All 3D models with links span 3 words; the first leading to MakerWorld, the second leading to Printables, and the 3rd leading to Thingiverse.
Intro
Dear lord, is it the first of the month again? It went by so fast; it’s almost like a few days were shaved right off the end. Anyway, it’s been quite the busy month–despite my best laid plans to get certain things done, Thingiverse surprised us all by announcing that they were completely and utterly bought out by MyMiniFactory, and as you can guess, that shook up the 3D printing world a bit. I’ve been a user for years, and given the new management’s apparent willingness to receive user feedback, I invested quite a bit of time trying to influence the platform to move in the (or at the very least, a) right direction.
More on that later, but let’s get on to what all else I’ve been up to in the past month!
Last Month’s Report
Pokemon TCG Pocket Coins
I’ve got good news and bad news:
The good news is that I’ve finally purchased a 3rd-party effect plate for the H2D, and have finally gotten back to printing!
As such, the Serena coin and the Mega Charizard Y Coin have been uploaded! Yayyy!
Just look at the sparkles on that girl. Absolutely glowing!
The bad news is this:
Yeah, I’m not sure what the deal is, but I cannot for the life of me get this Goomy to work. Managed to get Serena through with a fair amount of failures but a decent amount of successes, then the Charizard came out with like 3 failed coins, and now I can’t get the dang things to stick to the bed all the way through the print. After much calibration I’ve gotten the first layers down STUCK, but then after a few more they start warping and peeling right up. Genuinely don’t know what else I can do to make them stick; I can’t add glue or anything since it’d ruin the effect.
My latest endeavor involved cranking up the chamber temperature a bit too far, which caused the PLA to soften in the extruder assembly, which I had to take apart to fix, and I thought had properly cleared the clogged nozzle since it seemed to be flowing nicely during the filament change, but…it didn’t work for the high-accuracy calibration. So while Goomy, Mega Gardevoir, and Mimikyu are literally all finished in terms of modeling and 3mfs and whatnot, they’re just going to have to wait until I figure things out.
Oh, and Iono just came out with the new pack, and I am NOT looking forward to coloring all her little tiny accessories and stuff in. At least the new “Pokemon 30th Anniversary Design” looks interesting and easy to print.
Project Kurt
*bebebebebebe wooooOOOOP!*
That’s the sound of a Kricketune chirping, because I got absolutely nothing here!
I received word from my editor that he’d be finished with my next video within a day, and that was *checks notes* February 1st. I checked back with him a few days ago so I could report back here, and it seems that while the latest vid will be finished eventually, he’s got a bunch of exciting personal opportunities coming up that have been pulling him away from editing for me. Obviously, I’m not going to go into detail about his private affairs too much, but suffice it to say that they are very much a higher priority than editing my personal vids.
So a Sport Ball/Park Ball combo vid will be coming out sometime, but after that, I really don’t know what the deal is. There’ll still be a whopping ten more videos that need to be done after that, so we’ll see. Might have to just knuckle down and do them myself. Unless someone wants to try their hand at editing them–hit me up!
Goals of Olde
Last month was a bit strange in terms of goals; I just kind of said I wanted to get caught up on projects/get organized, so… let’s talk about it!
Pumpkin Man in Japan
I did indeed manage to clean up and even clean out (to a certain degree) my ClipsInProgress video folder. It went from this (left) to this (right):
Granted, this was just a lot of consolidation and straight up giving up on a few of them, but I did manage to get a few shorts from this out into the world, with the following topics:
And perhaps more relevant to the 3D printer heads out there, an instruction video for my H3 model rocket.
This came on the heels of finding out that this particular model was stolen (fun story–worth a read!). In short, someone made some really amateurish edits to my existing model and then used it without crediting me, so I went ahead and made the same edits myself, but better!
It’s now modular, and you can swap out the number of engines, boosters, and the size of the nose cone, as well as update the base to change the model number to reflect that. Check it out!
Oh yeah, and I did indeed finish the Suika Game model I promised. If you happen to have this very specific set of gacha toys, you can display them with it! Accompanying video will come soon, though.
