3D Printable Wargaming Terrain: Designing Modular Buildings
A practical guide to making your own 3D printable wargaming scenery — modular buildings for Warhammer, Kill Team and D&D tables — and exporting them as print-ready STL files.
Why modular buildings work best
Terrain that splits into floors, roofs and detail parts prints faster, fits smaller build plates and lets you rebuild the same kit as a different ruin, shop or tenement each game. Separate floors also mean models can be placed inside a building rather than perched on a sealed block, which matters for line-of-sight and objective play.
In UKSTLSTUDIO every building is generated as stackable modules: ground floor, repeated upper floors, a roof, and optional details such as awnings, signage, fire escapes and rooftop HVAC units.
Pick the right scale before you export
Models are authored at native 28mm (1:56). The exporter applies the scale multiplier for you, so you never need to work out percentages by hand.
| Scale | Typical use | Export setting |
|---|---|---|
| 28mm / 1:56 | Warhammer 40,000, Kill Team, most D&D minis | Native — export at 100% |
| 32mm | Heroic-scale skirmish minis | 32mm preset |
| 15mm / 20mm | Historical and mass-battle games | 15mm or 20mm preset |
| OO (1:76) / HO (1:87) | Model railway scenery doubling as terrain | OO or HO preset |
| N (1:148) / 10mm / 6mm | Epic-scale and small-footprint tables | N, 10mm or 6mm preset |
Building a piece of terrain step by step
- Choose a theme and a building type — apartment, tenement, bodega, shopfront, row house or department store.
- Set the floor count. Two or three floors give a useful line-of-sight blocker without dominating the table.
- Choose windows and doors, and switch on open windows if you want firing positions and interior visibility.
- Pick a roof: flat, parapet, friezes or a sloped metal roof. Flat roofs double as a fighting platform.
- Add details — awnings, billboards, signage, rooftop HVAC — and custom sign text for shopfronts.
- Export. Choose your scale, then Single STL for one solid piece or separate files for modular printing.
Printing tips for tabletop scenery
- Print walls vertically for clean window frames and fewer supports.
- Exports are trimmed flat at the base so parts sit square on the plate with no elephant-foot gap between floors.
- Some slicers report a non-manifold warning on detailed parts; it does not stop the model printing correctly.
- 0.2mm layers are plenty for FDM terrain — brick and trim detail reads fine at arm's length on a table.
- Print detail parts such as signage and HVAC separately so you can paint them off the model.
D&D and dungeon tables
For roleplay tables the same modular approach works: keep the ground floor open with a wide door, print two upper floors, and leave the roof removable so you can reach minis inside. Row houses and tenements butt together into a continuous street block, which gives you a whole town from one printed kit.
Start designing
Open the studio, pick a building and export modular wargaming buildings at your scale.
Open UKSTLSTUDIO