Colorful, Foldable 3D Printed Polyhedra!

hey guys welcome to make anything I'm Devin and a few weeks ago I shared this video where we made some really cool full-color phone cases on a single extruder 3d printer using this technique of doing multiple passes with different colors on the first layer of the print and then printing the rest of the model on top of that it ended up working really well it got me super excited and then people started sharing their use of the technique on Twitter and Instagram and that got me more excited so I really wanted to just keep pushing this idea to see how far I could take it the biggest constraint with this technique is the fact that it really only works on the first 1 or 2 layers of the print before it becomes a real inconvenience but I still wanted to see if it was possible to get a full color 3d model using this technique and I've been exploring that over the past week or three so today I'm gonna share my results so far let's do it cool before we jump right into this project I want to thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video if you're interested in honing your creative skills or running your own business skill share is such a valuable resource it's this online learning community with over 25,000 high-quality lectures and as a premium member you have unlimited access with the New Year just around the corner now is the perfect time to fuel your curiosity creativity or even your career personally I'll be using the opportunity to finally learn After Effects and other skills that will help me improve the quality of my videos an annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month and the first 500 of my subscribers to follow the link in the description will get a two-month free trial so you've got nothing to lose and a lot to learn check it out all right let's get back to my video check out these simple dice that I printed out they are simple but they're also very cool for a number of reasons as you can see we've got a two color print here with some light blue and some transparent matter hackers Pro PLA and you might notice a few things about this print that are particularly interesting for one thing each side here is completely smooth and we've got two colors on every single side and yet this was printed on a single extruder printer the trick is that these dice don't come off the printer looking like this instead they look like this so what we have here is basically an unfolded dye and this is going to be useful for a number of reasons for one thing it allows us to use that multicolor printing technique on just the one layer but when we fold it all together we still get colors on every single side another reason this is great for this purpose in particular is that it allows us to print every face of the dye in the same way in the same orientation and that's going to help us make a more balanced design a common problem with printing dice on a 3d printer is that they may not come out completely balanced but by unfolding it like this I was able to design it in a way that each piece is gonna have the same weight essentially and it's gonna be distributed equally across the whole die as you can see on this side we've got all these little tabs and these are what allow us to snap everything into place so I'm just gonna carefully start bending the faces first I'm gonna start with this loop and then I'll just snap that into place and then we've got the two sides we can kind of press together like this and after some satisfying snaps everything is assembled into a nice perfect die I think these came out looking really cool and well I haven't done any super intense testing yet they do seem to be fairly well balanced I also made some larger ones with some more intricate designs to really test out this technique and these ones are really robust and they're nearly solid inside so they're really heavy and they feel great a little bit big for actual gaming purposes and they can probably put a dent in a table so these ones are more decorative but they're definitely still super cool these dice served as an awesome proof of concept because they showed that we can take this multiple color technique as well as this idea of folding prints and combine those to make true full-color prints and all the surfaces are also completely smooth which is just an added bonus after my success with those cubes I moved on to other polyhedra starting with this tetrahedron it's another one of those platonic solids which means that all of the faces are the same shape and they all meet each other at the same angle and this angle where these two meet internally is called the dihedral angle and that ended up being really important because that's how I managed to design these internal clips that clip together and hold the shape these dihedral angles will vary between different polyhedra and the numbers aren't always clean whole numbers but luckily wikipedia has a whole list of all those angles and it's just a great resource to learn all about these shapes in general it took a lot of trial and error but I discovered that the trick here was to make the taper angles of each face equal to the dihedral angle divided by two and subtracted from 90 with that value you could extrude these to a point and when folded up each point will meet right at the center of the polyhedron although in this case we'll just make it one millimeter thick I used that same angle to make sure that these clips snap together in the perfect position as well but those details will have to wait for another video anyways here's that dodecahedron printing out and this is another one of those cool platonic solids it's made up of twelve equal pentagonal faces I cut these triangular holes in all the faces to give this model a kind of wireframe look it saves material when printing and I also just think it looks really interesting these things are really satisfying so I just kept designing different polyhedra here's a rhombic dodecahedron and this one has some really cool hidden shapes depending on how you look at it check out this crazy one it's called a rhombic try accont ahed Hren and it's made up of 30 identical rhombic faces of all the shapes I modeled though my favorite has to be the icosahedron it's just got this really Pleasant shape and it's made up of all these equilateral triangles now that I have a good handful of models for all these basic polyhedra it's not too difficult for me to make little changes that end up creating drastically different looking models in the end here I took the dodecahedron and I created these hollow pyramids so that when it's all folded together they all point inward towards the center of the shape and it just creates this really dramatic looking design and you know I heard you like