Elizabeth Johns Project 3: 3D Printer

Process

For this project, we were instructed to use the Create Form tool in Fusion 360 to fabricate an organic model to eventually print on the makerspace’s Bambu 3D Printers.

Going into this project, I knew that I wanted to make a small-scale recreation of a Freddy Fazbear plush from the horror indie game, Five Nights at Freddy’s. I chose to make this project because one of my hobbies is crocheting and in the past, I had tried to create this very plush through the medium of yarn. As a result of this, I felt that I had a very good understanding of the overall form of the plush and what shapes I would need to best recreate it. I felt this project was something feasible for my first attempt at creating organic forms with Fusion 360.

In the actual fabrication process of this project, I started by creating two spheres of the same size, one for the head and one for the body. This would help the project to be read more like a plush and make it cuter with its chibi-like shape. From there, I worked on modeling the head by giving it rounded cheeks, before adding a rounded rectangular prism for a snout and two round spheres for eyes. I then modeled the body to have a chubby body and a small neck. Then, I modeled some limbs that would be used for the arms and legs, albeit at different scales. Finally, I created a little bow tie for the neck, and used a deformed sphere for the tail.

Through this process, I was able to have the basic shape for the body, and eventually work my way to a completed model of the plush. While the image below is of the final iteration of the project, this version of the project was certainly not the first one I printed.

 

Result

    Even though I knew how I wanted to look, I decided to try printing the project at multiple points in the process to ensure that the shape would render how I wanted it to in real life. This meant that I would have essentially been attempting to print unfinished versions of the project.

For my first attempt at printing, I decided to throw bunny ears onto the plush to test how the Bambu printer would handle such a tall model and because bunny ears were easier to model than the top hat that the final product was meant to have. This first model, Bonnie, would give me insight into what to change for my next version of the project. Specifically, I wanted the snout to be more rounded and animal-like, and to make the limbs have a more pronounced padding to make the feet feel more plush-like.
The second attempt at printing gave me time to not only make these changes, but to swap out the bunny ears for the correct bear ears and top hat that the plush was meant to have. This second model showed me that the padding that I added to the feet of the model would also need to be added to the belly. It also gave me the chance to see that this model was missing some dots on the snout that the original plush was meant to have. 
With all these changes in mind, I was able to make edits to the model and print the project for the third and final time. All of these changes helped me make the model more accurate to its actual in-game design while making the model visually read more to be like an animal and a plush. The final print of my project can be seen below.

  

Reflection

     Through this experience, I learned that even when you have a project model that looks great, the way that it renders in a CAD program can be very different from how it renders in real life. My constant 3D prints helped reveal parts of my project that needed more work or needed to be remodeled. This proves that the perfect environment and rendering of 3D modeling programs do not always perfectly translate into real life. This would be even more true, especially if I had any errors with the actual 3D printing process, such as print failures. As a result, it is important to constantly test models and be prepared to print multiple iterations of a project to ensure that it meets the standards of the creator.