40mm Scale Miniatures: What That Number Actually Means

40mm is one of the more confusing numbers in this hobby. It looks precise, it sits in the middle of a range everyone quotes, and almost nobody agrees on what it measures. If you have arrived here trying to work out whether a 40mm figure is big or small, whether it will match the miniatures you already own, or whether it is the right size to paint, this guide answers those questions directly.

It also answers a question a lot of scale guides quietly dodge, which is what the shop writing the guide actually sells. Remerlinds makes unpainted resin figure kits, printed to order in the Netherlands, and the range is built around display scales rather than gaming scales. There is a section below that says plainly where 40mm sits relative to what is on the shelf here, and what the closest honest alternatives are. If you came looking for a 40mm gaming army, you will want to know that before you read three thousand words.

What the Number 40mm Measures

A millimetre scale is not a ratio. It is a manufacturing convention, and it describes a length on the finished figure rather than a relationship to the real world.

The length in question is usually the height of a standing adult human figure. That much is agreed. What is not agreed is where you stop measuring. Some makers measure from the soles of the feet to the eyes, on the reasoning that head sizes and helmets vary and eye level is the stable reference. Others measure to the top of the head. A few measure to the top of whatever the figure is wearing, which is how you end up with a plumed helmet counted as scale. Almost everyone excludes the base, but not quite everyone.

The practical result is that two figures both sold as 40mm can differ by several millimetres in overall height, and the difference is not a defect. It is two houses using two rulers.

Key takeaways:

• 40mm describes a height on the figure, not a ratio to a real person.
• Foot to eye and foot to top of head are both in use, so expect variance between makers.
• Bases are normally excluded from the number and normally add 3 to 6mm.

Where 40mm Sits Against Everything Else

The useful way to place 40mm is to convert every scale to a common reference. The table below assumes an adult human of 1.8 metres, which is the standard convenience figure, and rounds to the nearest whole ratio. Treat the ratios as approximate by design, because the input is approximate by design.

Scale	Approximate ratio	An adult figure stands	Commonly used for
28mm	1/64	2.8 to 3.3 cm	The dominant tabletop wargaming size
32mm	1/56	3.2 to 3.8 cm	The other dominant tabletop size
35mm	1/51	3.5 to 4 cm	Skirmish games and boutique ranges
40mm	1/45	4 to 4.5 cm	Niche skirmish games, board game figures, traditional collecting
54mm	1/33	5.4 to 6 cm	The classic single figure painting scale
75mm	1/24	7.5 to 8.5 cm	Display figures and competition painting
90mm	1/20	9 to 10 cm	Large display figures
1/12	1/12	About 15 cm	The smallest common ratio scale for display kits
1/10	1/10	About 18 cm	The most common display kit scale

Read the bottom two rows carefully, because that is the sentence most 40mm guides never write. The smallest ratio scale in ordinary use for display kits, 1/12, produces a figure around 150mm tall. That is close to four times the height of a 40mm figure, and something like fifty times the volume. Millimetre scales and ratio scales are not two ways of describing the same shelf. They describe two different hobbies that happen to share a vocabulary.

Key takeaways:

• 40mm is larger than the 28mm and 32mm mainstream and smaller than the 54mm painting standard.
• It is an uncommon size, which means fewer ranges and fewer compatible accessories.
• A 40mm figure and a 1/12 figure are not neighbours. They are a factor of four apart.

Why Millimetre Scales and Ratio Scales Disagree

Convert 28mm to a ratio and you get about 1/64. Then measure an actual 28mm gaming figure and you will often find it stands 32 or 33mm to the top of the head, with hands the size of its face, boots like breeze blocks and a weapon thick enough to be structural.

This is deliberate. Gaming figures are made to be seen from a metre away under bad lighting, picked up by the torso a hundred times an evening, and cast or printed without snapping. Exaggerating the extremities is what makes a small figure readable and durable. The trade name for it is heroic scale, and it means the nominal millimetre number consistently understates how bulky the figure actually looks next to a true scale one.

Display kits pull the other way. A 1/10 figure is normally built to real human proportion, because at 180mm you can see everything and nothing needs exaggerating to survive handling. Chibi figures pull further still in the opposite direction, deliberately breaking proportion for style rather than for legibility.

So when you compare a 40mm gaming figure with a 40mm-tall portion of a display kit, they will not look like the same world even though a ruler says they match. The number matches. The design language does not.

What Remerlinds Actually Sells at This End of the Range

Here is the honest position. Remerlinds does not currently sell a 40mm range, and does not sell wargaming or tabletop armies. The catalogue is display figure kits, and the great majority of it is measured in ratios rather than millimetres, starting at 1/12 and going up.

