I have continued in my efforts to make a good print of the sculpture inspired by the Cicero D'Avila pose in my previous post.
Firstly, I remade the arm pose, tipping the woman's head back to improve the angle of the face and prevent the arm support material from falling across it.
This smaller version was printed on a delta printer in red PLA and showed that the model was printable although the underside of the arms is still very ragged following removal of the support material. At this point I decided to change the arm position again, opting for a more vertical configuration that would hopefully avoid the need for any support material.
Once again I decided to shortcut the process of making the model printable by using Project Miller to re-skin the mesh. Unfortunately, the model still had some errors which resulted in malformed Gcode when I tried to slice it with Slic3r and Kisslicer. This time I found that the new version of Cura (I'm using 13.12) offered some very useful advanced options including Combine Everything (Type B) under the Expert settings. The Gcode looked very good in Repetier Host so I set off the 12 hour print and this time I finally managed to produce a model that does justice to the sculpture I had planned. Here's a timelapse video made inside the printer using Octoprint.
Some detail shots taken before the smoothing process.
And after smoothing in acetone vapour to remove the print lines and support blemishes.
At last, I feel inspired to start work on a new piece. I've continued to collect photos of interesting nude poses on my Pinterest page and recently found a couple of pictures that I think might work well together.
The first piece is a marble sculpture by Cicero D'Avila. The torso and legs will prove an interesting challenge to reproduce, but the hands are not ideally placed for 3D printing because of the way the fingers are pointing down.
The second picture was a recent find which I think I can use to create the arm pose for my new design. I couldn't find information about the photographer - if you know, please pass the details on and I'll credit them.
Creating the pose wasn't too difficult and took me only a couple of hours. Project Miller is a fantastic new tool in my toolkit which hugely simplifies the process of making a 3D object printable. It can automatically wrap the model in a single manifold mesh which eliminates all of the problems with hair, eyes, teeth and folded limbs, at a single stroke.
I then took the raw model into Blender and began the process of sculpting in some additional details in the hair.
The next step was to find the best way of slicing and supporting the model ready for 3D printing. this time I decided to give Cura a try. Cura is an extremely fast slicer written by David Braam of Ultimaker. When I'm evaluating a sliced model that needs support, I look for the right amount of support material with an adequate gap between the support and the model so that it will break away with the minimum of effort. My first attempt at printing this model, which I have named Cicero for convenience, used a light grey PLA and took over 8 hours to print. The lower half started well but sadly the head and arms are not as smooth and seem covered in a regular indentation. The pose looks great though and is definitely one I would consider using again.
