Vili's bizarre 3D printing adventures, part 4 - The turtle

Hey, everyone!

Here is another (a bit belated) blog post about my 3D printng adventures. Better late than never, right? ;)

I am going to continue discussing the last 3D model from the second batch of figurines that was sent to me for printing by my instructor Martin Punchev. Our object of interest today is the model of a turtle. It was also created during the Character design course at CGZEN and was modeled by Tsvetomir Filipov.

Turtle by Tsvetomir Filipov

I will be frank, this fella was quite challenging to slice and print. Also this is by far my longest print in terms of hours for a single part and you will see why. Let's dive into the process!

Model analysis

After a quick look at the model you can see that there are six parts in total for printing. The turtle has lots of details on the body, back, feet and legs and we have to show them. This means that it should be printed with a higher resolution. There aren't any small parts. The entire object is pretty solid with very good shape. The current setup of the model suggests that after printing every piece has to be glued to it's respective place.

The model split into parts and resized in 3Ds Max

Most challenging and time consuming will be the body and the shell of the turtle. Supports will be needed too, except for the legs. After my first resize of the model with scale of 2300% the turtle became 14 cm high. Perfect! We are in the size limit. Cura on the other hand had different opinion on this. Slicing the body of the turtle, the program showed me the amazing seventeen hours printing time!!!!!

Ain't nobody got time for that?! Not to mention so much material will be wasted. I certainly can't do that.

Next I lowered the scale to 2000% in 3Ds Max. Cura on her end said 12 cm height. Checking the shell and body:

Nine hours for the shell and seven for the body. Not great, not terrible. Still nine hours it is too much for this kind of object. Martin suggested to me to lower the scale to 10 cm height and give more details on the body and the shell. I rescaled for the third time - 1800% scale and Cura gave me 108mm which is a bit above 10 cm. Let's see how things look like now:

This is as far as I can go. Five and eight hours aren't that scary at all. 10 cm height will be our final size of the model.

Slicing in Cura

First I started with the hands and the legs since they are smaller and it will be fast and easy to print them. Two hours in total for the hands and half an hour for each leg.

Turtle's hand sliced in Cura

Turtle's leg sliced in Cura

Settings - arm:

• Layer height - 0.12mm
• Infill - Gyroid pattern, 18%
• Supports - Touching buildplate, Density - 40%, Pattern - Grid, Support Z distance - 0.3mm
• Buildplate adhesion - Brim
• Nozzle diameter - 0.4mm
• Time taken - 2 hours

Settings - leg:

• Layer height - 0.12mm
• Infill - Gyroid pattern, 18%
• Supports - Touching buildplate, Density - 45%, Pattern - Grid, Support Z distance - 0.3mm
• Buildplate adhesion - Brim
• Nozzle diameter - 0.4mm
• Time taken - 32 minutes

In the case of the leg support wasn't needed at all, but I left this setting enabled just in case. Still this didn't affect the print time.

Next on the list are the body and the shell:

The body sliced in Cura

Settings:

• Layer height - 0.18mm
• Infill - Gyroid pattern, 15%
• Supports - Touching buildplate, Density - 50%, Pattern - Grid, Support Z distance - 0.3mm
• Buildplate adhesion - Brim
• Nozzle diameter - 0.4mm
• Time taken - 5 hours 51 mins.

Thinking back in time I could have lowered the infill rate to 5-8% and probably the printing could have been even faster. Probably three to four hours at best. I positioned it with the back side facing the supports, since it won't be visible because of the shell.

Speaking of the shell, here it is:

The shell sliced in Cura

 Again the bottom side is facing the supports, while keeping the top intact.

Settings:

• Layer height - 0.18mm
• Infill - Gyroid pattern, 10%
• Supports - Touching buildplate, Density - 45%, Pattern - Concentric, Support Z distance - 0.3mm
• Buildplate adhesion - Brim
• Nozzle diameter - 0.4mm
• Time taken - 7 hours 34 mins.

The main task here was to find the perfect balance between good resolution and speed. The layer height is the first important thing when slicing. The bigger the number, the lower the resolution, but printing is faster. The opposite - lower layer height value, better resolution, but slower printing. At 0.18mm the details are looking perfect! Next important thing for such big model as this one is the Infill rate. The Gyroid pattern helped a lot in reducing the print time. Since then this has become my number one choice for infill patterns. It has the best mixture of strength of the object and speed!

Post print

Lets see what we have printed after all these hours:

Perfection! I think the god of 3D printing heard my prayers that time and the whole job went without problems! I must admit, I was very worried if the shell will be printed correctly, because it was the longest object that I have done so far. After all seven hours are almost one entire day of work in the office! I am glad that it went smoothly in the end! It took me three days in total to complete this project.

Now I am going to close the episode! I hope that you enjoyed reading this post! You can share what was your longest print and how many hours it took you. I am really curious :).

On the next blog post you will see one very cool lizard businessman ;).

To be continued...