ClaygroundMake a designer toy.
Block out the silhouette
15 minutes. You end with a toy in one colour that reads from the front, side and top.
Make it cute
15 minutes. You end with two versions of the head, and the one a stranger picks.
- Lorenz's baby schema names a rounder face, a higher forehead, bigger eyes and chubby cheeks, and in Glocker's 2009 study the cuter an infant looked, the more an adult wanted to care for it. Wikipedia on cuteness
Make it stand
15 minutes. You end with a toy with a flat base that stands without help.
- A figure can only stand when its centre of mass sits over the ground it touches, which engineers call the support polygon. That is necessary, not always enough. Wikipedia on the support polygon
Split it into parts
20 minutes. You end with a toy in parts that print flat and fit together.
- Plan the parting lines, the air traps and which parts are separate before you sculpt, not after. FormX
- At a factory the toy is split apart into pieces for the mould and put back together at the end, and a design the factory cannot mould comes back for changes. Kidrobot
- A pin printed apart and pushed into a hole afterwards needs about 0.15 to 0.25 mm of gap on the radius, and QIDI says to treat that as a starting point and print a test piece. QIDI
Check the size
15 minutes. You end with a toy whose thinnest parts survive being small.
- Munny stands 2, 4, 7 or 18 inches tall, and a Dunny 3 or 8 inches. Wikipedia on Kidrobot
- A Bearbrick 100% is 7 cm high and a 400% is 28 cm. Wikipedia on Bearbrick
- On a filament printer with a 0.4 mm nozzle, a wall should be a multiple of 0.4 mm, so Formlabs advises 1.2 mm over its table's 1 mm. Formlabs
- Resin figurines want walls of 1.2 mm or more in thin parts, and features under 0.5 mm need checking. Figuro
Print and paint
25 minutes. You end with a printed, painted toy, and a list of what to fix next time.
- At Kidrobot each round of notes to the factory has about half as many comments as the one before, and a toy is approved when it is undeniable. Kidrobot
- Resin prints need a drain hole of at least 2 mm, typically 2 to 4 mm, and hollow shells are 1.5 to 3 mm thick. Figuro
- Finish by sanding at 220 to 400 grit, priming with two or three coats, painting base colour, detail, shading and highlights, then sealing in thin coats. FormX