Three new print-in-place animals I designed in code this week. All are single-plate prints with no supports and no assembly.
Tongue-Flick Tree Frog on Lily Pad
A tree frog on a veined lily pad with about 900 skin bumps. The tongue and fly are captive in a channel, so you can slide the tongue out. Print at 0.2 mm layers. Cults3D listing
Flexi Axolotl
Nine ball-joint segments, feathery gills and stubby legs, about 194 mm long. Joint clearance is 0.4 mm. Twist each joint gently to free it after printing. Cults3D listing
Flexi Octopus
Eight tentacles with four ball-jointed segments each, 33 parts in total, about 165 mm across. Cults3D listing
How they are made
The joints are generated with boolean operations in Python (manifold3d). Each segment carries a ball on a neck that sits in a socket 0.4 mm larger than the ball, so the ball is captive but free to move. The part-count check is a connected-components test: if the number of separate bodies is not equal to the number of segments, two parts fused.
One bug worth knowing: if you add legs or other features after cutting the socket, they can fill the socket. Cut the sockets last.
I have not test printed these yet, so scale and clearance may need tuning. Support me at patreon.com/123black.
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