OctoJelly!

Description

How does one justify bringing such a cute little Frankenstein-esque thing into this world when there are already so many cute multi-legged things to be had?? Well, it ALL started on a dark and stormy night.... Okay no, really, I just got some new filaments recently, one of which is a transparent PLA. Notoriously brittle, and somewhat gloppy, so I thought to myself.. "Self, I KNOW we could print that cool fake ice-cube model over there... what amazing simplicity, and appropriate as well for both a first print with a new material AND transparent theme! But naaah let's print something with a TON of moving tiny parts instead! Oh, and while we are at it, why don't we do something where all of the little parts are chained together, like little droplets of filament love on the table, no way will that new filament you want to try randomly glop up on you, harden and drag a chunk of your little creation over itself and send them flying! Neeever!" Wow, in hindsight I have to look at that little self-suggestion and wonder... do I even like me?! Fast forward a bit, I went ahead with my mission, doing the typical temperature tango, and extrusion groovin', but shortly in I decided since I was going to do this the painful way with a number of prints, I wanted something cute... cute and on theme! Cute... and on theme... and well, what my daughter TOLD me to make... She said, in a very matter-of-fact tone that a Jellyfish toy was exactly what my test would be. You know, in hindsight I look back at that little interaction and wonder.. does she even like me?! Well there we have it... orders are orders... but I simply could not find a model that filled the criteria entirely, and I really wanted print-in-place with no construction required since I would be using this to test with... AND peopling the world with them of course! And so OctoJelly was born. An amalgamation of the DrLex Cute Mini Octopus remix and 3DCentralVA's articulated Jellyfish remix. During the process I did what optimizations I could to shore up any duplicate/wrong facing triangles etc. and the new model is completely manifold, so it should print well on most printers. I did test prints up to a .6 nozzle and .32 layer height, no support, without issues and nice free-flowing tentacles even at the fastest of the prints. .4 nozzle at .18, .20, etc. all of course work fine as well. I doubled up the layering within the model because I was using a translucent filament, it made for an interesting shimmer in the under-surface; It goes quite ethereal under UV as well, pictures attached! One word of warning - make sure your bed level is good, and keep your extrusions under control. Default print settings with a good quality filament on a stable bed should just work.. but the print is sensitive to start out with laying out all of the leg pieces. If your extruder catches on any of them they WILL pop right off the mat, attach themselves to the extruding material, and unceremoniously crash through, well, EVERYTHING if you don't catch it in time... :) Just like the lineage that it comes from these are really nice and very tactile figures, and fun to set on things... anything actually... even pets and loved ones when they are unsuspecting! UPDATE: I have reduced this to a single STL file to avoid confusion and misprints. For those who have the previous versions, those still work fine, but V1a I corrected a slight alignment issue (cosmetic only) and refactored the body while I was at it. This new version has been test printed as well to ensure the updates did not break it (it's the regular white Jelly among the transparent Octo's in the recent picture I posted of the OctoJelly attack on my keyboard) ;)

Statistics

Category

Tags