Last up on the list of videos… wait, is that me on a 1-on-1 video call with the CEO of Thingiverse???
Acquisition of Thingiverse
No one saw this coming, least of all me! Now, I’m not going to recap the entire ordeal right here… because I spent a lot of time this month recapping it.
Yes, a surprising amount of my time this month was spent on the Thingiverse acquisition–the short version of it is that MyMiniFactory bought Thingiverse, but instead of quickly and quietly gutting the site to make a quick buck, the new management has taken things slowly, and has been spending most of their time right now gathering information on how best to handle changes to the platform going forward.
Accordingly, I have been spending large amounts of time trying to shoot as much feedback out there in order to guide the ship in a good direction. As you all may know, Thingiverse is one of the 3 sites I upload all my models to, so it would be in my best interests if it got some life breathed into it.
In all, I posted my initial insights about it, watched and summarized the AMA they did with the community, shared my thoughts with the CEO, and finally wrote an article about potential monetization strategies Thingiverse could implement. Overall, kinda crazy that the CEO reached out to me personally (granted, they presumably just contacted people who contributed to the feedback forums and also had an email attached to their account), and it was cool that he seemed very much open to feedback.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not all this feedback will be taken in and implemented well, but… hey, at least I have a right to complain if things go wrong!
What’s Next?
Alright, folks, I apologize for my lack of clarity last month, but I have solid goals this time! Without further ado, let us dive in!
Main Goal
So after creating Durandal, I decided to hit up the Fire Emblem Reddit to take requests for what I should do next. I didn’t think I was going to break upvote records or anything with the post, but it got like… 5 suggestions, with the top one getting 4 votes. While Alm’s Falchion technically won, it also happened to be the first suggestion anyone posted, so it feels a bit weird declaring it the winner when the results are literally (at the time of writing)
Alm’s Falchion - 4 votes
Tyrfing - 3 votes
Urvan, Basilikos, and Sol Katti - 1 vote
And the Sol Katti was stated as a joke!
So I’ve decided on Urvan, because I had already been thinking about making it, and the dude who suggested it said they’d print it if I did. And since I’m here for the people, their wish is my command! So I’m going to have to order some more filament and find wall space to put it, but… hopefully I’ll be as cool as the original leader of the Greil Mercenaries before the month is out.
Stretch Goal
Recently, I purchased for myself a rather nice The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild pen, and my girlfriend was kind enough to get me a similar Nintendo Tokyo Store one as well. They’re really cool–they have black, blue, red, and green ink, as well as a mechanical pencil and eraser. And the other interesting thing is that I happened to find a non-Nintendo one sitting on my coworker’s desk.
As it turns out, it’s called a Uni Jetstream 4&1, and it in and of itself is a really popular pen, at least here in Japan. During classes, when I walked around the room to help each of the students out and answer their questions, I started noticing that dozens of dozens of my students owned this exact type of pen–just with blue bodies, wood-print grips, custom name engravings…
A lotta people own this pen.
So, I thought it might be interesting to try and make a really aesthetic-looking pen holder for it–give it a weighted base, make it ergonomic to take the pen from it and easy to replace it, and have little hidden storage compartments for the lead, erasers, and replacements for the ink cartridges. The overall goal is to make something that wouldn’t look out of place on the front page of a 3D model site.
ImpossiGoal
I swear this poor thing has been almost up to bat like three times now, but you know those models that have single-string extrusions suspending something? I wanna make one of those. No idea how to do it, but I’ll see if I can’t get on it this month!
Conclusion
Man, February went by too quick. Glad I could get things organized, but still a little irked by the lack of coins progress and how editing the Project Kurt vids has seemingly returned back to my hands.
Ah, well. March will see more things, but
Oh dang. Just registered that Spring Break is at the end of the month. Huh. That might eat into the time I can use to get stuff done.
Welp, in any case, here’s my Bucket List! Lemme know if you see anything interesting on there you wanna see me do.
Bucket List
This is just every idea from the last time put here again for recordkeeping. I’ll probably delete some if I have zero interest in doing them, but feel free to skim through this and see if anything catches your fancy. So here they are!
