MakerBot Industries

More Pine Trees by tc_fea

Welcome to the second installment of Super Sweet Printing Tech.

Tc_fea’s work on printing with unsupported overhangs shows a progression from a stringy “Pine Tree” to an almost Lego-tree like Pine Tree 4.  What I find interesting about the last tree is just how straight and horizontal those “branches” are.  The “Pine Tree 2″ has branches with 5mm vertical clearance and the “Pine Tree 4″ has 2.5mm vertical clearance between branches/layers.  In any case, I think that this opens up new design possibilities – such as being able to create textured furry and/or hairy printed models. ¹²³⁴  Or cacti.  Or porcupines.

Also, tc_fea?  Dude, I’ve played with Sketchup.  Those trees would be about 100 times easier to design in OpenSCAD.   ⁵

More Pine Trees by tc_fea

These are nicer versions of the pine tree experiment first tested in thing:7018. Pine tree 2 has a more random look and has 5 mm vertical spacing between branches. Pine tree 4 has fuller look and has 2.5 mm vertical spacing between branches.

This thing brought to you by

1. Or, a plastic chia pet. [↩]
2. I’m not sure if a plastic chia pet is actually any better or worse than a real chia pet. [↩]
3. On the one hand, the real deal is an actual plant.  On the other hand, a printed chia pet could be recycled as soon as you tire of it. [↩]
4. And, really chia pets are rather useless – so having one that could be recycled seems like a real bonus to me. [↩]
5. All you would need to do is design one vertical layer of branches, make that into a module, and then rotate multiples of that module as needed. [↩]