ScaleMini is live with a HUGE UPDATE: a free size comparison tool for the whole hobby 📏
Hey everyone!
Some of you have heard whispers about this in the Discord, and today it's official. We've spent the last few months building ScaleMini, a free web tool that answers the question every collector keeps asking: "what size is that mini actually?"
What it does:
🔹 Compare any miniatures side by side at true scale on a giant ruler, in mm, cm or inches
🔹 Set a reference model and instantly see the exact % to scale any other model up or down in your slicer
🔹 Measure your own minis from a photo, or import an STL/OBJ and read the exact height straight from the mesh (your file never leaves your browser)
🔹 Free accounts with a personal library: save your measured minis into folders, build lineups, and reopen them on any device
🔹 Submit to the public catalog: every approved mini is credited to you forever, with contributor badges and a public leaderboard
🎥 Full walkthrough video: [VIDEO LINK]
Everything above is free and stays free. There's an optional Premium tier ($4.95/mo) that only removes the storage caps, because hosting images costs real money. No features are locked behind it.
Why this matters for you as patrons: the full StationForge library is going onto the site, so you'll be able to check how any of our minis scale next to the rest of your collection before you print, and get exact print scaling percentages for proxies and conversions. Your support is what gives us the room to build things like this for the hobby, and it means a lot. 💙
The catalog is community built, so if you measure something we don't have yet, submit it and your name stays on it. And if there's a studio you'd love to see on the ruler, tell us in the comments.
One honest note: we tested everything as hard as we could, but with this many moving parts a few bugs will probably sneak through. If anything looks off, tell us here or in the Discord and we'll squash it fast.
Go measure something!
Comments (3)
This tool has a lot of potential, but there is one huge issue: scale is based on absolute height. This is not very useful since poses, weapons, armour etc. can make the same miniature measure drastically different heights. To address this, miniatures scale has always in the past been based on the height from the foot to the eye level. Naturally this means you can still really only easily compare figures that are standing more or less straight, but it makes it much easier to compare models in a range. I think for the tool to be genuinely useful it should be based on eye height of a reference model pose to establish a baseline *scale* (e.g. 28mm), and once established for one or more reference models, apply that scale to the entire range of minis from the same army or even artist. Now you might conclude that would not be too useful either since nearly everything is 28mm scale. But actually the problem that needs solving is that the variance between creators who claim to be 28mm scale is quite substantial. Figuring out the small differences in scale between miniatures ranges from different creators that claim to be 28mm is the real problem that needs solving, and to do that you need to be able to compare directly, and using eye-level scaling is an established standard of comparison. To add a little more nuance, mini ranges can also differ quite a lot in how exaggerated their proportions are - think "heroic" sculpts vs. realistic ones. In these cases, if you are mixing minis between ranges it may not be a simple case of scaling by height alone - you might get better results scaling x- and y-axis together, independently of z-axis. For a real-world example, 3D Breed has a range of models that were created to work in both 15mm and 28mm scales. In order to print successfully in 15mm the sculpts are thickly proportioned, and this is carried through to their 28mm versions, making them look quite "chunky" compared to minis in their more recent ranges which are better proportioned for 28mm. So typically I will scale the chunky models to 85% x and y, and 95% height. To some degree you can use your tool to scale by eye, but it would save so much time, trial and error to be able to set a reference scale for an entire range of minis to compare their measured scale to a standard reference scale (probably 28mm), and then allow you to pick the reference scale you want to convert to (e.g. 54mm, 32mm, 28mm, 15mm, 6mm) and get a % scale factor. If you do that, it will be a genuinely useful scaling tool for printers.
Blessed 🙏
Somehow I missed this whole thing until now, this is fantastic!