If you’ve made it this far, you already know which printer lane you’re in. Maybe you picked resin for those crispy cheekbones, or maybe you’re riding with FDM because it doesn’t require a tiny chemistry lab. Either way, the next step is the same: you need to slice. Slicing is the part where your computer takes a 3D model and translates it into the exact motions and timings your printer understands. Think of it like turning sheet music into a specific performance. Same song, different tempo and emphasis. Do it right and the mini sings. Do it sloppy and the mini sounds like a kazoo.
I’ll walk you through a beginner-friendly session in Lychee (for resin) and in Cura (for FDM). No assumed jargon. No “go read a forum and come back with a PhD.” Just the buttons that matter, why they matter, and the few habits that stop support marks from landing right on the nose of your paladin. By the end you’ll know how to import, orient, support, and export a mini in both tools, plus when to tweak layer height, anti-aliasing, infill, wall counts, and the weird little toggles that secretly control how smooth a cape looks or how straight a spear stays.
What “Slicing” Actually Does, Without Robot Poetry
A 3D model is just a shape. Your printer doesn’t speak “shape,” it speaks “thin layers.” The slicer takes your model and cuts it into hundreds or thousands of pancakes. Then it adds instructions for how to draw or cure each pancake. FDM draws with hot plastic. Resin cures with UV light. Same pancake stack idea, different kitchen utensils.
When people talk about “profiles,” they mean saved collections of these settings. Imagine having a “weeknight dinner” profile and a “Sunday feast” profile. Weeknight is faster, simpler, still tasty. Sunday is slower, fussier, and beautiful on the plate. You’ll build two or three profiles you trust for minis and you’ll swap between them like outfits.
Lychee for Resin: From Import to “Pop Off the Plate” the Calm Way
Open Lychee and drag your STL into the scene. Don’t worry about the big empty grid; it’s just the printer’s build area. Your first job is orientation. That fancy sword begs to lay flat because it looks stable, but that’s because swords are liars. Printing big flat surfaces directly on the plate makes them hard to remove cleanly and invites elephant foot artifacts near the base. Tilt the model so the slicer starts the build from a safe, hidden region and climbs toward the important bits. With a cloaked hero I’ll often angle the mini so the slicer begins under the cape and inside the base rim, then rises toward the face.
The second job in Lychee is supports. They’re scaffolding. You want them where eyeballs won’t linger. If a support scar lands on a cheek or forehead, you’ll notice it forever. If it hides under a cape or inside a thigh gap that nobody sees, you’ll forget it exists. Lychee has automatic support placement that does a decent first pass. Run it. Then orbit around the model like a suspicious raccoon and move the anchors off of smooth, high-attention areas. I like to cluster supports along armor panels, belt lines, the underside of capes, and the bottom of weapons. Anywhere a little nub will read as texture instead of damage is fair game.
Support thickness is a balancing act. Think of it like pushpins versus coat hooks. Thin tips leave tiny marks but may not hold heavy parts. Thick tips hold well but leave bigger cleanup spots. Lychee lets you mix sizes. Use slightly beefier supports under heavy areas like a billowing cloak and lighter ones along delicate areas like fingers. For a first print, keep it simple: medium posts for structure, light tips near detail, and a few “backup” posts so one failure doesn’t domino the rest.
Hollowing can save resin, but you don’t need it on day one. If you do hollow, add drain holes where they’ll be invisible on the table—often the underside of the base—so trapped liquid can escape. Lychee will warn you about islands, which are pieces that would form in mid-air with nothing beneath them. Handle those with a support or by slightly rotating the model so the slicer builds each bit on the back of something else.
Layer height in resin is your smoothness knob. Tiny numbers mean thin layers and smooth faces. Bigger numbers print faster but show more stepping. For a hero mini, a small layer height is your friend. Anti-aliasing is the cleanup crew that smooths stair-stepping caused by the LCD’s pixels. Don’t max it out like a DJ cranking bass. Moderate values keep edges crisp while taking the “pixel sparkle” off curved surfaces.
Once supports look reasonable and the layer height is set, preview the slices. This is the X-ray view where panic turns into confidence. Watch how each layer grows. If you see a floating island, you missed a support. If you see the slicer chewing straight through an eyebrow with a support pole, move it now instead of filing it later. The preview stops ninety percent of “why is there a crater on my ranger’s face” moments.
Export your file, send it to the printer, and resist the urge to mess with anything mid-print. Your best quality leap will come from support placement and orientation, not from haunted slider wiggles while the vat is already glowing.
Cura for FDM: Teaching the Hot Noodle to Behave
Cura feels like a cockpit the first time you open it. Ignore the dozens of toggles. A small handful runs the show for minis. Drop your STL onto the plate and check scale. Many minis import at strange sizes. If your human looks like a kaiju stomping a city, you’ll need to scale to your system’s standard. For 28–35 mm game scale, an average human should stand around that height from feet to eye line after printing, but don’t become a measuring goblin on day one. Close enough is fine.
