Nick Moolenijzer

For the first part of combining two meshes, I started off with the following two meshes from Thingiverse:
Phone stand


Computer stand

Unfortunately, after a long time struggling with getting the meshes to combine into a single good mesh, I realized the phone stand was a bad mesh to start with. Instead of trying to fix that mesh, I found this headphone stand to work with instead:
Headphone stand

This worked a lot better! I was able to first position the hand up against the headphone stand in the position I wanted, then slowly trimmed away the points and edges from the hand that I didn't need.

I was able to trim the hands using the headphone stand mesh to get the fit perfect. Then I moved the hands slightly into the mesh, did a boolean mesh union, and a quad remesh. Finally this resulted in a closed mesh which Rhino considered a "good mesh" so I counted it as a win!

Finally, I imported to Cura and sliced it to make sure the print would work well.

Moving onto the next phase, I started working on my lamp mesh. I decided I wanted to make a replica of my face on a hanging lamp?

I started off with this terrifying drawing:

Then, I used the iOS app Polycam to scan my head, and after a few very bad attempts, I came up with one that was almost good.


Which resulted in the following STL:

Finally, I cleaned up the mesh with deleting/trimming points and remeshing, mirrored the face to complete a shape, and added a top and bottom. I trimmed the top with a 27mm round hole so that the plug can fit through but not the rest of the housing.

Starting part 2 of the lamp creation! I picked up from where I left off with the previous meshes of my head, but the meshes were "bad" meshes that needed to be reworked.

To do this, I created panels around a single face mesh, then used boolean difference to create a single solid mesh. I then mirrored the fully solid mesh and used boolean union to join the two sides.

During this process, I tried out my first small print to make sure that this was feasible!

After that, I downloaded some animals from Thingiverse, and started trying out some models and prints. I quickly realized I needed to split off a top section of the head and remesh any bad animal meshes, so I did just that! I then unioned the animal meshes to the separate panel to be on top of the head pieces.

I also added a central cylinder that was large enough for the lamp plug to fit through and that could rest on top of the lamp innards to act as a lampshade. I used this to boolean difference the two pieces of the lamp.

Finally I started printing the real thing! I realized from my small test print that I needed to rotate the print so it was top side down if I want to use spiralize outer contour. So I rotated, turned on spiralize outer contour, and used tree supports.

I printed the head separately which took quite a few hours over multiple started/stopped prints. I then printed the animal top panel as a solid, also with tree supports, which took another 9ish hours.

Finally, I assembled! I had to pull out the cylinder from the head piece, then I attached the two panels using tape glue and then ran the cord through the hole in the top, and rested the lamp on the innards! I had to add a small counter weight inside of the shade, but otherwise it all worked out.