25 Microns Of Details

At the Rochester Institute of Technology

Taking my 3D printing studies & details further, "torturing" the awesome Formlabs printers to the point where printing fails, then backing the scale threshold up till details form more and more successfully. Big thanks to Formlabs for donating resin for my research & for their support. Thanks to School of Design - RIT for facilitating the 3D printing lab. Thanks to Robert Fleck, David Cohen, Andrew Balboni & Taylor Clow for all the tech support.

A Render of the actual 3D object. Short Film Link:

https://vimeo.com/62873397

Firefly out of the UV oven

Rear Light Frame

Rear Firefly Light caps - Black vs Clear (filled with Glow In The Dark material)

Details on Wing structure - Came out insanely fine!

Details on the side hose coils and attachment pipes on top of the head

Cleaning Scaffolding

Wing out of the UV oven. - I will be testing with less scaffolding

Gluing the wings

Still Working on reprinting and re-polishing the clear materials to get clearer transparency

Glow-In-The-Dark material - Too tiny, but glows beautifully :)

SMALLER: Printed well enough it can hold the weigh on the two feet

SMALLEST: I wanted to see how tiny the scale can go regardless of the details

Another indication of scale

Here is the process (Pix & GIFs)

from importing the object to Preform till the cleanup

Building the support manually in Preform (formlabs printer's software) so I get an efficient support that is easier to clean than the automatic.

If this object was bigger, I could get less support, but small pieces require more support to print successfully.

GIF - Starting Print after warmup

GIF - Printing Peek 1

GIF - Printing Peek 2

GIF - Printing Peek 3

GIF - Printing FINISHING

Printing is Done!

Alcohol Bath - Resin Rinse :)

Baking in the UV oven (so the resin cures, dries and become more solid - takes few hours at least, the bigger the size of the print the longer it needs to cure).