How long does a 28 mm miniature take to print?

For a 28 mm figure on a 20 mm square base, printed through a 0.25 mm nozzle at 50 mm/s:

Only 3,215 mm³ of plastic is involved. This is entirely a resolution decision.

Why miniatures are slow for their size

Flow, and there is no way around it. At 0.1 mm layers with a 0.25 mm nozzle's 0.28 mm lines, the requested flow is 1.4 mm³/s — a tenth of what a functional part runs at. The hotend's ceiling is irrelevant here; the geometry itself refuses to accept plastic faster.

Speed does not rescue it either. A miniature is all small features and direction changes, so acceleration limits keep the head well below its commanded speed on most of the toolpath. The nominal 50 mm/s is optimistic before the model is even sliced.

The nozzle is the real decision

Dropping to a 0.2 mm nozzle buys marginally finer detail and a great deal more time, plus a clog risk on anything with the slightest filler in it. Most people printing figures settle at 0.25 mm, which is where the detail-per-hour curve peaks.

Going the other way and using a standard 0.4 mm nozzle at 0.2 mm layers gets the figure printed in 21 minutes, and the result is unmistakably a 0.4 mm print — faces, folds and weapon edges all lose definition. That is a fine trade for terrain and a poor one for a character model.

Batching changes the arithmetic completely

The layer count is fixed by the tallest figure on the plate. Print eight miniatures of similar height together and they share those 280 layers, so eight take a little over an hour rather than seven.

For anyone printing an army, this is the whole technique — and it is why the tallest model in a batch, not the average, sets the schedule.

Feed a base area and a figure height into the print time estimator to time your own model, and read what the small orifice costs you in the 0.25 mm nozzle reference.