For anyone who might be reading and finding it useful, here’s what I settled on.
After a lot of testing and tweaking, I decided that some zits (at the sharp corners of some facial areas) were unavoidable on such a small model and with a 0.4 nozzle.
Not sure how this will show up, but I have attached a BEFORE and AFTER photo.
Before is the results I settled on. After is after removing the zits with a fingernail and tweezers.
I think this is the best I can really get on such a small item (2.5cm tall) and 0.1mm with the N2’s 0.4mm nozzle.
Here’s what ended up working for me with Raise3D PLA and an N2 printer:
* Bed temp to 60C (I had troubles with models popping off the bed at 40C, but the jury’s still out on this)
\* Retract speed change from 20mm/s -> 40mm/s
\* Retract Extra Restart -0.02mm (note the minus sign: -0.05mm works but it’s too much, you get really sparse infill. -0.1mm gets air prints.)
I printed 3 models on one big raft, chose the best looking one. Printing 3 models gives the tiny things time to cool more between nozzle passes, as another poster suggested.
I preheated the bed manually for 10 mins or so at 60C before firing up the print (otherwise the bed doesn’t have time to warm through - the heater is at target temp but the bed itself isn’t.)
I manually adjusted extrusion temperature up to 215C during the raft printing, dropped it back down to target 205C after raft was done. The raft uses a lot of plastic in constant flow, and at 205C or lower the extruder didn’t quite keep up.
I played a lot with extra fan, lower printing temperatures, different retract settings, etc. I never got any improvement I would consider super significant. The best and simplest results for me so far seem to be the above for printing this particular model.