Welcome to the first article in "Dabbling in 3D Printing."
A friend of mine, Michael, makes custom action figures (he's not afraid to say "dolls") as a hobby. His home office is filled with dioramas of scenes from different cartoons. He makes all his own doll costumes and props. I learned the rudiments of 3D printing by designing and printing a few larger props for him that he wasn't sure how to fabricate.
The diorama above is inspired by the 1970s Saturday morning cartoon series, "Josie and the Pussycats." I designed and 3D printed the guitar amplifiers. My friend Michael gets all the credit for the detailed painting. This and the remaining props in this article are all at 1/6 scale.
The first prop I made was a guitar amp inspired by the Fender Champion. This I designed using the Blender 3D modeling program. The logo used an open source font similar but not identical to the real Fender logo. The speaker grille texture was made by turning an image of some fabric into a height map in Blender. The knobs were all from a third-party, open source package of small models. Blender is a complex program, and I already knew it from dabbling in computer animation, but because of its complexity I don't recommend it for those new to 3D design.
The next prop I made for Michael was another guitar amp, this one loosely inspired by some Vox-brand speaker stack pairs. The main thing I did to give a Vox feel to the speaker was use the raised diamond grid on the speaker grille. This prop I modeled using a completely different approach and tool, OpenSCAD, an open source program that allows you to design objects by using a kind of programming language to describe the geometry of parts and how they are arranged with respect to each other. I'm a software engineer professionally, so this was just another programming language to learn. OpenSCAD has many helper libraries, such as one I used to uniformly and automatically space out all the control knobs. If you are comfortable with any kind of programming language and understand high school geometry, you should be able to get the hang of OpenSCAD.
The last prop I made for Michael was an old-fashioned floor safe based on late 1800s safe designs. The scene above is inspired by the 1970s cartoon series "Lupin the 3rd," about the exploits of a master thief, descended from a long line of master thiefs, and his gang. This safe was also designed using OpenSCAD. The one detail of the safe I didn't get around to is to make a platform with small (non-functional) wheels for rolling the safe around. That would have been a nice touch.
All the parts were printed using gray Hatchbox 1.75mm PLA filament on a Monoprice MP i3 Mini printer. Michael recommended the gray color because it makes it easy to see the surface details and paint covers it well. I have since gifted Michael with that printer and bought one for myself that can print larger objects in more kinds of materials, a Creality Ender 3 Pro.
I don't believe the MP i3 Mini is manufactured anymore, but it seems to be identical to a printer made by Chinese company Wanhao. I believe PowerSpec makes a nearly identical unit. This is a nice starter printer. Its only downsides are its small print volume and that it doesn't have a heated bed. But if all you want to print to start are smaller PLA plastic objects, this is a nice printer. I was lucky and must have bought a discontinued model, because I got mine for only about $100. It comes preassembled. This machine prints only 1.75mm PLA filament. I do notice that Wanhao and PowerSpec now want a lot for these machines (~$300), but as I said, they do come preassembled, unlike many printers.
All the slicing of the 3D object STL files for these props was done using Ultimaker Cura. I have been very happy with this slicer software, which is used to take a 3D shape and convert it into layer-by-layer detailed printing commands. You can configure at least a hundred different options about the 3D printing with Cura, but it has a multi-tiered options system so that even a beginner can use it. I highly recommend Cura.
All photos in this article are by Michael Grider of Michael Grider Photography. They are copyrighted and used here with permission.
