If you've bought 3d Printed Miniatures before, you might already be familiar with support material. For you, the end-user: Supports are the small rods of resin that may be left over form the resin printing process.
So what are they, and why do they matter for you?
Well, they're used to...as you may have guessed - Support your models as they print. Resin printing happens upside down. In practical terms, a build plate starts at the lowest point on a Z axis, and then moves up in tiny increments (between .035mm and .05mm) until your model is fully printed.
Supports are used to keep the model stuck to the build plate. If it moves around, you'll get all sorts of crazy print problems like those seen below. Issues like this can cause part of your model to print in a different area entirely, resulting in your tabletop heroes looking like a magician placed a hex on them.
There are other reasons we need supports for resin printing - but the point of this article is why it matters FOR YOU as the person buying and using printed minis.
It's because supports have to attach to your model as it prints - these attachment points can range in size from about .1mm to nearly a full millimeter on larger models. The larger the attachment point, the more it will obscure details on your model. And while smaller attachment points lead to less detail obstruction, they still aren't desirable to maximize details.
Many, MANY professional printers tend to use the presupported versions of files given to them by the model designers. Unfortunately, these are often not optimal for the person who will be using the model, because the supports are sometimes placed in areas that obscure detail.
At Last Hope Printing, we ONLY use professionally presupported models, or we do them ourselves when excellent supports aren't available to us. This ensures that the mini you receive will not have more detail obscured by support material than is absolutely necessary.
Sometimes a model just has to have supports in an undesirable location, but 95% of the time, this can be avoided with careful positioning of a model on a build plate. In the example below, we can see two models that have supports on them. One has the detail facing the build plate (bad) and the other has the model positioned in a way that makes for longer print-times (the taller the model, the longer the print), but ultimately results in a far superior model for the customer. We always print in the way that results in the better model, and never sacrifice detail for speedy printing.