3D Printed Tabletop Miniatures: Printing a Whole D&D Party (or an Army)

Most miniature orders start one of two ways. Either someone needs a single character — a paladin, a tiefling rogue, the exact face they rolled up for a D&D campaign that doesn't exist as a stock figure — or they need a lot of models at once: a 40-to-60-model army, a monster pack for an encounter, terrain to fill a table. Both are completely normal jobs for us, but they want different machines, and they cost very differently per model. This post is the honest version of how it works.

We run both resin (MSLA) and FDM printers in the shop, so a single order can mix resin heroes printed for fine detail with FDM terrain printed cheap and big. The dedicated miniatures page has the quote form; this is the background that makes the form make sense.

What people actually order

The mini world is broader than "one D&D guy." The common buckets:

• Player characters and NPCs — a single hero or a small handful, usually printed for maximum detail because someone is going to paint and keep them.
• Monster packs — a set of the same creature (six goblins, a pack of wolves) or a single big bad for a boss fight.
• Full armies and warbands — 40 to 60+ models for a system that plays at unit scale. This is where batching matters most.
• Terrain and scatter — ruins, walls, buildings, crates, barrels. Bigger, lower-detail, and a great fit for FDM.
• Tokens and objective markers — flat or low-relief pieces, cheap to print in bulk.
• Dice towers and trays — functional table pieces, almost always FDM.

Resin vs FDM: the core decision

This is the choice that drives everything else, so it's worth being concrete about the trade-off.

MSLA resin — for the heroes

Resin nails the fine detail that 28–32 mm "heroic" miniatures live or die on: faces, individual fingers, chainmail links, feathers, fur, crisp weapon edges. If a model is meant to be looked at up close and painted, it should be resin. The cost is real: resin parts come off the printer wet, so they need a wash, then a UV cure, then support removal. The cured material is also more brittle than FDM plastic — thin spears and outstretched arms can snap if a model gets dropped. That's the price of the detail, and for a display hero it's the right price.

FDM (PLA / PETG) — for the bulk and the terrain

FDM is the call for anything big, anything functional, and anything where ultra-fine detail isn't the point. Terrain, busts, dice towers, scatter, and cheap bulk all print well in PLA or PETG. You give up some of the micro-detail resin gives you, but you gain toughness, lower cost, and the ability to print large pieces that simply won't fit on a resin plate. A ruined wall does not need eyelash-level definition; it needs to be on the table.

Batching: where a fleet gets affordable

This is the most important practical point in the whole post, so read it twice if you're pricing an army.

Every order carries a fixed setup cost — preparing files, slicing, supporting, plating, starting and babysitting the print, then post-processing. That setup is shared across the whole order, not charged per model. Which means printing one mini by itself is the worst possible value, and printing forty at once is dramatically cheaper per model than ordering them one at a time across six separate jobs.

The mechanism is plate packing: fitting as many miniatures as possible onto a single build at once. A resin plate can hold a surprising number of 28 mm models supported and angled together; an FDM bed can pack a small terrain set in one run. The more we can nest onto each build, the fewer total machine-starts the order needs, and the lower the per-model cost falls. So the honest advice is: if you know you'll want the whole party, the monster pack, and the terrain — send it all at once. Drip-ordering one model a week is the most expensive way to do it.

Scale, basing, and conventions

"28 mm heroic" is the common tabletop standard — roughly the height of a human model measured to the eyes, with slightly exaggerated hands and weapons so they read well at arm's length. Print to whatever scale your system expects; a model sized for one game can look wrong next to another's.

Basing matters more than people expect, because the base is how a model sits in its system:

• 25 mm round — standard infantry in most modern systems.
• Larger rounds (32 mm, 40 mm+) — cavalry, large creatures, characters who need presence.
• Monsters and bosses — often 50 mm or bigger, sometimes oval.

Tell us the base sizes you want and we'll print the models to match. If your STLs already include bases, even better — just say so.

How parts arrive and painting prep

Resin minis ship with supports removed and the models cleaned and fully cured, ready to prime. We don't hand you a raw, sticky print with a forest of supports still attached — that cleanup is part of the job. There may be faint nubs where supports met the model in hidden spots; that's normal and disappears under primer.

On painting: we can deliver minis raw (bare gray resin or PLA) or lightly primed if you'd rather start from a uniform base coat. Both gray resin and PLA take primer and acrylic paint well. We don't run a full paint studio — the assumption is that you (or your group) want to paint them yourself, which is half the fun. If you need them primed, ask and we'll quote it.

Files, rights, and lead time

One honest note up front: we print files you own or have the rights to. That means your own designs, or STLs you've properly licensed — for example, models from a creator's commercial-use or "myminifactory tribe" license. We're not the right shop for printing someone else's copyrighted models you don't have permission to use. If you're unsure about a file's license, send the source and we'll sort it out.

On timing: for a fleet, print time dominates the schedule. A single hero is fast. A 50-model army is genuinely days of machine time once you account for resin layers, washing, curing, and support cleanup across multiple plates. We'll give you a real lead time when we see the model count and sizes, not a generic promise.

To get a fast, accurate quote, send:

1. The STL files (or links to the licensed models).
2. The scale you want them printed at (e.g., 28 mm heroic).
3. Base preferences — sizes, or whether bases are already in the files.
4. How many of each — "1 hero, 6 goblins, 1 ogre, 4 wall sections" is exactly the kind of breakdown that lets us batch and price it.

What a typical order looks like

A typical party-plus-terrain order looks like this: a full D&D party — say five hero minis, one per player — printed in resin for the faces and gear detail, plus a handful of FDM terrain pieces like a ruined wall, a couple of crates, and a small building to dress the table. The heroes get plated together on one or two resin builds; the terrain runs as its own FDM job.

The win is that the setup cost is shared once across the whole order instead of being paid five separate times for five separately-ordered heroes. The party comes off the resin printer supports-removed and ready to prime; the terrain comes off the FDM printer tough enough to get shoved around a table all night. That mix — resin where detail matters, FDM where size and durability matter, everything batched — is the pattern most good mini orders fall into.

Whether it's one character or a sixty-model army, send us the files, the scale, the base sizes, and the counts, and we'll quote it. Get a quote at theprintedbay.com, or drop your STLs directly into the dropzone on the homepage.

The Printed Bay is a one-person 3D printing studio in Des Plaines, IL, serving Chicago and shipping nationwide. A real human runs the printers and answers every email.