Steampunk Aquatic Denizen - Vase Mode!

Ahoy, wonderful people!

Behold! An explorer from the mechanical depths! This Steampunk Aquatic Denizen has a decidedly chunky, mechanical style, but is actually printable in vase mode!

Building up vase mode designs is a matter of just observing a few rules. No isolated pockets or points allowed! No very steep or very shallow angles permitted! Even less steepness permitted on curved faces! Intersections between planes need to be managed so that they run on oblique angles and not horizontally where they become unsupported bridges.

So, it was decidedly strange when this print kept breaking in half - but only on some specific printers and with some specific filaments! And the rest just printed perfectly. And it failed in exactly the same spot every time, with some messy printing that just mangled the area so that the printer tore it apart!

The model itself didn't seem to have anything obvious. In fact, the area in question didn't really have any significant features at all. The slicing looked fine, too, just a series of lines stacked on top of each other, as walls tend to be. Nothing seemed amiss... until switching to the visualisation of volumetric flow rate! It turned out that the slicer was putting a whole lot of filament into that area, and with some filaments (PLA Silks, I'm looking at you) that was just too much to handle and it all went belly-up, if you'll excuse the fish reference.

 Armed with that knowledge, there was still the question of what actually caused that increased volumetric flow! I figured that turns were probably relevant, so all the previously-presumed-innocent bends were smoothed out into longer curves and in some cased just replaced with a pair of shallower curves on either side, all to make the area look less angry in the slicer visualisation. Thankfullly, each iteration got less concerning, and even more thankfully the prints ended up successful on all the filaments and printers! 

Who knew there was a whole world of other potential print failures out there that I just hadn't encountered yet?!

Print Description

This is a vase mode print, so set your slicer accordingly!

Print Dimensions

By default the Steampunk Aquatic Denizen is quite large! 85mm x 121mm on the print bed, and 239mm tall. It can be readily resized, however.

Supports Needed? 

Not at all!  Designed for straightforward printing!

Scalability

The Steampunk Aquatic Denizen will readily scale up or down! I have some printed at 60% and 50% in the photos, in fact.

The fins are extra thick to accommodate scaling smaller, mostly because those were the bits that suffered when I scaled down early prototypes :) There is a thin fin that runs around the connection to the tail, and that will vanish at some point when scaling down, but that won't cause any problems - it will just not be there, leaving the face behind it in its place.

Print Orientation

The Steampunk Aquatic Denizen prints on its tail!

Further Thoughts

Being a closed form, though, that does not rely on the internal space being a void, this model can also just as easily be printed as a regular print full of infill. Or a regular print with zero infill, for that matter. Much as I love vase mode for printing so quickly and cleanly, there's certainly something to be said for the robustness of a regular print!

Happy printing!

xoxo

Sven.

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511 Steampunk Aquatic Denizen