Miniature Scale & Sizing

 

 MINIATURE SIZES & THE PROBLEM

Brief history overview – Companies have been slowly scaling up miniatures, especially with the implementation of heroic minis. A miniature labeled as 28mm from a decade ago is undoubtedly much smaller than today’s 28mm miniatures for many miniature companies. Many miniature companies have miniatures that are labeled as 28mm, but are in reality much closer to 32mm in size and scale, if not even larger. There’s really no single hard number or formula that miniature companies use when sizing or labeling their miniatures due to how they scale and sculpt each miniature in each of their different miniature lines. Some may measure from feet to the top of the miniature, others may not account for the pose of the minis, etc. The consistency that size labels are supposed to give are ironically, always slowly changing – generally by increasing the size of miniatures without increasing the size label. Heroic miniatures can throw the scaling and size labeling of miniatures off due to their exaggerated features and proportions which is where a lot of the size variations come in. With that being said, krakenships miniatures adhere to the size and scaling of most popular miniature companies that focus on minis for tabletop fantasy role-playing games and will work perfectly with the standard 1×1 inch grid.

 

KRAKENSHIPS & MINIATURE SIZES

To help with potential confusion, here’s the terminology used for size and scale explanations:

Scale = The miniature’s size relative to actual height of what it’s representing. Think shrink-ray. (Examples – 1:58 and 1:64)

Size = The label given by the company to denote the miniature’s size. Think attempts to standardize similar sizes across different miniature companies and lines. (Examples – 25mm and 28mm)

Our miniatures are created and measured using the scale method. We have two miniature sizes here at krakenships, 25mm and 28mm. Our 25mm are true scale while our 28mm are heroic scale – true scale miniatures are proportionally correct in size and shape unlike heroic scale miniatures, which have exaggerated features in order to show more detail and allow for an easier time when painting. These sizes are determined by the height from the sole of the miniature’s feet to their eyeline, after correcting for their posture or pose.

 

KRAKENSHIPS MINIATURE SCALE - RELATIVE SIZING

Here at krakenships, we determine our miniature sizes based on the real-life height of the creature the miniature represents. This relative sizing method allows us to keep the heights of different fantasy species relative to other fantasy species. An example of this would be a shorter Gnome, around 3ft tall, would be about half the size of a Human, who is 6ft tall - this would also translate into the miniature figure’s actual sizes as miniatures! How do we do this? Buckle up for some math, folks, because here’s where it gets complicated!

  • We first determine the overall height of the creature. For example, the average height of a human male in the US is 5’9′′.

  • Next, we determine the height of the creature’s eye line. We prefer to use this measurement because it is cleaner than the straight height, as it circumvents any crazy hats or headgear. In humans, this is about 4 or 5 inches from the top of the head. For larger and smaller species, we compensate. For the human male example we used above, we would subtract 5 inches, giving us an eye line of 5’4”.

  • We then convert that height into millimeters. 5’4′′ is equal to 1625.6mm(thanks Google Unit Converter!).

  • Now we determine the scale to which we want our miniature to be miniaturized. We commonly use a scale of 1:58—meaning every 1mm of the miniature’s height is equal to 58mm of the actual creature’s real-world height.

  • Back to the math! Determine the eye line height of the miniatures by dividing the eye line height of the creature (in millimeters) by the scale. Using our example from before: 1625.6mm divided by 58 is 28. So the eye line of the miniature would be about 28mm from the soles of their feet—hence the 28mm size label!

This is the same method we use for our 25mm minis, but the scale for those is 1:64.

Now, during the modeling phase of our miniatures, the exact heights may vary slightly due to both the miniatures stance/pose along with some of the exaggerations that come with the heroic sizing method (larger features for easier painting).

Note: Keep in mind that the 25mm and 28mm miniatures are obviously different in size, but also the true vs heroic scale can make the two look monstrously different in size due to the different proportions.

 

DETERMINE YOUR MINIATURES SCALES USING KRAKENSHIPS METHOD

You can determine the scale of other miniatures using the method from above with a bit of reverse engineering! Keep in mind that other companies may size their miniatures differently, but this may help you determine if krakenships minis will work well with your existing miniature collection!

It may also just be easier to reference the images of each miniature next to a ruler for exact heights and sizes, found at each miniature’s shop page under the Description drop-down tab.

Take 304.8 (that’s how many millimeters are in a foot) and multiply this by the actual height of the miniature in feet – Is the miniature’s actual height supposed to be a 3ft tall halfling or a 5ft 9in (5.75ft) human? Use Google Unit Converter to get decimals from inches to feet, if needed. Lastly, take that number and divide by the miniature’s size (25mm, 28mm, etc) and round. Slap a “1:” in front of the number and you have the scale! There’s obviously some guesswork with this method when determining the actual height representation of the miniature, but if you have some time to burn, you can most likely narrow it down after a few number crunching sessions and get both the scale of the miniature and the actual height of which the miniature represents. We like to assume that most human miniatures are all representing 6ft tall figures.