u/Electronic_Resort985

Spent the last month dialing in a workflow for printing AI generated miniatures on my Saturn 3. Figured I'd share what works and what doesn't since I wasted a lot of resin figuring this out.

Generate the model in Meshy. I use image to 3D mostly because I can control the pose better by uploading concept art. Text prompts give me random poses that usually don't work for tabletop.

First thing in Blender is check for non-manifold edges. There's always some. Select all, mesh cleanup, make manifold. Then check wall thickness, anything under 1mm gets thickened or it'll break during printing or post cure.

Weapons are the worst offender. Swords, staffs, spears all come out way too thin. I usually just delete them and kitbash replacements from free STL weapon packs. Faster than trying to fix them.

Scale to 32mm in Chitubox, add supports manually. Auto supports miss overhangs on AI models constantly because the geometry is irregular. Manual supports take longer but save failed prints.

Print settings: 2.5s exposure, 0.03mm layer height for detail. Standard grey Elegoo resin.

Success rate after dialing this in is about 80%. The 20% failures are usually models with too many thin floating bits that I missed during cleanup.

Total time per mini from generation to printed: about 45 min of active work plus print time. Not counting the learning curve which was painful.

Worth it for custom campaign minis. Not worth it if you just want generic fantasy stuff, there's better STL packs for that.

When I first got into crypto last year I only had like 300 dollars, figured it's not that much so even if I lose it whatever. And that exact mindset is why I lost it so fast.

Just because 300 isn't a lot doesn't mean you can mess around with it, actually it's the opposite, when you don't have much you really can't afford to be careless. I was just scrolling twitter and buying whatever people were hyping up, this one pumped 50% so I jumped in, that community said something was about to take off so I followed, and within a month my 300 turned into less than 80.

After that I realized the problem was I had zero plan, just buying whatever I saw, basically gambling.

So I started putting most of it into BTC and ETH, and only using a small part on altcoins I actually spent time researching, and I completely stopped touching meme coins. Sounds boring right, but I actually stopped losing money.

Another thing I never thought about before was picking the right platform. When your money is small the fees really add up, you get hit a few times and you can feel the difference. From my experience if you're just holding long term, coinbase and kraken are totally fine, they're safe and easy, doesn't matter if the fees are a bit high since you're not trading much anyway. But if you wanna do short term trades or you're buying and selling a lot, you might wanna look at ones with lower fees like bydfi or binance, when your capital is small that difference actually matters. Also no matter what platform you use don't keep everything in one place, get a cold wallet and put your main bag in there, it's definitely worth doing.

For real though if you've got a few hundred bucks and you're thinking about jumping in, the most important thing isn't what coin to buy, it's don't rush into buying anything. Spend a week or two figuring out what you're actually doing, that's way better than jumping in and paying tuition like I did. My 300 dollar lesson really just comes down to something that simple.