I wanted to make a fancy keychain. I kept seeing articulating animals on literally every 3D printing platform, but I wanted a mermaid. I wanted her to be movable like those other animal figures, but small enough to be a keychain (which ends up being my downfall….)
I redownloaded Blender since I had a much older version, and relearned some of the shortcuts and UI. I made a simple version of the mermaid, keeping her really low poly, more out of habit from learning in college. I find out that Blender now has a sculptor like Zbrush? Fantastic! I was curious on how it worked so I simply started playing around and realized I needed more polys. (another mistake we’ll soon find out)
She’s looking pretty darn good. Better than I thought she would, especially since I was learning the tools and really flailing around trying to get things to agree with me. I then add some details to her tail, again trying to keep it fairly low poly because I’m not sure how much detail would actually show through in a 3D print.
We have a body! but… she still needs a neck and some arms. So now I start relearning how the boolean tool works. Makes for quick cuts I need to make decent loop joints.
Her arms fought me. Sculpting and adding that extra geometry? yeah.. made it impossible to connect things and make nice connections. They didn’t want to agree. I redid the 4 times before I eventually said “FINE, You get simple arms now!” which, being a keychain, was probably a better move anyway. I also added hair and had a fairly better time making the neck joint. Now to print!
Sigh…. So… here’s where we found out that she’s too small to print. I had a Snapmaker 2 that I had gotten forever ago, and totally forgot that it was a PAIN to work with. She printed… fineish. but her arm joints and neck welded together and the head joint was so small it snapped off completely. The joints I made were too small. So back to Blender to redo the joints and reinforce the neck.
So, I got a new printer after realizing that the Snapmaker just would not agree, despite fighting and changing every setting possible. So here’s the mermaid redone and printed with a Bambu. Again the extra geometry made this IMPOSSIBLE to work with and so I had to go back to a previous save with the lower polys so I could properly make the new joints. Arms were completely redone and held up much better, but again, was still too thin and one arm snapped off. I also over compensated with reinforcing the neck. It was too chunky and didn’t allow for movement. The tail however was so nice and moved beautifully; just like a fish tail.
So, After doing this, I figured she’s too small. Any joint I put on her would just be so fragile, at least at the small size I wanted her to be. If I made her the size of a Barbie, she’d probably turn out really nice. However, I didn’t want that big of a model. So at this stage, I figure it’s best to redo her from scratch, taking my mistakes into consideration this time, she’ll probably turn out much better. Stay tuned, I’ll redo her at some point and upload the results.