New Thing: Bushes for Gloomhaven

I published a new thing on Thingiverse - a Gloomhaven bush model!  I spent a lot of time trying to get decent looking foliage for my printed upgrades.  I tried printing the big blob style bushes and then painting them green, but I'm not nearly a skilled enough painter to pull that one off.  I tried printing a framework and then attaching clump foliage (basically, green dyed scraps of sponge) to it, but I'm nowhere near gentle enough to make that work (I tried everything I could think of to get that stuff to really stick together, but it was always shedding whenever I moved it).  So, I bit the bullet and decided that I would make my own bush, with actual geometry for the leaves.

I'm still pretty new to 3d modeling, but I've watched a few of Miguel Zavala's youtube videos and have managed to pick up a thing or two.  So, I used those hard earned skills and slaved away with Blender... and made a leaf.  But that's ok!  Because, once I had a leaf, I duplicated it and rotated it 137.5 degrees.  Then, I did it again, and again, and again until I had a decent looking clump of leaves.

Once I had a clump of leaves built, I just had to hang it on a framework.  Luckily, I still had the branch framework that I assembled from my clump foliage experiment (which used branches from this vegetation collection), so I just put a bunch of leaves onto those branches.  After some angling and random rotation (it looks subtly weird when all of a bush's leaf clumps are perfectly oriented to eachother... maybe a good prop for a Lovecraftian horror game or something...), I had a model that I was pretty happy with.

Of course, that model was basically unprintable.  It had leaves shooting out and hanging downwards in every direction and tiny-super-small branches throughout the bush.  So, I spent some time thickening everything up and overlapping as many leaves and branches as I could, to try and make this thing more easy to print.

In the end, I got 6 mostly-successful prints out of the model, but it involved a lot of work.  I think that the best way to print it is to cut it in half first, right where the branches begin to spread out from the main body of the bush, and print it in those two pieces.

The bottom is easy to print, but the top needs a lot of support.  I used Meshmixer tree supports (which I'll write more about soon), giving the thing a 3 mm offset so that the whole top top of the bush would be suspended.  That way, the bases of my supports could all bleed together into a single, invulnerable first layer, and I gained a bit of leeway with where my supports touched down. 

I let Meshmixer generate supports automatically (albeit with only 10 density), then I spent some time reviewing them.  With this model specifically, I had some problems with support trees warping upwards slightly, which caused the nozzle to knock them around a bit and even snapped a few off.  To combat that, I make sure to put cross connections every centimeter or so between my support trees.  When I sliced the model, I also used a Brim in Slic3r, to help get that super strong first layer.

When I was done printing, I had a big pile of support trees.  But, tucked away somewhere inside there, like the mint cream filling of a better-than-average-oreo, was my bush.  It took a lot of delicate work with my wire cutters, but I eventually extracted a pretty successful bush from the jungle.

A few support trees failed, but the spaghetti actually ended up providing enough support to print the leaves on top of it, so I guess that's a win!  Still, when I print with support trees in the future, I'm going to try making them 3 mm thick (instead of the 2 mm trees that I used here), in the hopes of making them work better.