The Voronoi Remixed 3D Printed Owl

 

Owl VoronoiTHE IDEA:
My 6 year old is really in to owls at the moment. Her Owl Themed Birthday party was loads of fun and that led me, as a good hacker Dad, to play around with some of the popular owl models available on Thingiverse.

I borrowed the older Makerbot Replicator Dual for the weekend, mainly to print out an Owl Cookie Cutter I made in Sketchup 8 (that’ll be a different post). But after printing out the cookie cutter I found myself replacing a stepper motor and rebuiling the extruder (that hasn’t worked for a year). To celebrate this rebuild I looked for a good dual extrusion print to try.  Since I couldn’t find a good owl one, yes we’re still on an owl kick, I remixed our favorite owl from Tom Cushwa using a Voronoi pattern.

The files can be found on Thingiverse here.

THE PROCESS:
I started with MeshLab and struggled through the soundless tutorial below. Then I took the result and did some MeshMixer boolean runs to create the two separate .obj files.  I finished it all off with a trip to NetFabb’s online file repair tool. The whole process took a whole lot longer than I thought it would but so far the results have been pretty nice for a first go at it.  (I am tempted to do a video of the whole thing if anyone would be interested?)

2 Responses

  1. James May 30, 2015 / 11:00 pm

    Amazing. Thanks so much for sharing. … and I’ve had Meshlab installed for over a year. I need to learn more about it.

  2. Tobias November 27, 2015 / 4:46 pm

    Check out http://www.voronator.com. After doing this voronoization procedure manually too often I created this free online service to tesselate 3D objects (stl, ply, dae, ..) with a voronoi pattern. It works with arbitrary forms.

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