Two kits in the catalogue are labelled in millimetres, and both are 75mm:

Kit	Scale	Sculptor	From
Aragorn	75mm	NomNom Figures	€24,99
Frodo Baggins	75mm	NomNom Figures	€22,99

75mm is not a gaming scale. It is the classic figure painter's scale, the size at which people enter painting competitions, and it is roughly twice the height of a 40mm figure. If what drew you to 40mm was the idea of a small figure you can finish in a few evenings without needing a magnifier, 75mm is arguably the better version of that wish, because everything you want to paint is actually visible.

The other route is by subject rather than by scale. The chibi range covers a lot of fantasy and tabletop subject matter at small sizes, and the finished heights land in the same neighbourhood as 75mm even though the proportions are stylised rather than realistic:

Kit	Approximate height	From
Beholder	7.4 cm	€18,99
Honey Bear	7.3 cm	€19,99
Themberchaud	9.1 cm	€22,99

A word of caution that matters more than it looks. None of these kits should be described as a 28mm or 32mm equivalent, and you will not see that claim anywhere on the site. A chibi is stylised, so its height tells you almost nothing about the scale of the character it represents. A 7.4 cm beholder is not a 7.4 cm human. Height and scale are different measurements, and conflating them is how people end up with a shelf that does not sit together.

If you want to browse rather than take a recommendation, the fantasy and tabletop kits collection is eight kits chosen by subject matter, and the chibi collection runs to 112 kits in the €15 to €35 range.

Key takeaways:

• There is no 40mm range here, and no tabletop army range.
• The only millimetre-labelled kits are two 75mm LotR sculpts.
• Chibi kits are small but stylised, so their height is not a scale claim.

Checking a Small Resin Kit Before You Buy

Most buying checklists for miniatures were written for cast metal or injection moulded plastic, and a good half of the advice does not transfer to a 3D printed resin kit. Here is what is actually worth checking.

• Part count and part size. The smaller the figure, the more a high part count works against you. Five parts on a 180mm figure is comfortable. Five parts on a 40mm figure means tweezers, magnification and patience. Check the product page and be honest with yourself about the assembly you want.
• Where the thin elements are. Spear shafts, bowstrings, trailing cloaks, individual fingers and antennae are the parts that make a small print fragile. That is geometry, not quality. A sculpt with the sword held close to the body will survive a house move better than one holding it out at arm's length.
• Stated height, not stated scale. If a listing gives you a finished height in centimetres, use that number. It is the one that has to fit your shelf.
• What surface work is already done. A printed kit's prep is not the same job as cleaning a casting, and how much of it is included varies. See the finish levels section below.
• The base situation. Some kits include a scenic base, some include a plain disc, some include nothing. A scenic base can add a centimetre or more to the finished height.

Support Marks, Not Mould Lines

This deserves its own section because the language causes real confusion.

A 3D printed part never touches a mould. There is no mould, so there is no mould line, no flash, no casting seam and no vent to clip. If a guide tells you to scrape the seam on a printed resin figure, it has been written from a metal miniatures template and not updated.

What a printed part does have is support marks. During printing the model is held to the build plate by a lattice of thin supports, and where those supports met the model there is a small witness mark, usually on undersides and rear surfaces where the printer's software was told to put them. They look like tiny raised dots or slight roughness. They sand out with a fine sanding stick in a couple of minutes, and on the smallest figures a fingernail file or a swipe with a fine grit sponge is often enough.

Every kit sold here leaves with its supports already removed, and the part washed and fully UV cured. What varies by finish level is how much of the mark-tidying is done for you.

Bases and Table Footprint

If you are buying a figure to game with, the base size is decided by the rules you play, not by the scale of the model. That is worth stating plainly, because a lot of scale guides hand out base diameters as if they were a property of the figure. They are a property of the game.

If you are buying a figure to display, the base is whatever the kit comes with or whatever you choose to mount it on, and the only number that matters is the total footprint on your shelf. For a figure in the 40 to 90mm range that is normally under 5 cm square, which means shelf depth is almost never the constraint. What constrains small figures on a shelf is being seen and staying clean, both of which are covered below.

Displaying Figures This Small

A small figure on a deep shelf disappears. The fixes are cheap and mostly about staging rather than about the figure.

• Bring it forward. Put small figures at the front edge of the shelf and larger pieces behind. A riser as simple as a stack of two coasters solves the back row problem.
• Light it from the front and slightly above. Small figures lose all their detail under a single overhead light, because everything you painted ends up in shadow under the brow and the chest.
• Group by theme, not by size. Three related small figures read as a set and hold attention. One small figure alone next to a 1/6 centrepiece reads as an accident.
• Give it a background. A plain card backing behind a small figure does more for it than any amount of extra shelf space.
• Keep it out of direct sunlight. UV is the one environmental factor that genuinely degrades cured resin and fades paint over time, and small parts have less material to lose.

