3D printing of robots

Hi,

I want to share my story. Our son wrote a letter to the Santa Claus asking to bring him Raijin from War Robots for Christmas. After multiples searches on internet and after contacting Pixonic, the creators of the game, we have learned that no official figurines of Raijin were available. Therefore, the only option left was 3D printing, but for that we needed a CAD model. After a search on internet, I found this one:

free3d.com/3d-model/raijin-76488.html

It is a nice looking model, though there is one panel missing on one side, but it does not have the weapons. Later on, I found the model of the gun as well:

free3d.com/3d-model/nashorn-weapons-65014.html

In the mean time, I also found this model:

www.tinkercad.com/things/4ySU9d9S6QY-raijin-new-and-improved

It is not as nice as the first one, but that was not the main issue, because after sending these models to a few 3D printing shops I learned that none of them were suitable for printing, because they were made up loose parts and because wall thickness was too small.

My first idea was to import the models into Solidworks and fix them. Unfortunately, I could only import the models as surface bodies and not as solid bodies. Moreover, the surfaces consisted of thousands of triangles, which meant that I could not edit the parts directly. I contacted a few Solidworks experts, including the distributor of the software in our region, to learn if there were some tricks I could use, but all said the same – it would be much faster to remake the model than try editing the imported mesh files. Well, the offers that I got for making the model from scratch started at 100 euro, which was too much for me, considering the already high price of printing and decorating the model. Therefore, I determined to fix the model myself.

I looked on internet for suggestions and many people recommended using Meshmixer. Using the software I managed to merge the parts into one solid body, but the result was poor – because of the low wall thickness there were lots of holes and other defects and the printed model would have been very fragile. Next, I tried MeshLab, but without much success either. Eventually I decided to try Blender.

The survey on internet said that this software had many features, but it also had a very steep learning curve and it did. At first, I did not even understand how to pan around the object, but thankfully, there is a lot of information on the internet posted by other users, so after I while I started to get the grip with the software and by degrees I started loving it. Eventually, after working for more than two weeks every evening after work, finishing sometimes as late as 3:30 in the morning, I managed to fix all the parts (over two hundred of them) – remove the internal surfaces, close openings, increase the wall thickness, and merged them into one solid body. The printer confirmed that the model was now suitable for printing and here is the result.

I have now given this model to a professional painter, so later on I could show you the final result. Anyway, if you have the same problem as me and do not want to pay big money for making the model from scratch, give Blender a try – it is hard work, but it is also so much fun and the final result is rewarding!