchlight Carnival. As you can see, placement will change two variables – (1) which parts you will be cleaning up and (2) the printing time. For the printing time, the support placement alone changes the print time from 4h53m in the first to 5h49m in the second.

Sourcing Minis

The last question I get is where to find D&D miniature models. At the moment, I use Thingiverse for many models, including furniture. And I now use mz4250 for monster/character models from – his Patreon is a great value.

My Cautionary Notes

AMS is not always your friend

The AMS system was not the panacea that I hoped for, with D&D mini printing exposing several limitations. While the printer may support multiple filaments, it still only has a single hotend.

But first – what I love about the AMS:

• Storage – It is convenient for your most-used filaments – it is sealed and low humidity
• 4 filament spools – you can print with up to 4 colors or to use different filament types
• ‘Refill’ – It automatically swaps to a new filament spool when one runs out and removing range anxiety

BUT there were some unexpected frustrations for me – swapping filaments is not an efficient process:

1. the printer cuts the filament in the print head (just above the hotend)
2. the AMS retracts the old filament back through the loooong tube – little teeth grab the filament and pull it back
3. the AMS then feeds the new filament through the tube
4. the printer then flushes the old filament that had been left in print head – first out a hole in the back, and then using a transition block

And so, I ran into the following issues while printing the D&D Minis:

• The flushing is inefficient for something like a mini that uses very little filament for each layer (e.g., small legs and some supports).
  • I found that for my minis, 80% of the filament used was in the ‘flushing block’ or dropped down the filament trash chute at the back of the printer.
  • When I tried printing 6 minis at a time – to minimize waste from the ‘flushing’ – I heat fused my hotend (more on that below)
• One of my PLA filaments broke a lot from being fed/retracted repeatedly down the tube as it was being swapped out after printing these little amounts per layer

TL;DR – Keep an eye on your AMS

Support filaments

I tried using PVA (water soluble) for supports. After long fights removing supports with my Ender 3, I fantasized about using different support materials that could be easily removed or could just melt away in water. Particularly with minis, you can at times find yourself trying to remove supports up behind a cave or under armor that flares out over legs…it can be a nightmare. Enter the promise of melting supports…meaning less time removing the supports and less time cleaning up the support burs. Why wouldn’t you do this, amiright?

But to the above point on the AMS, introducing support filament into the prints added a lot of inefficiency.

Returning to our Kenku friend, the above is a screenshot of what happens with I turned on PVA as a connective material between the support and the model. This results in four major shifts in the print:

1. First – it creates this big block to the right of the model (image above)…that’s the tower where it dumps/flushes material at each layer of the print. Looking at numbers, that tower uses 10.61 meters (or 32.05g) of net-new filament.
2. Second – the time shoots up from just over 5 hours to over 2 days! This is a factor both of the added material, but also all of the time moving filament up and down the tube and reheating the hotend.
3. Third – look at all of that filament being used, we go from 1.46 meters to 63.38 meters! And the model is still the same size…that 630% increase of filament is all waste.
4. Last (my WTF moment) – the 3/4 of this filament is just being flushed – extruded and dropped out the back of the printer…it’s not even going into the tower.

While I did appreciate the easier cleanup, the increased time and filament waste wasn’t worth it for me.

TL;DR – PVA wasn’t worth it for me; I use the same PLA filament for supports

Watch the temperature

To minimize filament waste, I tried printing six minis at one go – which turned out to be a three-day print. On Day 3, the print failed because the hotend had overheated and caused the PLA to fuse further up in the hotend, away from the heated tip.

The print died overnight, and I lost the print because some of the print had lost adherence to the plate.

TL;DR – Crack the printer’s door open if you will be printing for an extended period of time