Tabletop miniatures are the perfect sculpting project: small enough to finish in a weekend, detailed enough to teach you something, and immediately useful the moment they come off the printer. This guide walks the whole path — scale decisions, sculpting for a physical process, export, slicing — using a browser as the sculpting tool. Disclosure up front: Re:Form is our app. The craft advice below holds no matter what you sculpt in.

Can you sculpt tabletop miniatures in a browser?

Yes. Re:Form is a free browser-based sculpting app running on WebGPU in desktop Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari 26, with nothing to install. You sculpt a mini with the full toolset, export OBJ on the Free plan or STL on Pro ($9.99/month), and slice it like any downloaded model. Re:Form is alpha software (v0.6.4).

Two practical notes before you start. Re:Form is desktop-only — phones and tablets aren't supported — and it asks for a free sign-in before you sculpt. What it doesn't ask for is a card, a download, or a watermark on your work. Your sculpt saves to your own machine, and the mesh lives on your GPU while you work.

If you want the broader printing context first, our guide to sculpting for 3D printing covers the general pipeline. This post narrows in on minis specifically, where the constraints are tighter and more interesting.

What scale should you sculpt at?

Sculpt at whatever size is comfortable and set the real size in your slicer. Tabletop minis are usually described as 28mm or 32mm, and — as of July 2026 — that number conventionally measures to the figure's eyeline, not the top of the head. A 32mm figure is therefore roughly 35–38mm tall overall once you include the skull and any helmet.

That convention trips up nearly every beginner, because it means a "32mm" mini is not 32mm tall. It's also loosely applied: many ranges labeled 28mm are, in practice, closer to 32mm or larger. If you're sculpting a figure to stand next to models you already own, measure one of yours to the eyeline and match that, rather than trusting the label on the box.

The other term you'll meet is heroic scale — the deliberately exaggerated proportions most wargame ranges use. Hands run roughly 1.5x realistic size, heads around 1.3x, with chunky weapons and thick boots. This isn't sloppy anatomy; it's a response to physics. At 32mm, realistically-proportioned fingers and sword blades are too fine to print reliably, too fragile to survive a game night, and too small to take paint. Exaggeration is what makes a mini readable at arm's length.

So: sculpt heroic if the figure is going on a table next to other wargame models, and sculpt realistic if it's a display piece or bust where size isn't fighting you.

Sculpting units themselves are arbitrary. Work at whatever scale feels good on screen — most people sculpt "large" and think in proportions rather than millimeters — and set the actual physical height when you import to the slicer. The one thing worth doing early is establishing a height reference: a simple box or cylinder in the scene at your intended proportions, so the figure's silhouette stays honest as you work.

Sculpting a mini that actually prints

This is the part that separates a good render from a good model. A miniature has to survive being a physical object, and that imposes rules a screen never will.

Build it as one connected mass

Printers deal in closed volumes. A figure that reads as a single connected body — arms touching the torso or joined at the shoulder, cloak meeting the back, weapon connected to the hand — slices far more cleanly than a cloud of intersecting shells floating near each other. Re:Form's Free plan includes every tool for this: all brushes, sculpt layers, masking, symmetry, and one-click remeshing, with nothing paywalled.

Symmetry is worth turning on for the blockout phase specifically. Get a symmetrical body and armor established, then turn it off and break symmetry in the details — a tilted head, an asymmetric cloak sweep, one pauldron more battered than the other. Perfectly symmetrical minis look like mannequins.

Respect the thin-feature floor

Every physical process has a minimum feature size, and it's coarser than what you can sculpt. A cape edge, a spear shaft, a wisp of hair, a trailing ribbon — anything that reads as delicate on screen may be too thin to form, or too brittle to handle, at 32mm.

The working rule: if a feature would be thinner than a toothpick at final print scale, either thicken it or brace it against the body. Thicken sword blades. Let capes touch shoulders. Run banner poles along an arm rather than out into open air. This feels like a compromise until you've snapped a spear off a freshly-printed model, at which point it starts feeling like craft.

Carve deeper than looks right

Minis get primed, base-coated, washed, and drybrushed. Every one of those layers fills detail in slightly, and paint is the great flattener of subtle work. Panel lines, cloth folds, chainmail, and the recesses between armor plates all need to be cut deeper and read bolder than they would on a render — a wash needs somewhere to pool, and a drybrush needs an edge to catch.

The heuristic that saves the most rework: zoom out constantly. If a detail doesn't read at the size the model will actually be viewed — arm's length, on a table, under mediocre lighting — it isn't doing any work, and the printer probably can't resolve it anyway.

Give it a base

Sculpt the mini with the feet meeting a simple base disc, or plan for a separate one. A figure balanced on two ankle-width contact points is a figure that will topple, and a base gives you a flat surface the slicer can orient against.

How many triangles does a miniature need?

Fewer than you'd expect. As of July 2026, current MSLA resin printers resolve roughly 18–22 micron XY pixels, and most miniature printing runs at 30–50 micron layer heights — a physical floor far coarser than what a sculpting app can hold. A few million triangles already carries more surface detail than a 32mm figure can physically reproduce.

Re:Form's Free plan supports up to roughly 12.5 million triangles. For miniatures, that is not a constraint you will meaningfully hit — it's several times more density than a 32mm mini can express in cured resin. Pro's 50-million budget (4x Free) exists for large busts, statues, and extremely dense detail work, not routine tabletop figures.

