Thanks to my friend Daniel Kreuter I received a fairly high res 3D figurine model ready for printing.
Since I do want to get into this more eventually I wanted to give this a go to test the limits of my printer. The nice thing about this model which is great for printing is both the simplicity and the details included. She doesn’t have any super detailed clothing (you can hardly tell she’s wearing any), the shapes are simple and clean. However the smaller features such as the face, fingers and toes, come out very clearly. The best part is the hair is not overly complex and has almost no unsupported hanging parts. Unsupported hair is very common in most 3D modeled figures which make them undesirable for printing.
The biggest challenge here is printing a very complex shape that can’t support itself during printing. You can clearly see when you get to the ball she’s holding, there would be nothing for the printer to start building that on off of. As a result I have to add in a lot of support material, though this drastically reduces the surface quality. The only tweaking I did was to rotate the fingers so they were not hanging unsupported, but rather connected with her thigh and the ball. I also added a base since the model only stands on her toes and would have been very unbalanced without one.
The biggest issue with this print showed itself near the top of the legs, halfway through the thighs. It became apparent there was no horizontal support and the long tall thin features were vibrating like tuning forks whenever the print head was working on them, or worse when the nozzle caught the edge of print making it deflect almost 1cm. Eventually this broke the middle support piece and in my panic I tried holding it all together with my hands until it got to the crotch. However I soon realized that I had inadvertently been adding weight to the print bed. Since it’s only supported on one side it’s like a cantilever and deflects. This totally knocked the z-precision way off and it took me 20 minutes sitting there before I came to a solution that i didn’t have to hold up myself. I was very determined to see this print through since it was estimated to take 7 hours and I didn’t want to restart it. I’m actually pretty surprised it managed to finish at all.
Above: Figure test with support material, just as the print was completed.
Adding weights to the bed to offset the Z-layer height. Thank god I didn’t cash those coins in yet. Maybe I’ll keep the pennies after all since they make great weights in small units.
Quality of the upper body and head was so so, lots of room for improvement. The support material definitely takes it’s toll on surface quality. I can probably achieve a much better finish if I was going slower and did thinner layer heights.
The totally messed up area. So surprised it recovered itself. The hand on the right looks super creepy.
The legs up to the messed up point look very good though, the quality is pretty smooth and the detail in the toes is pretty good.
Oops. Looks like the only thing holding up the right section was the fingers, which broke while I was trying to remove the support material.
I learned a lot from this print. I now know to never, ever, eeeeeever touch a print while it’s printing. I also learned how to deal with misalignment in the Z-axis by adding a bit of weight to the bed to deflect it and give the nozzle a bit more room.
This also showed me that I need to consider horizontal support for tall unsupported structures. I definitely need to change my settings for support material from just ‘Line’ to ‘Grid’ so it’s sturdier.
If I get better software to slice this model, I will definitely attempt it again. If it turns out better than this, and remains unbroken, then I will look into post processing it as well.
Thanks again to Daniel Kreuter for the model, he does great 3D modelling so go check out his stuff on his site.