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?)

Printing Topless… and Bottomless

Sometimes you run across great models/files on Thingiverse or elsewhere on the net that are solid objects that you’re supposed to print without a “roof” or top layer. The same is sometimes true about printing objects without a floor or bottom.

If you’re using Cura, Slicer or other non-Makerbot software you can find these setting available in the advanced settings, but on Makerware/Makerbot software it is a bit tricker. You’ll need to create and modify a custom profile.

I am not sure why they don’t simply create an “Expert” tab that allows for simple check boxes to turn these features on and off. There have been a couple of folks posting tools to give it that functionality but some of them are more complicated than what we’ve done here.

(Wow, I just checked YouTube and don’t see a video that I thought would be there…. )

Screen Shot 2015-03-03 at 12.30.01 AMTo edit your profile: Go to the “Settings” tab and then click and expand the “Advanced options” . At the bottom you’ll see a “Create Profile” button. Click it and give it a meaningful name.

I often put many of the settings in the name title, S2F20L02 (for shells:2, Fill 20%, Layer Height 0.2mm).

Now you can click on “Edit Profile” if you have TextWrangler on your computer then I suggest using that.

These are the lines that I changed in my file. Note that we have two MakerBot printers with dual extruders so I like to make put a temp in for each extruder.

Screen Shot 2015-03-03 at 12.12.17 AMThese variables are spread through out the miracle.jason settings file so it might be easier to edit with a program like TextWrangler, BrioFlexTrack4which is my preference.

"extruderTemp0": 220,
"extruderTemp1": 220,
"platformTemp": 60,

"roofThickness": 0.0,

"floorThickness": 0.0,

"infillDensity": 0.0,

"doRaft": false,

You can see my entire settings file and one I have used for NinjaFlex (with a special extruder) on my GitHub here.

If you are feeling daring or want to try out other features hidden away here refer to MakerBot’s Custom Slicing documentation here.
Thing shown: “Brio Flex Railtracks” by romanjurt
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:661462