Orientation matters even more with FDM because gravity is rude when drawing noodles. You want gentle slopes instead of sheer cliffs. A dome printed straight up becomes a staircase. Tilt it slightly and the steps flatten out. With capes and armor panels, orient so the outer visible face gets the longest, smoothest runs and the hidden face deals with supports. Cura shows overhangs through color previews; anything glowing “this is risky” needs either a small angle adjustment or some support love.
Supports in FDM are like pop-out scaffolding. You want them sturdy enough to hold, sparse enough to remove, and placed where a tiny scar won’t ruin the mood. Cura’s tree supports are great for minis because they snake around detail and touch in smaller spots. Think of them as gentle roots instead of brick columns. You still aim their contact points at hidden surfaces, but they’re kinder when you miss by a little.
Layer height is your texture dial. Lower is smoother but slower. On a small hero, a finer layer height up top makes faces and curved armor look good. If you combine that with a slightly thicker first layer you get bed adhesion without sacrificing finish. Walls and infill matter too. Walls are exactly what they sound like: the solid shells around the outside. More walls make thin parts stronger and hide infill patterns. Infill is the honeycomb or grid inside solid-looking parts. For minis, you don’t need a dense brick interior; a modest infill with decent wall count gives you strength and keeps print time sane.
Cooling and speed are the unsung duo. A small feature printed too fast without enough cooling slumps like a tired ice cream. Slowing down the top layers and letting the fan breathe helps sharp points and thin weapons. Cura has settings that reduce speed for small layers automatically, which saves many fragile spears from becoming spaghetti.
Finally, check seam placement. FDM leaves a tiny “start/stop” line where each layer begins. You can tell Cura to hide that seam in a corner, follow a specific angle, or randomize it so no single line becomes obvious. For minis, pushing the seam toward a cloak’s back or along a belt often makes it disappear under paint.
When the preview looks sensible, slice and send it. Cura shows time estimates and material use, which is helpful if you’re printing a dozen bases and want to know whether you can finish before game night or you should set expectations with your party.
Orientation: Where You Win or Lose Before Printing Starts
Orientation deserves its own moment because it’s the quiet superpower. The printer doesn’t know what a face is. It only knows surfaces. Your job is to rotate the model so the slicer builds from strong, hidden areas toward delicate, visible ones.
For faces, tilt so the nose and cheeks rise later rather than sooner. You want supports on the jawline or under the chin, not on the apples of the cheeks. For weapons, try to avoid long flat spans parallel to the build surface. If you must do a long span, give it a slight angle so each layer has something to rest on. For capes, put the supports on the inner side and let the outer side flow as one big smooth sheet. It’s easier to sand the inside of a cape than to fix chatter right across the back where everyone looks.
Sometimes you’ll rotate a model, add supports, preview, and then rotate it again because the preview shows a better path. That’s not wasted time. That’s the craft. It’s like turning a potato in your hand before you peel it. Two extra minutes now saves twenty later.
Layer Height, Anti-Aliasing, and Why “Tiny Numbers” Aren’t Always Best
Thinner layers capture detail but also multiply the number of layers. On resin, tiny layers are wonderful until they become overkill. Human eyes and paint hide a lot. A heroic 0.03–0.05 mm can look just as smooth as microscopic settings once primer and highlights go down, and you’ll finish prints in hours instead of “what year is it.” On FDM, chasing ultra-low layer height on a mid-tier machine can highlight mechanical wobble you didn’t notice at larger layers. If the printer’s motion isn’t perfectly tuned, it will “write” that wobble into delicate layers. Pick a smart middle that your machine handles gracefully.
Anti-aliasing helps on resin because the LCD has square pixels trying to draw curves. It blends the edges so they don’t look like stairs made of diamonds. Moderate settings are your friend. If you crank it, you can blur sharp panel lines. With FDM there’s no anti-aliasing magic; the smoothness is on you via layer height, orientation, speed, cooling, and extrusion consistency.
Supports: Gentle Where You See, Strong Where You Don’t
Support strategy is half empathy, half gravity. Empathy for future-you who has to sand the scars. Gravity because unsupported islands sag or tear away. On resin, place heavy posts on hidden planes and lighter tips on visible contours. On FDM, lean into tree supports that kiss lightly and release cleanly, and nudge their touchpoints away from hero details.
You’ll learn the “grain” of a model quickly. A flowing cloak tolerates a few scars inside the fold. A smooth bald head does not. A sword blade forgives a support near the base but never mid-edge. Hands are notorious: better to anchor at the wrist and under the palm than put a post on a knuckle you’ll stare at while painting. The fewer scars in focal zones, the happier your primer pass will be.
