Thanks guys I think I have finally hit the sweet spot with regard to calibrating my printer as this is the first time such a wide print has adhered to the print table so well.



Before I go onto the print here is a photo of my bender model now painted.

I took some photos of my sidewinder spaceship as it was being printed so that you can see it building up. I do want to record an entire print run at some point and speed it up but there are some technical challenges to overcome before I can do that.



About an hour and a half into printing.





About 3 hours in.



Finished in around 3 and a half hours.

The finished item (still needs some sanding down and there is still some structure to remove in the gaps half way down the side of the ship).

It's a really nice model. If you follow the link to the knight and look at the creators profile you see they have made plenty of cool stuff. You can also download the knight model in a few different poses.

If Romans or Samurai are more your thing he has those as well.

I have been working more on creating some of my own models. I have not continued the tank yet as I need to transfer it from a laptop. I have however been working on a hovercraft in my lunch break.

This is all from what I have learned from doing the Autodesk tutorials in the magazines so they are well worth doing.



I used the loft tool to create the hull from two different 2d shapes. The upper shape was scaled down from the lower one to give it an angle.



The skirt was created using the sweep too. The sweep tool is quite buggy but I managed to get it to work after a few attempts. You can use it to run a 2d shape around an edge or path to create a solid.





You can not see it yet but I used the subtract tool to dig out an area for the fan duct. The next step is to hollow out the duct and work on a blade mount.

Thank you. The bender bust is one of my favorites, it looks great on my shelf and to think I didn't buy it either!

Here are some more screenshots of my hovercraft process from today's lunch break. After it is done I am going to separate it into logical parts to print and glue it together.

This will mean print times will be faster and there will be less support structure and sanding required.







I have now hollowed out the fan duct and modeled the rear rudders. I have also created the cockpit area.

Can`t wait to see this one, it looks good.

Have you made an approximate costing for these little gems out of interest?

Regards
delboy271155
(Derek)

A small update work has begun on the propeller.



The propeller blades were created using 3 different sized oval shapes and the loft command. This created a varying thickness.

The blades were then rotated around a cylinder to create the propeller. This was done using a function called smart rotate. This is a really useful feature because you select a plane and then rotate and object around the plane. By selecting the front plane on my cylinder I was able to easily rotate blades around it.

To give you a little insight into my 3D design experiences.

Before giving Autodesk 123d a go I used Blender a lot. As a learning tool blender was awful. It was capable of a lot more than autodesk but the amount of interface clutter, shortcuts and modes you had to learn made it very difficult.

Autodesk on the other hand has a much more simple interface and for creating static 3D objects it is much more straight forward.

All of the core tools are there in front of you and easy to find and it is a lot less buggy than blender.

It also has a great manual help you learn all of its features so needless to say for 3D printing I jumped ship pretty fast.

As for learning 3D design from scratch Autodesk is a much better entry point. I wouldn't say 3D design is not complicated but its far less complicated than it looks from the outside.

Once you gain familiarity with the tools and know what to use and when then you can quickly gain the experience required to make more complex models.

I never thought I would be able to make anything like this hovercraft model, but from using what I learned in the tutorials in the idbox mag and a little research online I have managed to get to this stage.

Instead of going ahead and starting to put some detail into the hovercraft cockpit I decided that I would get the hull ready to print with the idea of printing any details separately.

First I loaded the hovercraft model as is into the 3d printer software to see what print solution it would come up with.



As you can see the air duct is filled with solid dark blue. Dark blue represents a printed area and this means that the entire duct will be filled with support material in order to support the top of the duct. This demonstrates why it makes sense to split a complex model up before printing. Not only will this increase the print time but it will mean the model will require more sanding in order to get rid of the support material.



With this in mind I started splitting my model up so that it can be printed in parts. Here I am left with just the hull and mount for the motor. There are also cutouts for the air duct so that it should be easy to fit and glue later on.



With this model imported into the 3D printer software you can see that the print solution looks a lot more simple and the time to print is significantly lower.

I managed to print a couple more items over the weekend.



The first is a Yoshi cup coaster which looks cool and works really well.



It could do with some rubber padding underneath to give it a little more grip on shiny surfaces though.

Yoshi Untersetzer - Yoshi coaster by Renngarage




The second is another ship from my favorite space game Elite Dangerous.



This is the ASP explorer, my current craft in the game. It needs some more tidying but I really like how the engines have come out.

ASP (Elite Dangerous) by JotaErre