dodecahedron so I put a dodecahedron inside of this dodecahedron a so-called [Music] now this one is just a basic dodecahedron and I didn't actually design this to color pattern it's just the result of using a concentric in fill in my slicer and switching out the filament halfway through the first layer I did something similar with this next print but I took the boat and tube off of my any cubic I three mega and I just filled it with all these little 3-inch sections of filament so before I even start the print the whole Bowden tube is filled up with all these little sections of different colors of filament I'm essentially manually splicing the filament and then when it starts printing out you'll see it just transitions between all these different colors I finished it off by switching to white filament and that gave me this really unique hyper icosahedron another option is to just disable the top and bottom layers of your print so that the infill gets exposed like I did with this crazy rounded icosahedron using the wiggle infill in simplified 3d and here's a bunch of different ones I did using the same technique here's a simple but aesthetically pleasing rounded dodecahedron that I made using that multiple pass coloring technique and with this pyramid icosahedron I just did a standard filament swap after a couple of layers then there's this crazy one where I basically threw together all these different techniques this is another try a canta he'd run that I modified to have this kind of Spore like sphere on the inside it's a really wild looking one [Music] as you can see I went pretty crazy with these polyhedra just testing more techniques seeing what different shapes and variations I could come up with and yet this obsession is unrelenting so I wanted to do more with it I wanted to make some more things some thingy some thingy things so the next thing I did was make a kind of planetarium light using this dodecahedron shape and they put a bunch of holes in it to match all the constellations and stars a few shooting stars in there as well and if you shine a light from the inside you get a pretty cool projection of all those little dots I still haven't found exactly the right LED to stick in here they get a nice bright clear crisp projection if anyone out there is a like a lighting expert or has some suggestions do share with me in the comments because I'd like to get some really cool projections using techniques like this with this one I use that concentric infill slicer setting again to get this really cool brushed metal looking finish with this vertigo gray PLA since this model is so big I actually printed it in two halves and the second half ended up failing just before the clips actually printed but instead of wasting the print I decided to just use my 3d pen to hold the panels together and that ended up working really well I'm actually kind of glad this happened because it's a great demonstration of repairing a 3d print using this 3d pen the final thing that I really wanted to accomplish before posting this video is printing a polyhedron version of our planet Earth so I referenced the dime action map projection created by legendary architect and designer Buckminster Fuller to create this icosahedron globe now I had several frustrating failures with this print because the panel's kept breaking off and I realized it was because I was using old filament that had gone brittle with these folding prints it's a really good idea to use fresh filament or at least make sure that it's really nice and dry using lots of desiccant or a filament drying system like this print dry from matter hackers this is basically just a repurposed food dehydrator but it's got some special hardware that makes it easier to use while printing eventually I did print a successful globe and I also made this little stand to go with it so it actually just holds in place using tension so you just have to put these caps on the top and bottom so we'll locate Antarctica there it is it's green because this is a projection of Earth in the year 2022 we'll place the other cap on the top point and then just lift this up and snap it into place all right there we have it a really cute little model and definitive proof that Earth is an icosahedron [Music] here's another version I printed using that exposed infill technique to create this kind of mesh globe and I also created this little stand with an LED inside of it to place underneath this globe that was printed using translucent filaments lastly I wanted to test out the giant build volume of my any cubic Chiron 3d printer so I printed this 175 percent scale version of the globe and it's super cool alright so this is where we're at in terms of this whole combination of techniques I think it's going in a really cool direction there's so much that can be done I'm already swarming with ideas you know I want to take my 3d printed fabric and make panels and make a shape out of that I want to make disco balls lift the fan lights there's so much that can be done I want to hear your guys's ideas too so please share in the comments by the way full disclosure I'm not claiming to have invented these techniques so people have been doing multiple color prints people have been doing foldable prints it's more a matter of bringing many ideas together and creating new things based on that that's kind of how creativity works I just want to see how far we can take this together so please share any ideas you guys have if you guys want to download and print these for yourselves please check out my mind mini factory page all of these designs will be available to download many for free others for a very affordable price I'd love for you to share your prints as well my manufactory has an app that's getting really good at this point and I want to see your different color combinations and stuff you guys come up with all right well that's it for today I hope you guys like where I'm going with this and if you want to follow along make sure you subscribe to maybe even hit that little bell that little you know do all of that stuff and I'll see you next time until then I'm Devin and of course don't forget to stay inspired [Music] you

Channel: Make Anything

Views: 239,334

Rating: 4.9526343 out of 5

Keywords: 3D printed, 3d printing, 3D print, 3d printer, make anything, colorful, foldable, 3D prints, polyhedron, polyhedra, globe, dymaxion, map, planetarium, light, tetrahedron, icosahedron, triacontrahedron, dodecahedron, folding, papercraft, 3D pen, geometry, satisfying 3D prints, cool 3D prints, best 3D prints, top 3D prints, PLA, printdry

Id: DXeR6tmcZCE

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/megablue]

/u/makeanything did it again. i am actually very impressed by the super innovative 3d prints...