Slicer Tricks That Save Hours Later
In Lychee, the slice preview is basically time travel. Scrub through the layers and imagine tiny forces pulling. If a thin tip is supporting a big chunk, add a friend below it. If you see a tiny island birth out of nowhere, give it a lifeline. Lychee’s support painting tools let you “grow” helpers exactly where you want them. Ten seconds there beats ten minutes of sanding.
In Cura, coax quality from small parts by letting the slicer slow down on tiny layers and giving the fan more say near the top surfaces. If a spear still looks risky, add a custom support blocker to keep supports off the blade edge and allow a single, clean sandable seam. The preview also shows travel moves. Long zigzags across a detailed face can leave wisps. A small combing or retraction tweak can stop the printer from ghost-drawing lines you’ll chase with a knife.
Common Beginner Gotchas You Can Dodge Right Now
The first gotcha is “printing flat to the plate because it feels safe.” It’s safe right up until you try to remove it or notice the bottom third looks squashed. Tilt a little, build off an area you can hide, and let the first layers bite into supports instead of fusing your model to the plate like glue.
The second is “too few supports because you hate cleanup.” Everyone hates cleanup. But a failed print is the longest cleanup of all. Place supports like seatbelts. You don’t need a cage, you just need enough to keep the important parts from flying through the windshield.
The third is “over-tuning before you have a baseline.” Print one mini with a sane profile before you change five variables at once. If the result is decent, tweak one thing and print a small section again. Chasing eight settings simultaneously is how you end up on page seventeen of a spreadsheet arguing with yourself about decimals.
Exporting, Naming, and Not Losing Your Mind
Name your sliced files like a rational creature. Put the model name, the profile type, and the date. Future-you will thank past-you when you circle back to reprint the same ranger six months from now and can tell at a glance which file produced the cleanest results. Keep a “good” profile saved and clone it when experimenting, so you always have a trustworthy fallback.
When you export, check that the printer profile matches your actual machine. It’s an easy mistake to slice for the wrong build volume or screen size if you hop between devices or swapped printers last week. If you’re running multiple printers, write down which one gets which file. It feels obvious until you have two minis on two plates and both are “hero_v2_final_FINAL.”
Bringing Resin and FDM Together for a Table-Ready Pipeline
Most people settle into a rhythm where resin does faces and FDM does real estate. You’ll slice a party’s worth of heroes in Lychee, set them to run in batches, then hop to Cura and slice an evening’s worth of bases and scatter. The resin jobs come out with that crisp texture everyone loves. The FDM jobs come out durable and cheerful, ready to get knocked off the table without breaking. When the painting queue fills, you won’t remember which slicer did which piece. You’ll just remember that supports didn’t ruin your faces and the capes didn’t look like corduroy.
If you’re the one-printer-for-now type, you can still borrow the best habits from the other side. FDM gains a ton by stealing resin-style orientation discipline. Resin gains cleanliness by stealing FDM’s “set it and step away” patience. The craft sits in the overlap: gentle supports where eyes go, strong supports where they don’t; moderate settings that match your space and schedule; and a preview pass that catches the goofy stuff before it wastes resin or filament.
Your First Real Slice: A Mini You’ll Actually Use
Here’s what a calm first run looks like. You import a simple fighter into Lychee. You tilt him so the cape grows first and the face last. You auto-support, then nudge a few tips off the cheeks and onto the jawline. You set a sensible layer height, turn on moderate anti-aliasing, scrub the preview for islands, and hit slice. While that prints, you drop a set of 32 mm bases into Cura, pick a fine layer height for the top layers and a reasonable one for the rest, aim the seam at the back, and let tree supports prop up that one dramatic rock. By dinner you’ve got a hero and a handful of bases. By bedtime they’re primed and ready for color. No drama, no sticky disasters, no sanding a nose back into existence.
The difference between a decent mini and a “how did you do that” mini is rarely magic resin or mythical filament. It’s this small stack of choices in the slicer. Where you point the face. Where you put the supports. How patient you are with preview. And whether you picked settings that make sense for a tiny human instead of a lawn gnome. Do that consistently and your prints will stop feeling like gambles and start feeling like recipes.
The Takeaway Before We Get Fancy
Lychee and Cura are just instruments. You’ll get good because you practice the same song until your hands know where the notes are. Keep orientation honest. Keep supports out of the spotlight. Keep layer heights sensible instead of microscopic for bragging rights. Preview like you mean it. Export with names you can decode later. Then step aside and let the machine work while you plan the paint scheme or roll up the next boss fight.
Next time we’ll push deeper into presets that you can download and tweak, how to design “fall-off-clean” supports on faces and weapons so you barely sand at all, and how to set up per-model overrides in Cura so thin parts slow down and cool without turning the whole print into a marathon. For now, slice one mini you care about, print it, paint it, and put it on the table. That little hero will teach you more than three days of settings rabbit holes ever could.
