Devo's 3D Kerbal Land

[Devo]

With some patience and practice I finally pumped out my first 3D Kerbal! The process isnt all that difficult, it's more cleaning it all up so it prints well. Now that I have that under control I will be printing out pretty much an entire Vehicle Assembly Building interior. Since it is being changed, it would be nice to have a memento of the old building in 3D form, with some kerbals working away at building a rocket. I used to make many miniature dioramas but have not in a very long time, so it will be fun to start crafting all the pieces for the VAB. I will have some kerbals with construction gear on etc, some climbing rockets, strapping stuff on, and will probably have a kerbal strapped to a rocket too at some point lol.

Ideally for these kerbals, I will be printing them out in several pieces, both so they are easier to paint and also so I can make them modular and give them movable arms and removable helmets. So what you are seeing here is basically "can I get this thing from my pc into a slicer, convert it to gcode, then xg3 and then actually print the thing" and the answer obviously is below I now need to clean up this model and smooth it all out properly, the size seems pretty decent, and for this particular print it was 81 minutes in total, and about 25 mins to paint it quickly, so all up under 2 hours. The green isnt quite right, the model itself is a bit stock still, so its fairly edgy, I will get them looking a bit plumper and have some more interesting facial prints. This is just the first in a very long line, I will post my progress as I make it. You can see in the video I use a pencil to hold up part of the print for a second, I chose to print this without the internal support for the helmet to save both plastic and time, and it was almost a success with the exception of some small underhand on the lid of the top of the helmet.

I am planning on clear helmets, just waiting on my clear ABS plastic to come in the post, which it should tomorrow or the next day.

Starwars (second series) standard size figure for comparison.

Edited June 24, 2013 by Devo

[Mekan1k]

What sort of 3-d printer did you use?

[keanukeno21]

Not bad!

[Devo]

What sort of 3-d printer did you use?

Replicator 2 dualstrusion, but I have it set pretty low resolution at the moment, I did that kerbal on 0.25mm, but can go down to 0.05. To get the really fine printing you need to do some major calibration, and if you have played with them, you know the gcode can always act different in different models, they sort of all figure out their own way to print.

It will be alot different once I seperate the parts!!! I am going to do a really big kerbal next, but before that I need to clean this thing right up.

The printer has been busy for the past 3 hours printing one of these up for me its the highest detail so far ive tried so fingers crossed..

Edit...

Well this is it after 6 hours and 21 minutes...

7cm tall, 7cm deep, 7cm wide...

I still need to clean the model up, needs some sanding and clipping, but i am pretty happy I can print something out like this one one piece, no glue required..

The detail on the back of the arms and legs amazed me, it actually did the individual cylinders and slider arms... and hollow too.. freakin amazing stuff.

Edited June 26, 2013 by Devo

[Devo]

Kerbal cleaned up!

I got my clear ABS so I can do the helmet glass now, I will also add some small LED lights for effect.

It still needs some work, and I am working on some more poses. For this one besides the smoothing I improved the Wave a little bit so the arm is a little more pronounced.

The screenshots below are from the printers software, so basically this is what your model is going to look like when it prints...

Old version, which I printed next to the new smoothed one, it should look sweet once I add the glass bubble.