3D Printed Chess Set

Preliminary models:

(See previous post for the sketches)

The king required a bit of troubleshooting to get the more complex curves. For the ears and the horns, I used sweep2, using the curves as the rails and the circles as the sweep shapes. As for the head, it's pretty much just a stretched-out sphere. In terms of proportions, I did some experimenting to see what felt right. I decided to not include a nose for this model just to simplify it a little bit since it already had details indicating a general face (the ears and horns).

Ears:

Horns:

I didn't keep the base model, but the queen was basically 6 sets of squares that I booleanDifference'd the pips into and then put together into a cube. (I had a similar model from the castle project that I reworked so that the pips were indented rather than on the outside).

The Bishop, Knight, and Rook were all made using revolve and the noses made using a sphere then scale1D to get them to become more ovular. The handles were mostly sweep around a curve (which I overshot so that they would booleanUnion nicely into the rest of the model).

The pawn was made mostly using the interpolate curves feature, with the wings mirrored through the middle. The wings were also offset then lofted together after I used planarSrf. I was considering having the wings curl in, similar to a bat, but I decided that I liked the way it looked flat, not to mention it is both easier to model and print. The candle wick part of the bomb was made using sweep1.

Model renders (concepts):

(King, Queen, Bishop, Knight, Rook, Pawn) 

Front:

Back:

Full set:

Consideration of feedback from peer-to-peer sessions:

In regards to the peer feedback, I got a few suggestions to lower in the straw and the top of the cup to make it look like it has some depth (before the "liquid" was flat with the top of the cup and the straws were just cylinders), which was a really good suggestion. Another suggestion I got was the queen's head was too big, which I was thinking that it would be better to size up the king's head as it was a comment about their proportions to each other and the king already had a small head anyways. Unfortunately, I did not incorporate this because at the time of the print, I had already set up four of my pieces to print at the same time (including the king), so in reality I just forgot to make that small change and didn't want to take up even more time on the printers. During these feedback sessions, I was told that they were a comprehensive set, but I realized that if you took the queen out of context, it doesn't seem to have enough to give sense of what character it is based off of (it just looks like a dice), so I decided to add on a mustache to further incorporate it.

Printing process:

Overview: For the king, the horns didn't print exactly like how I expected, but I think it is fine because horns wouldn't be perfectly smooth in real life either and it sort of gives a more natural appearance that I enjoyed the more I looked at it. Another thing I noticed was that maybe I should have made the queen a little bit taller, but I think in the grand scheme of things, it is not a big issue due to the fact that there is only one queen on each side. (During the modeling process, I scaled the die down because it looked too big in comparison to the king, this was before peer feedback, but didn't change the height because I had them approximately scaled to match a chess set.) 

In regard to the printing process, I had a few struggles, but I was able to get past them. The first issue I came across was that someone decided to put an hour-long print on the printer that I booked for three hours (I had multiple pieces on my g-code). It was a bit of an issue considering that someone else was also booked right after my print so I had to make do with the time that I had (I couldn't bring myself to stop someone else's print and possibly inconvenience them even though they may have deserved it). Something else that occurred (during my first initial test print) was that two of my pieces printed in black while the rest were white because the other printers were all using the rest of the white filament when I went in to do my print. Of course, after peer feedback I had to reprint them anyways so the color thing wasn't an issue.

The only other issue I came across was the fact that my rook needed support material on the piece, so it left some marks, but I think a bit of sanding and painting would help it. Some of my other pieces had marks on them too even without using support material, so it could also be a general printer thing.

Final results:

Eventually, I would like to print out a full chess set, but I am holding off until after the semester ends so that I'm not taking up extra time on the printers as multiple classes are doing this project/using the printers.