Niko's Stuff

Yay, after all the prototyping, a week of being sick and making absolutely no progress, and the painful process of stringing the doll together I finally have a functional spaceman! The project started out with brainstorming and designing the character I wanted to make. Then I modeled all the pieces of the astronaut using simple shapes and added the mechanical features required to put the doll together. I started 3D printing early on in order to have a physical prototype to help assess how all the limbs would work when put together. After a couple prototypes I was able to make the final model, print it, and put together the astronaut. he so cute  (∩˃o˂∩)♡

I started out modeling the astronaut in blender using the references I drew. The model is composed mostly of simple shapes - spheres and cylinders - scaled and combined together. The hands and feet required more editing, using Blenders vertex, edge, and face editing tools, as well as extrusions and loop cuts to make more complex shapes. I started out just making the shape of the body, then later worked on each piece individually hollowing it out and adding any internal structures. My first 3D model of the astronaut was very simple, I just wanted to start printing quickly so I could get an idea of how the physical object would be put together and make changes from there. My first printed prototype worked really well but had a few issues. The elastic cord I bought to string the doll was too big, so I bought some smaller stuff and made the doll bigger for the next prototype. I was able to partially put the doll together with wire for the time being. I had also left out the notches on the

 My test 3D print was medium successful. I was able to print the music box piece with no issues, but it doesn't play the song correctly. You can hear some of the song when you try to play it, but some of the notes don't quite work. I think the piece just required to much fin detail to be able to be 3D printed fully functional. Also because I modeled the piece based off of a digital music box similar that wasn't exactly the same as my music box I think the tune of the song is off. Printing this gave me a good idea of what the supports are like to use and remove from a model though, which gave me confidence to use them with my project. For the settings of my 3D print - Peter suggested I print with much a finer detail level (0.05mm) since the piece had a mechanical function.