Alien Antennae #CostumeChallenge

thingiverse

Everybody will know you're an alien if you have stalks sticking out of your head with little dishes on the end. There's a left and a right antenna, but they're just symmetric mirrors of each other. The .stl files are about 6.5" tall, you can scale them as desired. I'm also including the .blend file incase you want to tweak / remix. As for where you attach these antennae, or how - I'm leaving that up to the end user... could be glued into a wig, or more likely attached to a headband. You might also drill holes near the flat circle and pass through an elastic strap, though I think the strap would have to be rather tight, and you might want to scale the flat circles to be a bit bigger if you're going that way. The ~1.7" diameter flat circle is intended to go flat on your body, with the more cosmetic dimple-dish showing to the world. If you must 3D print the whole thing, you can mix this design with something like http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:242087 or http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:521515 or draw your own extruded arc to attach these to. Personally, I think using a commercial off-the-shelf headband makes a lot of sense. I know that antennae and ears have http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1822443 been http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:34064 done http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:32887 before http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:174949 . Hopefully, these are a new/unique enough style to be interesting for some people who might want to use them in a costume. Antennae are simple, lightweight costume accessories with a lot of visual impact. Print Settings Printer: FlashForge Dreamer Rafts: Yes Supports: Yes Resolution: 0.18mm Infill: 10% Notes: I just went with standard print settings. I don't usually print with rafts/supports, but this design needs it - I had bad luck first try with 2mm tree-like supports. The next two prints with 3mm tree-like supports went fine. You can see the right antenna (left side of the photo) dish came out a bit smoother, I think that's because I had it oriented flat (up) in the print, the other was oriented at a slight angle. Post-Printing Cleanup The support pattern will make your alien look like he's got a rash behind the antennae dishes unless you do a little cleanup. Personally, I think matte is a good finish for these, so I'm just sanding my ABS prints, not doing any polishing. How I Designed This Blender - Skins The basic shape is a segmented linear edge, with three points at each joint. I "skinned" the edge, smoothed it to the "3" level, shrunk all of it, then re-enlarged at the middle of each 3 points to make the joint appearance. The attachment disc is another enlargement, but the dish is a bisected sphere, given a little thickness and set down over the segmented edge - the reverse-dimple in the middle of the dish is the end of the edge. I didn't know how to do skinning, or bisection when I started this, earlier today. Blender has plenty of good tutorials on the web.