Printing Process

    Out of all the designs I've made, this is by far my favourite. The Pokemon is a banette, and the piece I chose for it is the bishop, I modelled the entire body with the hope that this would give me some more options on how to add it to the bishop base. The main body and head of the piece are made with some ellipsoid shape, and the best part is that there was minimal frustration when I was trying to make it fit the reference, it fit the background of the character because it's supposed to be a toy, so easy-to-reproduce shapes and whatnot yay! Anyways, the little cones on top of the head did take a little more, I started out with a regular cone before Boolean differencing it to have the backwards curve, a little tilt sideways and backwards and the center was done, a copy-paste, later and then there were three, a bit of extra tilt sideways on both, tiny shrink and the ones on the side were done two.  

    The weird little hat was harder to make, I started with the approximation of the shape from the top view, extruded the shape to give me a weird-looking block then did the same with the side view. I tried to boolean difference it, but it didn't do the thing I wanted it to (it got rid of one thing I didn't need, and the thing I did, and then left me another thing I didn't need so...) but I ended up doing a boolean split to just make those separate parts then delete the extra and keep the thing I needed. The cage edit was the best thing to happen to me while I was moulding the hat. There was a moment where, I admit, I was laughing maniacally because I had figured out something that would save me so much time in the long run.

    Trying to figure out what the base for the bishop would look like was a bit more complicated, I wanted to incorporate the design of the Pokemon into the piece itself in a way that would make sense like I did for the rook. So I came up with the above solution, I made that base and figured out the top. The first thing I tried for the top was lofting the shape, using several circles in varying diameters, and it didn't work, they came out like square bases instead, so I ditched the idea quickly, but what I did after was draw out the basic curve of it and used the revolve tool to create the knob of it, and since banette is a ghost type pokemon, I got rid of the torso and the upper shoulders and added the head and arms to the base of the bishop piece.

    The rook was interesting to work on, a mix of easy and a mix of hard. It started out simple, two circles, one bigger than the other, but they needed more of a normal curve to make it seem like the Pokemon's back, but that left a weird something on both sides. That's when it got a bit more complicated, I tried to get rid of more material, but that just made the same, if smaller, somethings, I ended up giving up on fixing it, because nothing I did fully got rid of it. Then I got started on the tower, I made a cylinder, for the main body, then I made a smaller cylinder, and Boolean differenced the top. Then I made two circles that made up the width of the leftover material on the top of the original cylinder and added lines to make teeth. Extrude the surface, place on top of the lip (I guess you could call it that) not to down on it, and then difference it, et voila, the start of an awesome tower.

    It still seemed too simple, so I added grooves to simulate what an actual tower looks like to me. Then it looked a little weird so I added a little door!

    It took almost four hours for the Pokepawns to print, it was hard to wait for so long because I was also printing my rook at the same time, and I wanted to seeeee what it looked like, but I knew what the pawns looked like because of my before test, so that helped curve my impatience. 

        One rook alone took almost four full hours, which honestly feels bizarre to me, the way that the machine prints and the paths it takes to do so are fascinating, I don't fully understand how it configures the coordinates to print the object, but the pattern it creates as it does so is awesome. 

    Taking off the supports was an absolute pain, not because it was actually hard, but because I've been overworking my wrist within the last week or so, which means I'm sore, and using pliers becomes even more complicated than usual. It was satisfying to take the material away to reveal the rook, but it did get a little complicated to get rid of the material in the grooves, I figured out really early that using toothpicks to loosen the inside, and then pulling out a bit with round nose pliers, made pulling the rest off really easy with flat nose pliers.

5 printed pieces out of 16, and 2 and a half left to design.