Our bestiary is comprised of a small number of plastic figurines, with a supplement of cardboard creatures on stands. This upcoming adventure in the sewers is a good excuse to expand the bestiary, and begin printing creatures we might happen upon in our adventuring.

I started with a dragon, which may have been optimistic. Miniatures like this can be complex to print and cleanup, with multiple supports, small and hard to reach areas, and sometimes delicate parts.

First Dragon

This dragon came from the ice dragon (repaired) model on Thingiverse. I resized and rotated it in TinkerCad, and then converted to STL. The original was scaled down to 56mm to speed up printing.

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Well, that was a disaster. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson about support structures on small, detailed prints. Alas, I hadn’t (haven’t), and this print ended up in the recycling bin.

The model itself was odd, and had a 3mm gap between the upper and lower portions of the dragon once printed.

• Maker: schneck007
• Source: ice dragon (repaired)
• License: Creative Commons – Attribution – Share Alike
• Model: Ice_Dragon_v23_-_.OBJ
• GCode: –
• Material: Hatchbox Red 1.75mm PLA
• Print Date: 2017/09/24
• Print Time: 4 hours 3 minutes
• Est Print Time: 3 hours 33 minutes (PrusaControl 0.9.3_390_beta)
• Est Filament: 9.2 meters (PrusaControl 0.9.3_390_beta)
• Slicer: PrusaControl 0.9.3_390_beta
• Slicer Settings:
  • 0.35mm layers
  • 20% infill
  • Supports Everywhere
  • Print Brim

Second Dragon

I thought we should try to go with a more solid bodied dragon, and do supports only on the print bed, similarly scaled down to hopefully speed up the print:

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The resulting print took about 10 minutes of careful cleanup, but turned out fairly well. The wings have patchwork holes because of the loss of layers when scaling, which sort of adds to the overall effect.

• Maker: makerslabcz
• Source: Dragon
• Original License: Creative Commons – Attribution
• Model: Dragon_Z.stl]
• Scale: 60% of Original
• GCode: –
• Material: Hatchbox Red 1.75mm PLA
• Print Date: 2017/09/25
• Print Time: 4 hours 46 minutes
• Est Print Time: 4 hours 11 minutes (PrusaControl 0.9.3_390_beta)
• Est Filament: 15 meters (PrusaControl 0.9.3_390_beta)
• Slicer: PrusaControl 0.9.3_390_beta
• Slicer Settings:
  • 0.35mm layers
  • 20% infill
  • Supports on Build Plate
  • Print Brim
• Printer: Prusa i3 mk2