3D-printed cat puppet-head

[Tioh]

Pinted in PLA on my 3d-printer in 6 hours 13 minutes. The movable eyelids are also 3d-printed. The eyes are ping pong balls. The lower jaw is made of aluminum, covered in Wonderflex. Everything was glued together with Plaast.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

I really love all the 3D printed work you're sharing Tioh!

I was wondering if, in your experience, it's practical/cost-effective for heads? I'm in the early stages of experimenting with 3D printing for the film I'm making. I've been mostly working a few things that need to be duplicated identically at different scales, which a 3D printer seems to be perfect for.

For puppet heads though, six hours of printing plus all the work that goes in to building the 3D model seems like a lot of work. I'm pretty sure that I could either pattern an animal head like that in L200 or sculpt a form for vacu-forming in about half the time it takes to print a head like that (of course the speed of 3D printers is going to grow a lot in the next few years I suspect).

That's in no way a criticism, I'm just curious for your thoughts.

Please keep sharing photos, your process is really interesting.

 

[Tioh]

...
I was wondering if, in your experience, it's practical/cost-effective for heads?
...

Is it practical? - Yes. Once you learned what a 3d-printer can do (how to make models, what materials and settings work best, how to cut a 3d-object for 3d-printing,...) it's pretty reliable.

Cost-effective? - That depends how much you value your own time. I can build a puppet without a 3d-printer. But if I do that I have to do the work. With the 3d-printer I only have to provide the model and I can do something else while the 3d-printer does the work.

It took some time to find the right settings for the 3d-printer and to learn constructing the heads. I've made 3d-models for 3d-animations in the past, so I already knew how to make a 3d-model for rendering - I just had to find a way to make my models watertight and with the correct thickness.

Making a new head is very easy now - I have made a basic-head model that I can change in minutes. Being able to make several copies of one head that match perfectly is also really cool.

This year I made 14 basic puppet and 3 costume heads - if I had made them by hand I would not have had the time to make more when three puppet-heads.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

What 3D printer are you using?

 

[Tioh]

What 3D printer are you using?

A slightly modified Makerbot 1 Dual clone.

 

[Tioh]

I made more 3d-models that can be used for different kinds of cats