Lychee Slicer Guide for Beginners

The first time you open Lychee Free, the interface feels busier than it needs to be. There are five menus, three side panels, a dozen buttons in the top bar, and most beginners click the auto-support button and slice and hope for the best. Eighty percent of the time that approach produces a printable file. The other twenty percent it produces a plate full of supports with nothing attached to them.

This guide walks the workflow that produces a printable file in twenty minutes, in the order Lychee actually wants the steps done.

Why Lychee Free is the recommended starting point

If you have not read the slicer comparison article, the short version is this: Lychee Free is the better starting point for miniature work because it was designed with small-scale, detail-heavy models in mind. The defaults are sensible. The resin profile library is broad and actively maintained. The auto-support algorithm produces results that work for most rank-and-file infantry without any manual adjustment.

The friction points are real. There is a per-hour export limit on the free tier, and community-sourced resin profiles require manual entry rather than one-click import. Neither of these matters on your first few sessions. Both are covered later in this guide.

If the resin 3D printing for miniatures cornerstone is where you want to start before getting into the slicer specifically, read that first and come back here when you are ready to slice your first model.

Installation and first launch

Download Lychee from the official Lychee Slicer website. Do not link a third-party mirror or a bundled version from a printer manufacturer; the official site is the only source worth trusting for version currency.

On first launch, Lychee prompts for a printer profile. Pick the closest match to the machine you own. If the exact model is not in the list, pick the parent generation. For example: if “Mars 4 Ultra” is not listed, select “Elegoo Mars 4” and then override the build volume manually in the printer settings panel. The build volume dimensions are in your printer manual or on the manufacturer’s product page. Getting this right matters because Lychee uses the build volume to validate whether your plate layout fits before it will let you export.

The five-step workflow

Everything else in this guide is the detail of five steps:

Import → Orient → Support → Arrange → Slice

Follow them in that order every time. Skipping steps or doing them out of order is the most common reason a beginner session ends in a failed plate.

Step 1: Import

File menu → Import. Lychee accepts STL, OBJ, and 3MF files. After import, the model lands in the centre of the build plate.

If you are importing a multi-part model where the parts share a common origin (a multi-piece figure from a Patreon creator where the body, arms, and base are separate files), import all parts at once rather than one at a time. When you import them together, Lychee groups them and keeps their relative positions intact. Import them separately and you will spend time repositioning pieces that were already aligned in the source files.

The model will almost certainly be too large, too small, or rotated wrong after import. That is what the next step is for.

Step 2: Orient

The orient panel lives on the left side of the interface. Orientation is the single decision that most affects how many supports the model needs, how clean the surface finish is, and how likely the print is to succeed.

Three starting points depending on the model type:

For a hero miniature with a clear front face, use the rotate control in the orient panel and tilt the model to roughly 45 degrees. The angled orientation spreads the layer-by-layer cross-sections out over more print time, reduces suction cup effects during peeling, and puts the largest surface areas at angles where supports are less intrusive on the finished model.

For a flat object like a shield, base insert, or coin, leave it horizontal. Horizontal flat objects print cleanly without supports and this is the one case where tilting is wrong.

For a tall thin model such as a banner pole or staff, use the auto-orient button in the orient panel and accept the result. Lychee’s auto-orient algorithm handles tall thin geometry well and will usually find a better angle than manual rotation.

For a more detailed treatment of orientation decisions by model type, the resin print orientation guide for miniatures covers the full range of cases.

Step 3: Support

Two paths exist here, and the right choice is obvious once you know which type of file you have.

Pre-supported files: if the STL came pre-supported from a creator (Patreon, MyMiniFactory premium content), skip this step entirely. The creator has placed the supports already. Adding auto-supports on top of pre-supported geometry produces a mess and usually makes the print worse, not better.

Unsupported files: click the auto-support button. If Lychee offers a preset dropdown, pick the “miniatures” preset. If no miniatures preset exists, the default setting is a reasonable starting point for most 28 mm and 32 mm scale work.

After auto-supports run, look at the result. If the support tips appear very thin relative to the model detail, consider increasing the tip diameter in the support settings panel. Lychee defaults can be slightly thin for character models with fine geometry, and a broken support mid-print causes the attached section to fail. The support settings for resin miniatures guide covers tip diameter and density settings in detail.

