Minecraft Creepers

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gnat

(@gnat)

Noble Member

Minecraft Creepers

My 7yr old and his friends are all about Minecraft so after he showed off some Transformers I printed for his birthday his best friend ask if I could print Minecraft.

So I found a nice Creeper model on Thingverse, remixed the head for a "multi-color" result, and started printing.

I ran 2 off for his friend (who apparently is being uncharacteristically gentle with them compared to his other toys) and then ran 16 off for my son.

So far 3D printing has been in the "nifty" arena for me, but this made it "really cool". I remember as a kid that I was always kind of bummed that I couldn't play out scenes from cartoons (Transformers, GI Joe, etc..) or movies (Star Wars), because at best I could have one of the "grunt" characters so there was no way to have the good guys fight say a squad of Storm Troopers. While my son's batch was printing I looked up the official Creeper and was shocked to see them running about $20! Power and material for the batch of 16 was about that price. No way would I spend $320 on these things, so I find it really cool that the printer has made it feasible for him to have a "mass" of "common" characters.

Here is the info (and pics) of the batch of 16:
- ~70 hour print time
- Amazon Green PLA for the bodies and head
- Amazon Black PLA for the faces
- 0.4mm Nozzle
- 0.1mm Layers
- 15% Gyroid infill
- No support (minor bridging issued under the center of the bodies, but nothing terrible)

As detailed in my remix of the head, I updated the gcode to stop before the 21.8mm layer so I could insert the faces into the heads. In my tests and the initial run of 2, moving the head to 0x200 and not changing the Z position was fine as nothing was close to it. If I were to do another run of the 16, however, I would raise the Z as well since the extruder was parked close to one of the bodies. Had it stopped (about 50 hours in) when I wasn't around to do my part immediately I can see a potential of damage to that closest body if it sat for a long time. The other option would have been to let the extruder cool while it waited, but again I didn't plan for the time difference.