It’s live on Thingiverse, too. I’d love to see how it turns for other people! Especially BlueBot.

This was by far the most fun thing I’ve ever designed, because it combined several endorphin-generating interests of mine: 3D modeling, 3D printing, and Star Wars. Talk about a nerd high!

I find designing for 3D fabrication so much more rewarding than designing in a vacuum, for print, or for video games. Unlike print, you wind up with an actual object you can interact with, and unlike video games, you can create your model with a nearly arbitrary amount of detail, because the printer can handle any level of it.

For example, see the Yoda and Devil heads on Thingiverse that are rapidly becoming the benchmark for maximizing your print resolution. I mean, just look at this incredible Yoda head by BlueBot:

Incredible. It’s hard to believe this was printed with a sub-$2,000 3D printer kit. I’m not quite there yet with my $500 Prusa, but I’m getting closer all the time.

That said, there are still two quirks that you need to keep in mind when you’re modeling something you intend to print:

Some part of each piece must touch the build platform. In the case of this model, that meant that I couldn’t print the star Destroyer in one piece because the bottom is a wedge shape, not a flat plane. This was pretty easily satisfied by cutting it in half and printing the top and the bottom beside each other:

Supported overhangs can be tricky. By far the two most troublesome parts of this model were the command bridge and the engines. In the end, a reasonable solution presented itself for the engines: another separate piece printed flat on the build platform that you glue to the back.

The bridge proved a little trickier. In the beginning, I tried separating and printing it flat later, but there was always an ugly gap when I reattached it to the neck. I played around a lot with Skeinforge trying to generate support material and in the process discovered something awesome that I didn’t know about before: a plugin called Skeinlayer allows you to visualize the movement of the extruder before you print. It’s right there in Skeinforge’s interface under the Analyze tab that I bet you never clicked on before (me neither!). This is a great boon to us Replicatorg users, since the program’s interface doesn’t have this feature built in the way Pronterface does.

After a few tests analyzed with Skeinlayer, I found a good combination of settings that resulted in perfect support material and makes the bridge print okay. Here are the settings in the Raft plugin that I used to generate support material:

Go print one!

Video: