Saturday, April 2, 2011


This is my largest print to date. It measures 10" by 10" by 3" and was printed in two parts that took more than 24 hours each. Even so, it is still just the front half of the teeth of an orca whale.
I found several people online took photos of the same orca skull in a museum, and was able to use all those photos to reconstruct the positions of the teeth, since each photo had a different angle. Unfortunately, I haven't found any CT scans or the like, which might have given me better quality data, so the jawbone here is pretty simplified.
I initially used that model to create a 3D whale model for rendering in Carrara, but I wanted to see what it would look like at full scale, so I printed it. I printed the first part in November, and it had some rough spots in the overhang area. A few weeks ago, I printed the second half, using what I've learned since then, and the result is much nicer, except it got stuck a few times, so I had to restart it in the middle.