Nativity

After this past Christmas my wife wanted to add a Nativity Scene.  So now and then after work I slowly worked on providing the starts of that for Christmas 2015.  After searching the thingiverse I found a couple of highly detailed models that someone had 3d scanned.  I thought these would be perfect to try!

 The first item I went for was "King 1" which is thing:591213 this print had no major overhangs for my printer to handle.  Although the arm has a large opening I had no problem in this area. The chin also printed well since I print with inner most loop first (to provide something for overhangs to try to grab.

 King 1 Back Side

Now naturally you would think I went to King 2 next.  Due to extreme overhangs I decided to go with King 3. King 3 which is thing:591219 also was a straight forward print.  The chin was kind of a big overhang and I have 1 strand of droop.

 King 3 Right

King 3 Left

 Still due to the extreme overhangs of King 2 I decided to do Mary and Jesus next. Thing:591195 has some great detail in my opinion. I was worried the baby would be too small but he came out just fine.

 Mary Front View

 Mary Back View

Mary Side View

Now after these three were complete it was time to finally try King 2.  Now with my printer not having support capability I knew there was no way for this file to print directly. I used a program called "netfabb Basic" to help slice up the model into pcs. I did not pay for the full version and only used the trial version. This allowed me to insert cut planes into the model and remove parts I didnt want. 

I ended up slicing him 3 ways. Once just above the elbows made him have a top and bottom. This allowed me to print the bottom section.  Although the elbows were still present in the slice it just printed a giant blob that I later easily removed. 

The second slice was a little creative.  I took the bottom of the model and sliced away the body and as much of the kings gift as I could leaving his elbows behind. I then flipped the model up side down so his elbows would come out of the print bed. This left just the tip of the gift floating in mid air. The part in mid air just created another blob that was just pulled off. 

The final section was just the top half from the first slice.  Once all three sections were printed I "glued" them together with acetone. I must say it came out way better than anticipated.

 If you look very carefully you can see the split plane just below his armpits.

King 2 front side

 Now time to put them  all together in one view :)

It is very important to note that the original file import makes King 1 a 577mm tall model!!!! Unless you have a huge 3d printer good luck.  In Kisslicer I scaled all the models down to 9% of their original size!!! This may have helped greatly with some of the overhang issues since the overhangs are dramatically reduced.

I hope the publisher of the set puts up more of the models now that he sees how they print!

I can also say that in the past few months I have been working ALOT on one other 3d print project with about 30 different iterations so far.  Unfortunately I will not be sharing that item on here or the thingiverse. It is an item related to one of my other hobbies that is a known problem that has no definitive solution, but with the device I am creating I may be able to capture a niche market.  That does relate to lack of posts since the printer fix :)