Best supporting act

Now that I have a delta printer that can make taller prints, I decided to go back and revisit one of my earlier designs, Pensive.

This is a model of a nude woman standing upright in a thoughtful pose. The problem I had originally was that when I printed it small enough to fit in the printer, some of the small features like the fingers just wouldn't print. 

My previous solution was to print the model in two halves and weld her back together afterwards. One beneficial side effect of doing this was that I could make the cut at exactly the point where the tips of the elbows start in the upper half. Now that I was able print the full height of the model in one go I realised I was going to need a different strategy for supporting the arms. I also took the opportunity to change the hairstyle for something a little more voluminous and impressive.

 Without a support structure below the elbows, the extruded filament would simply fall to the bed when the nozzle reached that point.

One method would be to turn on the support feature in the slicing software but this rather crude method would result in a large amount of additional material being placed in many unnecessary areas.

Instead I decided to try the latest version of Meshmixer which allows individual pillars to be placed, manually or automatically, underneath the areas that need supporting.

I didn't like the positions of the automatically placed supports and so I opted to add my own scaffolding exactly where it was needed.

Here is a picture of an early test piece, 175 mm tall with a rather excessive amount of support material still in place.

Having proved that the method worked, I decided to go for a larger version 250 mm tall. This one worked even better. Printed in white PLA at 0.2 mm layer height taking 19 hours.

 I think that this method of support placement could be extremely useful in future and should make it  possible to print many other difficult poses.

Kayleigh

One of the most beautiful poses I've seen recently on Pinterest was this one.

It had been repinned many times, so clearly other people agreed with me, but wasn't being properly credited. I used Google image search to track down the original version and discovered that the model is Kayleigh Lush.

I used my favourite character modelling software to emulate the pose (not exactly right, but good enough to capture the spirit of the picture, I hope) and then exported an OBJ file. I then used Blender to correct the orientation and scale and to flatten the base and remove the eyelashes, before exporting an STL file.

Here is the screen capture of the 3D model in Blender.

This time I used Project Miller again to select the external surfaces of the model, then used Kisslicer to generate the gcode file with full support turned on and printed in white PLA from Faberdashery at 0.15 mm resolution. 

Another pretty successful print, in my view.

With hindsight, it might have been better to have sliced with Cura and used the expert setting called 'Fix Horrible' - type B, which closes all internal holes and deals much more nicely with limb overlaps. Maybe next time.

Cicero D'Avila

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.

One more video of the finished product.