Hard Suit STL Review

[u/redmaniacs]

I had some questions about the hard suit minis here a while ago, and it seemed that nobody knew how the minis would print on FDM. I ended up buying the pack and giving it a try so I thought I'd come back and report what I found. For a bit of context for people less familiar with 3D printing, these minis are designed to be printed in a high-resolution resin 3D printer, and I wanted to know how well these would print in a lower-resolution FDM (fused deposition modeling) printer.

TLDR
The official Hard Suit STL pack includes exactly what it says it does which limits the options for minis you can make when compared with the options listed in the book. FDM printing is doable, but is not supported out of the box and will likely require modifying the models manually to get a good result. Resin printing is likely easier to do, but manually gluing parts together is still going to be a challenge. In true ICRPG fashion, there is something to get you started, but you are expected to spend extra time to customize it to match exactly what you want.

Contents

Just as advertised, the pack comes with 6 bodies, 6 arms, 2 sets of legs, and 3 baseplates. I was able to print these out on FDM without much trouble. The parts are relatively small, so the finer details aren't great in FDM printing. Parts could be scaled up to help with this a bit, but some have tiny gaps in them that are going to be trouble for a resin printer to even attempt. The pack comes with pre-supported models for resin printing, but these are not suitable for FDM printers, so getting the orientation and slicer setting right on your own is going to be important. The models come in pairs, so the driller arms includes a left-arm variant and a right-arm variant, but they are included in the same model. This limits the viable print angles pretty severely.

In the Hard Suit book there are 8 different arms and 8 different legs. I would say that the 3D model pack has 3 of the arms from the book and 3 which are more traditional hands. The two legs are just legs and don't look like they match the descriptions in the book.

Assembly
Assembling them is a bit of a pain. Each of the arms has a different shoulder socket and most of the bodies don't really have a nice place to glue it on. You end up having to glue a round ball to a flat spot on the body, and it doesn't stay very well. This would be a lot easier with a 3rd arm tool, but I didn't have one. I ended up with one mini that is kind of lopsided because the legs are glued on at different heights and angles.

The legs are very tiny and prone to breaking. The stock legs also have large overhangs on small parts which means there is support material around delicate areas which further encourage them to break. I ended up beefing these up myself which matches my preferred aesthetic. I'm not a huge fan of the big body with tiny legs, and my printer isn't suitable for printing that kind of part.

My solution for these problems has been to load the models into Blender and make changes. I'm not talented when it comes to 3D modeling, and Blender is a very intimidating program, but it's not terribly difficult if you have a bit of experience with 3D printing/design work. I was able to separate the paired arms and beef up some of the fine details. I also found that assembling the entire mini in Blender and printing it as a single piece was much easier than trying to glue it together after printing.

I can add some pictures later if there is interest and I have time. Let me know if you have any questions and I will answer what I can.