Tips for printing small robed miniatures that actually worked for me

Been printing a whole warband of these grumpy little guys for my brother's birthday and I had almost the opposite problem with the face. Mine was coming out fine on the details but the hat brims were tearing off mid-print and taking chunks of the head with them. Turns out I had the model tilted too steep, something like 20 degrees, and the weight of that big headdress was just too much for the supports at that angle. Dropped it back closer to 12 and the failures stopped completly.

I do all my support placement in the slicer manually too, but I've found the little contact points on the robe folds actually help me rather than hurt me. I put them on the deep folds between wrinkles where a small dimple disappears when the paint goes on anyway. The face and the hands stay completely bare though, learned that the hard way on an earlier frog shaman where I spent a whole evening with a hobby knife fixing a gouged cheek. On the curing side, I stopped using my wash and cure station's default timer entirely. Now I swish them in IPA for a couple of minutes by hand, pull them off the plate while they're still a bit soft, snip the tips, and finish curing on a turntable under a small UV flashlight so I can see exactly when the surface goes matte. Wrinkle lines on toad chins are the whole point of these sculpts, so I'd rather babysit the cure than lose them.

I've only tried one of these little toad guys so far and his feet just snapped off when I pried him off the printing plate. Now I'm wondering if I left him on there too long or if the bottom layers were too thin. Do you all print a bunch of them at once or one at a time? I keep picturing them sticking togehter if I crowd the plate.

With the second poster on the babysitting-the-cure thing, that's been the whole difference for me too. One extra thing that helped was using a soft toothbrush during the IPA swish, just gently going over the robe folds and chin while it's still on the supports. Pooled resin loves to sit in those wrinkle grooves and then it bakes into a shiny film that blurs the lines. Thirty seconds of brushing and my last toad kept every frown. Also prints fine in small batches of four or five as long as you keep them spaced apart.

Funny reading this, took me right back to doing similar figures on my old machine ten years back when we had to balance everything on guesswork supports and hope. One trick from those days I still use on chunky-hatted sculpts: sink the model a hair into the virtual plate so the very bottom of the robe hem fuses flat, then trim it flush with a fresh blade. Kills the weakest support contact before it exists. Takes a bit of repositioning in the slicer but I haven't lost a hem since. Anyone else still do that flattening trick, or has newer software made it pointless?