FDM printers sit further down the same ladder. An FDM machine draws each layer as extruded lines of plastic, so nozzle width and layer height set the smallest feature it can form. Fine skin texture and hair-level detail largely vanish at miniature scale on FDM — which is exactly why mini painters gravitate to resin.

Spend your triangle budget where it pays: sharp edges, deep creases, faces, and focal details need density; broad smooth surfaces and the underside of a cloak don't. Remeshing redistributes density when one region gets heavy and another goes sparse.

One honest note on the cap: hitting the Free limit only stops further subdivision. Every tool keeps working on the mesh you have, and nothing is lost. For minis, you'll finish the sculpt long before the ceiling is in view.

Export and slice

When the sculpt is done, export a mesh and hand off to your slicer.

Re:Form exports OBJ on every plan, including Free. Pro adds STL, GLB, and FBX in both directions. For miniatures, OBJ and STL are the two that matter — GLB and FBX earn their keep in game engines and renderers, not slicers. If you want the full breakdown of what each format carries, we wrote one: OBJ vs STL vs GLB vs FBX.

STL is the format the printing world defaults to, and some communities and print services ask for it specifically. But the major slicers all accept OBJ, so a free user can sculpt and print without converting anything. Save your master as a local .clay file — it snapshots everything, layers included — and treat exports as disposable handoffs.

From the slicer, it's a standard resin workflow:

  1. Set the real height. This is where your figure becomes 32mm to the eyeline instead of 32 meters.
  2. Orient it. Most mini printers tilt the figure and print at an angle, keeping supports off the face and front-facing detail.
  3. Support it. Let the slicer auto-generate, then manually clear supports off the face, chest, and anywhere else you'll be looking.
  4. Hollow it — maybe. Common guidance for chunky resin pieces is 1.5–3mm walls with two or more drain holes of 2–3mm, at least one near the top. For a single 32mm mini, hollowing saves little resin and is often skipped entirely; it earns its keep on busts and larger figures.
  5. Preview the layers. Your last quality gate. If a thin detail disappears in the slicer preview, it will disappear on the printer.

Sculpts kept as a connected solid mass rarely need mesh repair. If the slicer does flag errors, its built-in fix usually handles them.

Can you sell miniatures you sculpt?

Only original designs, and only on a paid plan. Re:Form's Free plan is licensed for personal, non-commercial use; Pro at $9.99/month or $99/year adds a commercial license alongside STL/GLB/FBX and the 50-million-triangle budget. Separately, and more importantly: the subject matter has to be yours.

This second part is where miniature sculptors get into real trouble, and it has nothing to do with what software you used. Games Workshop's published intellectual property guidelines (as of July 2026) state that fan content may not be sold or monetized, and the company treats recasting, scanning, and 3D-printed reproductions of its models as infringement. It has enforced this — DMCA takedowns against model-sharing sites in 2021, and litigation against sellers of converted Warhammer-derived files.

The line, in practice: generic fantasy and sci-fi designs are yours; recognizable copies of someone else's models and trademarked names are not. Sculpt a heavily-armored space soldier and sell it freely. Sculpt a Space Marine, name it a Space Marine, and you're a defendant. That distinction is legal reality, not our house style — and if you're building a commercial line, it's worth a conversation with an actual lawyer rather than a blog post.

For personal use — printing your own D&D party, a warband for a home campaign, terrain for your own table — none of this applies to the subject matter, and the Free plan covers you.

Where Re:Form fits, honestly

Re:Form is alpha software (v0.6.4) and a young app. ZBrush remains the industry standard for commercial miniature sculpting, with over two decades of tooling depth; Blender is free, mature, and has a complete pipeline around its sculpt mode. Both are more capable than we are today, and if you're producing a commercial mini line for a living, they're the safer tools. We say that plainly — you can read our fuller take in Re:Form vs ZBrush and Re:Form vs Blender.

What Re:Form offers is a much shorter path to the first mini. There's no install, no GPU-driver saga, no multi-gigabyte download, no hunting for the free tier's asterisk. You open a tab, sign in, and start pushing clay with the entire toolset available. For a hobbyist who wants a warband printed by next weekend rather than a new profession, that trade is usually the right one.

FAQ

Should I sculpt at 28mm or 32mm?

Match whatever you already own rather than trusting labels. Both numbers conventionally measure to the figure's eyeline, so a 32mm mini stands roughly 35–38mm to the top of the head. Ranges labeled 28mm are frequently closer to 32mm in practice. Measure an existing model to its eyeline and sculpt to match — scale only becomes real in the slicer anyway.

Do I need Pro to print miniatures?

No. Re:Form's Free plan includes every brush and tool, roughly 12.5 million triangles, and OBJ export, which the major slicers accept — a complete pipeline for printing minis for yourself. Pro ($9.99/month or $99/year) adds STL export, GLB and FBX, the 50-million-triangle budget, and the commercial license you need if you intend to sell prints.

Can I sculpt minis on a laptop?

If it runs a WebGPU browser, likely yes. Miniatures are among the friendliest sculpting projects for modest hardware, because a 32mm figure needs far fewer triangles than a hero-render bust — the printer can't resolve the difference anyway. Re:Form is desktop-only, so no tablets. Our guide to sculpting on a low-end PC covers what to expect from weaker GPUs.