the one with the pikachu

software I attempted not to break: fusion 360, rhino, scanning software

hardware I attempted not to break: uprint se (3d printer), sense v2 (3d scanner)

----brainstorming----

As always, I think I spent more time looking up cool things and thinking about what to build than actually building something. This week was especially bad since there were just so many cool things I found that I wanted to build. After a lot of chrome tab opening and closing, I ended up deciding to make a Pikachu bobblehead. I checked Thingiverse and found this design inspired by the Funko Pop! dolls. For the most part, I really liked this design, so I ended up downloading this design and then altering it. I began altering it in Fusion 360, but ended up having some issues working with the mesh mode, so I just switched to Rhino. I made a few small changes: moving the cheek parts in and up so that they were less pronounced but just a little bump, and adding a base to the doll so that it would hopefully be a bit more stable as a bobblehead. Then, I decapitated Pikachu by splitting his head and body right at their intersection, and then made small cylindrical cutouts in each of the parts for a small spring to go into.

----assembling----

Once my file was finished, I printed out Pikachu. The job took about 4 hours and there were a lot of supports to hold up a few parts of Pikachu, like his tail and ears. Since these overhang a lot, the supports were needed so that the material would have something to stack on. The printing ended up going really well - there were a few misaligned pieces that I just cut off at the end, but overall, everything was solid and well formed. I sanded down Pikachu a bit so that any rough edges would be smoothed and the entire form would be a little less rough.

Then came the most fun part - painting! I spent a few hours painting Pikachu using some acrylic paints, doing many really light coats so that the paint would get into the small crevices in the form. It was really fun to paint Pikachu, though some of the parts (like his eyes, his feet, and the base) were hard to paint because of the tiny openings and weird angles. If I was going to do this again, I might use the vinyl cutter to print out guides so that I could just paint things without having to worry about getting paint where it wasn't supposed to be. But after multiple rounds of paint and drying, it was time to finally assemble the bobblehead! I used a hot glue gun and a few springs I had found in lab to attach the head to the body so that the head could move.