Something a little different for today. A friend of mine, knowing that I’m all about 3D printing, asked if I could print him a miniature off of Thingiverse – the Arcadia Quest Inferno Fountain by user YAAARGH. Problem is, that model is very clearly intended for resin printers – the kind that use a vat of material and a laser, rather than the vertical stacking that fused deposition modeling (FDM) printers like my Makergear M2 does. I certainly didn’t want to let him down, so I took the model into 3D Studio Max and started slicing it up into multiple flat-planed surfaces. This gave my printer a solid face to build the necessary parts off of without resorting to an absolutely ludicrous amount of support material usage, which would have left the resulting model looking pretty terrible. I also took the liberty of straightening the model’s tail out so that it could be printed in the same fashion.
I sliced the individual parts in Simplify 3D using an 80-micron layer height and got my machine running on the prints with a .35mm nozzle. Took a bit of tuning, but I was able to get it to run the details down to a level I thought was pretty reasonable, given the minute size of the parts!
Here’s how everything carved up:
A look at the head, for scale’s sake:
And the final printed pieces!
Not bad, if I say so myself. There are some definite seams that will need some attention from the recipient, but my work here is pretty much done.
I shared the files on Thingiverse as a remix of the original model. If you’d like to try out making your own, here’s the link!
