Thanks for sharing. I'm always curious how the "pros" run their 3d printing.
Is this the same company who does / did Battle Honours in the past? I've purchased multiple packs of WWII Japanese from them in the in metal. Nothing phenomenal but perfectly fine sculpts and I was happy.
I took a look around the 3D website. It appears the models are from various sources. I have some of the terrain STL files and the specific ones I'm thinking of don't appear to be made to be printed in about 28mm scale. The problem here is that thin / fragile bits of a 28mm model become increasingly breakable the smaller you get. Imagine a 2mm part on a 28mm scale model which becomes close to 1mm a 15mm scale. Imagine it microns thick at 6mm. You generally don't have a of of this problem with terrain, but with infantry, it can be a big issue. A rifle, or strap, or shovel handle becomes ridiculously fragile with scale shrinkage.
There is a reason hand sculpted figures are frequently chunky. They hold up to game play and have a general look that just works well when painted and viewed at an arm's length away. Using 3D modeling to create hyper-realistic figures often is not a plus. They are harder to paint, the immense detail may not even be visible, and there is a tendency to have fragile, narrow parts on the model that are subject to easy breakage. This can easily be overcome with 3D modeling by simply building the models to be more chunky. The 3DBreed "March to Hell" series actually does a great job with providing models that print to nice solid miniatures. They look chunky on the website but print well.
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The fact that the model snapped at the ankles may indicate that the model just wasn't well designed. Slim parts break. Or that the manufacturer may be using an sub-optimal resin for printing miniatures. Resin has dropped in price over the past years. $10 USD USD a kg is common for basic resins but they are not suited for miniatures at all. This stuff can show detail just fine, but is also very brittle and not something that can be handled let alone be dropped. There are plenty of ABS-Like options which are better. Maybe $20 USD a kg. There are even better resins designed for miniatures at around $50 USD a kg. Professional printing should be using professional resins.
In your write-up you also mentioned the figures came with the supports attached. If this is true, that is seems to be just lazy on the manufacturer's part. Being someone who does a fair amount of 3D printing at home, I can say that a god number of my breakages come from removing the supports. If printed with standard resins and cured, this is even more a problem. I'll spitball a guess that for me, an average batch of 100 28mm figures printed using a standard resin, cured, and then removing the supports will end up with at least 25% breakage of the miniatures. If this is what is going on, it seems the vendor is delivering a product and offloading the breakage into your hands.
photographs the same figure, with different cameras and equipment.
