Wow. Your awesome little critter has convinced me to join this community.
What are you working with and what else do you make?
Bambu Lab A1 and mostly PLA for material (aka the easiest one to print).
When I need something flexible, I use some TPU. And when I need something that will hold for a long time, I use PETG.
I make all kinds of stuff, mostly toys and household items, sometimes I design something myself (generally the stuff that’s meant to be useful, not pretty), sometimes I use models other people created.
Currently I’m printing a puzzle for kids.
Edit: a recent print of mine:
Hoooly spyro that’s another amazing piece, congratulations!
Is the layering apparent primarily because of equipment, material，print speed or does each factor have a roughly equitable impact on layering?
Spyro looks amazing, I’m just curious about the technical side.
Thanks for sharing, it’s pretty inspiring to see what people are making.
Settings, mostly. The layering is always there, but how visible it is depends on the layer height. Both the Depresso and Spyro were made with 0.2mm layer height, which is a good compromise between looks-good/prints-fast. If you want something that looks really nice, you’d go to 0.08mm layer height (the lowest this particular printer can go with this particular nozzle size). The print would take around 2.5 times longer with 0.08mm layer height.
Material also affects this, but PLA generally is the easiest to print with and looks among the best visually. If the print speed were really high it would affect it as well, but it was well under the maximum speeds.
This is a FDM printer which basically lays one layer of heated plastic over another, there are also SLA printers which can go much lower layer heights and thus the prints are visually much better, though use-case of such printers are limited to pretty looking pieces, you can’t really make anything functional with them.
Edit: If you want the prints to look really great, you’re gonna have to do some post-processing anyway, like sanding down the uglier parts and painting it with some acrylic paint. That way you avoid the visible layers as well.
Okay, thanks for the in-depth explanation.
Im looking forward to a lot of functional pieces, i like tinkering with things a lot.
I’m surprised you can make the layers even smaller, both depresso and spyro already look great!