Bunny Peel with meshmixer Support

thingiverse

This is a sort of "orange-peel" extracted from the standard Stanford Bunny model included in meshmixer. The object itself is pretty cool, but we think the really exciting part is the custom support structure. This was generated with the support generator in meshmixer 2.0. Files with support generated for a 5cm and 10cm print are included. The images compare our support with MakerWare support for the larger 10cm model. Ours uses much less material and prints an hour faster! Meshmixer is free, get it here: http://123dapp.com/meshmixer Instructions Download and print! I used the Standard print settings in MakerWare on a Replicator 2, with 0.2mm layer height. Do not scale the model, or there is a good chance the posts will not connect, as they are carefully sized. If you want to scale it, you will have to download meshmixer 2.0 (http://123dapp.com/meshmixer) to create a new support structure. The support was not generated completely automatically. In both cases I had to add some additional struts manually. There is a video describing how to do that here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFTyTV3wwsE Without adding extra support struts in several places, the larger bunny failed, as part of it was knocked over by the print head. Watch the video above and look carefully at your support. You want to add extra strength to any areas where there is a large volume above a small support structure, or where the posts are very long. (The automatic algorithm will get better at this in the future!) I used the default parameters for the support generator, except for setting the tip size to 0.5mm. The default 0.85mm is very conservative and will require much more effort to remove.