Who Needs a TARDIS When You Have a 3D Printer?

As my recent posts will attest, I’ve been doing rather a lot of Star Trek 3D printing lately. However, Trek isn’t the only thing that has been keeping my printer busy.

While browsing MakerWorld, I came across a creator called JAV-3D, who has produced a huge selection of models based on various Doctor Who characters. Naturally, this immediately caught my attention.

I decided to take a gamble and downloaded the files for the Thirteenth Doctor and her "fam". Although I already had a Thirteenth Doctor miniature, I’d never managed to find suitable miniatures for her companions, so this looked like a good opportunity to finally put the whole team together.

There was, of course, a slight problem.

Much like the Star Trek models I’ve been experimenting with, these weren’t designed with tabletop gaming in mind. They are primarily display pieces, standing somewhere around 18 to 20 centimetres tall when printed at their intended size. Getting them to fit alongside the rest of my 28mm collection therefore meant some fairly dramatic downscaling.

Rather than simply applying the same percentage reduction to every model and hoping for the best, I wanted the figures to reflect the relative real-world heights of the actors as closely as possible. A little AI-assisted number crunching helped me work out the appropriate scale for each model and, more importantly, what size each one needed to be printed at to look convincing alongside my existing 28mm miniatures.

This was another good test of everything I’ve learned recently about printing miniatures on an FDM printer. Taking a model designed to stand nearly 20cm tall and shrinking it down to around 28mm inevitably means asking the printer to reproduce details at a fraction of their intended size. Faces, hands, clothing and other small features can very quickly disappear or become indistinct.

Despite that, I’m pretty pleased with the results.

All five figures took roughly a day to print, and while they’ll benefit from a little sanding and general cleaning up, I think they’ve come out remarkably well considering just how much the original models have been reduced. Once that small amount of post-processing is done, they should be ready for priming and, eventually, painting.

And, most importantly, I finally have the Thirteenth Doctor and her fam together in miniature form.

You can see how they turned out below.

The fam assembled! Back (L-R): Ryan, Graham and Dan. Front (L-R): The Thirteenth Doctor and Yaz.

The bases are 3D printed as well. Rather than use commercially available bases, I printed these myself, giving the figures a consistent look and making this an almost entirely home-produced little project.