The storage guide covers the longer term side, including what to do with kits you have not built yet.

What Actually Arrives

Every kit is printed to order, so nothing here is picked from a warehouse shelf. Before it is packed, each kit has its supports removed, is washed, is fully UV cured, is test fitted so the parts are known to go together, and is quality checked. Every part travels in its own bag.

Packing is cardboard boxes, bubble wrap and packing paper. There is no foam. The paper is 100% recycled, the boxes are FSC certified, and the bubble wrap is made from 100% recycled material. Fragile parts get extra protection, and delicate details such as hair strands or fingers are bagged separately, which matters a great deal more on small figures than on large ones. Larger orders may arrive as several smaller boxes inside one shipment.

In the box you get the kit itself, assembly instructions for anything multi part, a gift note if you asked for one, and a thank-you card.

The kits are cast in grey or beige resin, unpainted, printed at 16K resolution.

Finish Levels and How Long It Takes

Because everything is made to order, you choose how much of the preparation work is done before it ships. Three levels, and each one carries its own production window:

Level	What is done	Usually ships in
Bronze	DIY Ready. Supports removed, washed and cured, QC'd. You sand, fill and prime.	2 to 5 business days
Silver	Detail Ready. Bronze plus support marks sanded and visible holes filled.	4 to 8 business days
Gold	Paint Ready. Silver plus all gaps filled, primed in your colour.	6 to 14 business days

Those windows are production time. Transit is on top, and depends on where you are and which service you pick at checkout.

On a small figure the case for Silver is stronger than on a large one, simply because sanding a support mark off a 7 cm figure without softening a nearby detail takes a steadier hand than doing the same job on a 20 cm one. There is a fuller breakdown in the finish levels guide.

Painting at the Small End

Small figures are not harder to paint than large ones. They are less forgiving of the same mistakes, which is a different problem.

Thin your paint more than feels sensible, because a coat that is merely thick on a 180mm figure will fill a panel line on a 40mm one. Prime in a colour that does some of the work, since you will be applying fewer coats. Use a brush with a good point rather than a small brush, because a size 1 with a fine tip beats a size 000 that has gone splayed. Work in bigger blocks of colour than you think the figure needs, and let contrast rather than detail carry the result from viewing distance.

Mount the figure on a handle before you start. Painting a 7 cm figure held between finger and thumb is how thumbprints end up in the varnish. A wine cork and a blob of poster putty is the entire investment. The tools guide covers the rest of the kit.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is 40mm the same as 1/45?
Approximately, if you assume the figure represents a 1.8 metre adult and the measurement runs to the top of the head. It is a conversion, not an equivalence, and no manufacturer guarantees it.

Will 40mm figures fit with my 28mm collection?
They will look noticeably larger. Whether that reads as wrong depends on the subject. A 40mm figure among 28mm troops looks like an ogre or a hero, which some people use deliberately, but rank and file will not match.

Does Remerlinds sell 40mm miniatures?
No. The catalogue is display figure kits, mostly at ratio scales from 1/12 upwards, plus a chibi range. The only millimetre-labelled kits are the two 75mm Lord of the Rings sculpts listed above.

Do you sell wargaming armies?
Not currently. Everything is sold as single figure kits for painting and display.

Do I need to remove mould lines from a printed kit?
There are none, because there is no mould. You may find support marks on undersides, which sand out easily. Silver and Gold kits arrive with that already handled.

How small is too small to paint?
That depends on your eyes and your lighting far more than on the figure. Most people find the difficulty curve steepens below about 5 cm, and a magnifier lamp moves that line further down than any brush will.

Do the kits arrive painted?
No. Every kit ships unpainted. Gold arrives primed in a colour you choose, which is the closest thing to ready to paint, but the paint is yours to apply.

What is the smallest thing you sell?
The chibi range is the small end, with plenty of kits in the 6 to 9 cm bracket. Browse the chibi collection and sort by what fits your shelf.

What if a small part arrives broken?
Get in touch. Every kit is test fitted and inspected before packing, but transit is transit, and on a made to order kit a broken part is a reprint rather than a stock problem.

Where to Start

If you found this page because you are researching scales rather than shopping, the short version is that 40mm is a real but uncommon size, it sits above the tabletop mainstream and below the classic painting scales, and it does not map cleanly onto the ratio scales used for display kits.

If you found it because you want a small figure to paint, the two 75mm kits are the closest thing here in spirit, and the chibi range is the closest thing in price and finishing time. If you are working out how scale numbers relate to each other more generally, the guide to miniature scales goes further into the arithmetic, and the assembly and finishing guide picks up where this one stops.

The full catalogue is at remerlinds.com.