
Cat and lady - 3D Printed by mrbill








This was one of the tougher prints I've managed to salvage. I downloaded it, took a look at it in Cura, and decided it needed both supports and raft. I sent it off to print and went to bed. In the morning, I found a mess on the print bed. The cat's mane and the girl's hair had turned to cotton candy, and she didn't exist from the waist down. I looked at the file in Cura's layer view, and could see the hair and mane were fragmented, or non-continuous. They both had layers that printed nothing followed by layers trying to print on thin air. I took the file to meshmixer, which showed up many errors detected. I did an "auto-correct" and it wiped out both the girl's hair and the cat's mane and claws. It also restored the top of her skull to something reasonably accurate. A second print worked better, but the girl was bald (as I expected), her right leg was cracked lengthwise and her left leg was a mess from the knee down. That's when I noticed that nothing lined up on the bottom of the print. It was trying to print the tail of the cat and add everything on top of that. Her legs were trying to print a single spot on the supports and build from there. I don't know if I could have fixed it with a settings change, but instead I took it back to MeshMixer, and did a plane cut to even it up as best I could. The tail lost a bit of depth, and her left hand still didn't reach the print surface. I then took the file into 123Design and added a hair file that's actually a Lego piece, but worked better than the original! I sent it to the printer for a third try, and except for a shift in her left arm, it printed out okay. When I went to paint it, I found that the cat's eyes were missing, and only the sockets remained behind partially closed eyelids. I used a paperclip to pick up tiny drops of the gold acrylic paint and filled the sockets. Once dry, I touched up around them with the gloss black that the rest of the cat is painted. If I had to do it again, I'd play with that hair file a bit more, it needs some scaling and position adjustments, but only noticeable from certain angles. Someone with more knowledge and experience with the editing tools out there may want to revisit this design and see if they can do things like scale a portion of an .STL without changing the rest (make her left arm longer, and change the cat's tail to make it lay flat on the ground plane). Painting this model was difficult with it being one piece. I'd like to see it redone as two separate parts that could be glued together or left separate for display. I'm not planning to post my updated .STL as I'm not 100% satisfied with it, but if anyone wants it I'd certainly be happy to share it. If anyone comes up with a corrected version, I'd like to do a max size print of it.
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