Pikachu pokémon figure, seated on a named hexagon plate.
I wanted to try out my new 3Dprinter, and how well it prints small details and round surfaces. Since the only included filament color that came with the printer was a bright yellow, and In these times of Pokémon Go, what else to print than a Pickachu.
This can be printed without support structures, but beware of the tail. To be safe, try using support.
You will most likely be told by your 3Dprinting software that this model has errors. If your printing software has an auto-correct feature, turn it on, and the Pikachu should print without issues.
NOTE:
3D model data is Copyright Gamefreak, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company 2001-2016.
This is a fan-art project, and all rights to the Pokémon and Pikachu brand and name belongs to Nintento and the Pokémon Company.
Printer:
XYZprinting da Vinci 1.0 PRO 3-in-1
Resolution:
0.4mm nozzle, 0.25mm layer height
Infill:
15% (10% should do as well)
Notes:
You may need rafts if your printer has problems making prints stick, and support to ensure proper printing of the last tail section.
I printed this without support and without rafts, using ABS at 210 C nozzle and 90 C plate, with 15% hexagon infill.
Making this Pikachu
I started searching for a sufficiently detailed Pikachu model to print, but to my surprise, no such model existed. A few came close, but I did not like the pose of Pikachu. In order to ensure a reasonably robust print, and the ability to print without support structure, I realized that I had to make my own Pikachu Pokémon 3D model.
As I have close to zero modelling experience or skills, the task of modelling Pikachu from scratch was not a possibility. Fortunately, with the Pokemon Go game comes a lot of great 3D models which are freely available to download (just remember to give all attribution to Nintendo etc. when used): http://roestudios.co.uk/project/3d-pokemon-models/
I now had a good Pikachu 3D model, but this was posed similar to the ones I already found in several 3Dprint archives with Pokemon models. After a bit more searching, I struck gold in this poseable Pikachu model made by Haolink on Deviantart: http://haolink.deviantart.com/art/Pikachu-MMD-3D-Model-eye-posable-557647939
With the poseable model, I now had complete freedom to make Pikachu take a seat and lay its arms on its stomach.
Then came the hard part of exporting the model as an STL. I make write a blog post about this at some point on my blog: http://blog.mivia.dk, but for now lets say that a lot of import/export was going on between the programs: Mmd, PmxEditor, Blender, Sketchup and XYZware pro.
I had to completely redraw and re-attach the tail of Pikachu in Sketchup, which is also where I added the hexagon plate and the text. If you investigate the stl, you will notice that this is not a clean model, as several surfaces are in collision or missing. I could clean this up in sketchup, but this would most likely take hours.
Let me know if you are able to print using this stl as it is now, so I know if it will be worth the effort to do a complete clean-up of the model.
The poseable Pikachu model opened in PmxEditor
I initially made this pose in Mmd, but something made it impossible to import in in PmxEditor, so i had to re-do it directly in PmxEditor
The finished model (with some internal errors still left to correct) assembled in Sketchup