Step 4: Arrange

Drag the model to the centre of the build plate. The centre of the plate receives the most consistent UV light from the printer’s LCD or projector panel. Models pushed into corners print with slightly less light uniformity, which can affect exposure accuracy on very fine detail.

The auto-arrange button in the toolbar places models automatically. It is a useful starting point when you have multiple models on the plate, but it has a habit of placing models too close to the plate corners. After using auto-arrange, move any corner-placed models inward by a few millimetres manually.

For guidance on filling a plate efficiently when you are printing a batch of infantry, the build plate arrangement guide covers spacing, orientation mixing, and the overlap-prevention settings in detail.

Step 5: Slice

The slice button is in the top right of the interface. Click it.

Lychee renders a per-layer preview once slicing is complete. Scrub through the preview from the first layer to the last. You are looking for two things:

First, any layer where a section of the model appears to be floating: not connected to anything from the previous layer and not attached to a support. A floating section will either not print at all or will detach and ruin the plate.

Second, any obvious support gaps: a section of the model at a layer where it extends outward beyond the support coverage below it. These are harder to spot in the layer preview than in the support view, which is why the support step comes earlier. If you see a gap, go back and add a manual support there before slicing again.

Once the preview looks clean, save the sliced file in the format your printer expects. The format depends on the printer: .ctb and .cbt for most Chitu-based printers, .goo for Elegoo Saturn and Mars 4 Ultra series. Lychee selects the correct format based on the printer profile you set up at first launch. Save to USB or send to the printer directly via WiFi if your printer supports it.

The two settings worth changing on day one

Lychee’s defaults are sensible for general resin work. For miniature work specifically, two settings are worth overriding early.

Layer height. Lychee defaults to 50 microns. For miniature-scale work with fine surface detail, change this to 30 to 40 microns. The thinner layer height captures more surface detail and produces a smoother finish. The trade-off is longer print time: a 35-micron layer height adds roughly 40 percent to print duration compared to 50 microns. Start at 35 microns, print your first few plates, and then decide whether the detail improvement is worth the extra time for your specific models. Most miniature painters find it is.

Anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing smooths the layer transitions at the model’s edges and removes the visible stair-step effect on curved surfaces. Newer versions of Lychee have this enabled by default; older profiles or imported profiles sometimes do not. Check the print settings panel and verify it is on for character work. Anti-aliasing adds a small amount to slice processing time but costs nothing at the printer.

The two settings to leave alone for now

Two settings appear in the print profile and are worth explicitly ignoring until you are further along.

Lift speed. This controls how fast the build plate pulls away from the FEP film between each layer. It interacts with your specific resin’s viscosity, your printer’s motor characteristics, and the cross-section area of the layer being peeled. The default is safe for most resin-printer combinations. Changing it without understanding the interaction can cause suction failures on large cross-sections or slow the print to an unnecessary crawl on small ones.

Lift distance. This controls how far the plate lifts between layers. Again, the default is correct for most situations. Leave it until calibration is the explicit goal of a print session.

Both of these settings are in the calibration territory that the resin print orientation guide touches on when discussing peel forces. Leave them at their defaults, get a successful print first, and revisit.

The free tier export limit

Lychee Free limits the number of sliced files you can export per hour. The limit is typically four. For a normal hobbyist session where you slice one or two plates, you will not come close to the cap. For a batch session where you are slicing five or six plates back-to-back to fill a print queue for the week, you will hit it and have to wait for the window to reset.

The slicer comparison article covers the Lychee Pro tier and when upgrading is worth it. The short version: if you are hitting the export cap regularly, the Pro tier removes it and adds support editing tools that matter for complex hero models. If you are not hitting it, there is no urgency.

Where to go next

The workflow above produces a printable file. Making that file print reliably is a different question, and it depends on your resin profile, your exposure settings, and whether your calibration is dialled in for the resin you are running.

The resin 3D printing for miniatures cornerstone is the place to start if you want the end-to-end picture. The support settings for resin miniatures guide is where to go when auto-supports are failing on specific model types and you need to understand why. The resin print orientation guide for miniatures is the reference when orientation decisions stop being obvious and you need a framework for thinking through unusual geometry.

The slicer workflow takes twenty minutes to learn. The calibration work behind it is what produces consistent results.