Testing actual VG Boomerangs
Boomerangs have always interested me–I mean, how cool is a piece of wood with 0 moving parts that returns on its own after you throw it? I’m interested in designing a bunch of Boomerangs from Video Games (Specifically from the Zelda Series) and testing out how well they actually would fly if you threw them irl, if at all. Lemme know if you know of any games that have boomerangs in them.
3D Modeling Poseable Models in Blender
I know Blender is more about animations and stuff, but I currently almost exclusively use it for importing one kind of filetype, and then exporting it as another. Since it certainly seems to be a powerful tool for handling meshes and stuff, I figure it’d be good to learn more about how it works, and to try and model some basic poseable figures in there. The prefecture I live in, Kagoshima, has a group of mascots that are all pigs–I think it’d be cool to create a base form for them, add bones onto it, pose it like they do in their promotional images, and then add their little accessories to make a cute little figurine set.
Gameripping and Crowdfunding
I’ve used The Models Resource to find models as reference material many times before, so I was considering repaying the favor and getting some models to add. The Magical Sword from Hyrule Warriors has always been in the back of my mind to make, but there are a couple problems.
No one ripped the sheath from the game. Both the sword and shield are there, but no sheath to put the blade in.
It would take a lot of filament. More than would be sustainable for a hobbyist such as myself.
For this challenge, I’d like to see if I can’t learn how to rip the model, so I can try and upload it myself. And to get the filament, I want to try out Maker World’s crowdfunding feature to see if I can’t scrape together enough to get the filament to properly test it and then print it out. It’s a pretty complicated model, as you can see here. It’d be a big undertaking by itself in order to try and adapt it.
Making Practical Mechanisms
So I have no idea what direction this would go, but have you ever worn a hard hat? You put it on, and there’s a knob in the back that tightens it down so it doesn’t fall off your noggin. I want to try making a headband that works like that, but has a mechanism in the front that lets you easily attach and detach a mask. How would that work out? Is PLA even bendy enough to make a reliable headband? I don’t know, but I found the patent for the ratchet, so…
Making More Rubber Band Hinges
Y’all remember Bakugan? I do. Really cool marble-like toys with a hidden magnet in ‘em which, when passed over a metal card, triggered the magnet which unlatched a bunch of springed hinges, transforming it into a little figure. Really crappy card game, super interesting concept. I wanna see if I can make one using rubber bands to power the hinges, similar to how my Poke Ball works.
Working with TPU
Fun fact: I’ve never printed in TPU. Ever. Sounds fun though. I’ve seen people make squeaky rubber duckies with TPU, and I want to try to do that myself. Except instead of a Duck, I want to make a Pig Ball, from the obscure PlayStation game Tomba! 2. This is the highest resolution photo I could find of it via a quick google search, which should tell you how rare it is.
What are those Suspended String Thingies Called?
I’ve seen some pretty cool models like the one in this image here. I have no clue (ok I have some clue) how they work, but I want to try one! I’m a fan of Naruto, and for some reason these prints remind me of a Sharingan floating in a tank. I’d like to make one, and swap out the design for every one seen so far in the series. Shouldn’t be that hard, right?
Trying out Some Cosplay
Really small goal, but I want to try and make Zero’s Buster from Mega Man X3. I’ve got an idea to try and use straps that might make it relatively ergonomic and solid, but I also want to think of a way to make it easy to take on and off.
Electronics and API, maybe?
A while back I made a video (or 2… or 3…) in which I attempted to make disco lights for my twitch stream. I kinda succeeded, but the end product was really finicky, unreliable, and hard to set up. Basically, the gist of the thing was that I wanted to make a spinning ball with holes in it that projected shapes from an internal light onto my walls, in order to spice up my twitch stream. I was toying around with trying to make one from the maker’s supply, and if that worked out, I want to try and sync it up with my twitch stream so that it changes color if I get a follow, raid, sub, or something like that. That’d be gnarly. I’ve had a couple people tentatively offer to help, and I feel bad that I haven’t followed through…
The old one had (technically) remote control, RGB capability, and variable spinning speed somehow, but it’d take a lot of learning to figure out how to do it effectively and reliably.