A Sunday Stroll into 28mm Territory

 Really, while planning and designing my next figures and trying to use up the last of a PLA filament spool, I decided to experiment with scaling down my normal 50mm designs. I was intrigued to know how scaling would effect the detail that I had on my peg sized soldiers - would it disappear or deform beyond recognition? ...One way to find out (I thought)...

So, I reduced my 3D Steampunk figure using TINKERCAD to what I considered an equivalent of 28mm scale (according to a web search that is 30mm form foot to eye level of the figure)...

As I said, I made no concession to the effects on detail by shrinking the existing model so I had no idea whether some of the finer detail would simply disappear during printing. Also, I have never printed out a 28mm scale miniature using my Flashforge Adventurer 3 so that was a bit of an unknown too (although I know a lot of gamers regularly print out 28mm miniature using such a 3D printer and are happy with the results).

In any event, I was sort of pleasantly surprised by the what was spat out! Bear in mind - because I like to tinker - that I decided to print this small figure out in one-piece (the body anyway) instead of three pieces like I did with his big brother. The arms and the sword I printed the usual way and separately...

Not too shoddy eh? (But it did need a clean up.) 😁

Here's a comparison photo of the 28mm fig with the original 50mm soldier. I haven't worked out the percentage reduction of this but it looks like it's about a 50% down-scale-ish...

As you can see, it's a little rough round the edges of some of the smaller detail I created for the 50mm fig. But it's not too bad and would probably look better once painted. If I'm honest, I've actually had worse plastic soldier figures from commercial companies and not complained! (I'm looking at you Airfix!) 😉

So, what have I learned here? Well, I do have to make some concessions to the smaller scale, perhaps by making some of the finer detail a bit chunkier so that it holds itself in the reduction. There has to be a balance in robustness of the design when I think I might be doing both a 50mm and 28mm version of the same figure.

Useful experiment.