I found these moon lithograph models and have been having great fun with them: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4102658. He provides several moon spheres ranging from 2 inch to 10 inch.
I started with the 3" moon and remeshed it to fit onto a night light I found on amazon:
Note that these models are highly-detailed and it take a long time to remesh them. If I remember correctly, it took more than an hour to remesh that 3" ball to add my mount design.
And again, all that detail makes the print take time. That was about a 17 hour print.
Next up is an 8 inch moon lamp that I will place in a tree in our back yard.
I designed a mount to hold the pendant light I bought. I split the model in half so that I don’t have to do any rewiring. I will epoxy this to the pendant light. I added a groove for a 60mm o-ring and pockets for 3/16" wooden dowels for alignment:
Then I remeshed the 8" moon ball, which is the largest I can print on my 220x220x250mm Ender 3 V2, to include a mount. This remesh difference and union operations required to do this took 15 hours of FreeCAD processing time–not a typo!
And this is the overnight progress on printing the moon. Cura thinks it will be a 4day 21hour print, but they have been running long so this will probably be a full 5 day print. Printing in PETG since it will be be outside.
An 8" moon globe in a tree. You are truly an evil man my friend. Just think how many birds, moths, & other critters you are going to completely confuse. They will completely lose their way around.
I remember 20 years ago when my son was studying 3d animation and trying to work on a windows pc that was already behind the times. I can remember the long rendering times. His friends couldn’t believe he could do 3d animation with that old computer at all. He gave it to me shortly after when he moved back to St. Barths.
I have always been amazed at how fast Cura and Prusa slicer can spit out g-code.
We would be grateful to know what profile settings (to make it easier, I could import & study your settings if you would be willing to make & share an export of a Cura profile with the settings) you used to get a successful print with these especially regarding having the top close properly. We have been using Cura to print parts of earlier versions of his Moon models in ‘Vase mode’ with the bottom set a few cm below the build plate then aborting the print when there is about a 5cm diameter hole left in the top of the ‘vase’ print version since that is where our Ender 5 starts printing in air…from other of our prints we speculate that our printer could successfully make bridges to close that hole but seem to not see Cura add bridge lines when we slice in non-vase mode so far…
And of course, very much looking forward to an update with how things go with your 5 day ‘outside Tree Moon’ print Thanks!
Yeah, I have not been using vase mode since I want the lithograph image to work. As I’m sure you know, lithographs wouldn’t work in vase mode since modulating thickness of the shell is how the light & dark areas are created in the image.
I’m using the default “Dynamic Quality - 0.16mm” profile for Cura 4.7.1 with the only change being infill set at 100%. (I also made a permanent change to use inner walls flow of 90% for print-in-place articulating prints, which I don’t think has an impact for this print.). Again 100% infill is necessary for the lithograph to work properly. I wouldn’t mind attaching my Cura profile, but I don’t think it is worth it since those are the only two changes to the default profile that I used.
I hear you about that top portion of the ball printing in thin air. I am stunned that it works so well on my printer, but it has so far. The largest moon I’ve printed so far is the 6" and it closed up nicely at the top of the print without any stray strands. I haven’t had to do anything special. I would say, just try it and see if it works on your printer.
1 thing to try would be to sink the model into the Cura print bed so only around an inch is left to print. This could be used to test how well the top fills in.
Thanks, both of you, for your insights. The quick top test did complete. Also, are you using a 0.4 nozzle? (I’m tempted to experiment with a 0.6 for this globe…I’ll do another test top with the 0.6 since I’m using steel nozzles & with steel having different friction and about half the thermal conductivity of brass the flow is definitely different than with brass…especially with the glo filaments we use (its our default white filament since it costs the same.)
Nice. Yeah, that looks similar to mine. I’m still printing with the stock 0.4mm nozzle that came with the printer when I got it at the beginning of October.
What was happening was the strings were slowly accumulating on the exterior of the hot nozzle and eventually got hot enough to burn. Sometimes those burned clumps got tangled into the print and became part of my moon. When I noticed what was happening, I put duct tape on the end of a stick and tried to gather up the strings every once in a while. It felt a bit like loading up a stick with freshly spun cotton candy. But obviously I couldn’t be there for all 107 hours of the print, so several ended up in the moon.
But other than a few burn marks, I’m really happy with how the print came out. I’ll just call those burns fresh craters.
A couple of years ago when I first got my ender 3 pro I printed a globe about 6 inch diameter which took about 36 hours to print and I was just getting up to go take a look at it and I heard a ball bounce on my kitchen floor where the printer was plugging away. It unglued just before finishing.
I was going to do something with it, but I either tossed it or gave it to somebody. It doesn’t take me long to flood my little apartment with plastic doo-dads when people don’t visit like they used to. That is why I’m taking a break besides the fact that my brain is on strike for the moment and I would probably screw something up if I try to push myself too hard and actually do something.
Thanks!
