Jorge Larach Project 3: 3D Printer

March 19, 2025

Process

This project started, like the ones prior, with the Youtube tutorial. I left Project 2 feeling pretty confident with my Fusion abilities, but was immediately thrown in the dark again with the "Create Form" toolkit, which I had no idea how to use. Halfway through the tutorial, I was asking myself why on Earth we were using this software, which felt extremely lacking in control, precision, and ease of use. When I had something resembling what the tutorial was asking us to make, I left the project alone for a while. I thought up a lot of cool things to 3D print which would be useful and fun, but the Fusion "Create Form" platform just felt way too restrictive and imprecise to do anything remotely functional or interesting. I eventually decided to freeform a sculpture, starting out with a vase-like thing, and experimenting with different tools until I ended up with something I thought was cool and worth printing. After a number of iterations and tweaks, where I added parts, creased and de-creased, copied and pasted, I had something I was happy with, and went ahead with printing.

Results

My final structure originally started out as a standing cylinder, to which I added a series of horizontal and vertical edges. I've been fascinated by 3D printing for almost a decade, and one of the first things I ever printed was a low-poly Stanford bunny; I really liked the aesthetic, so I went with a mostly low-poly direction for this project. I added creases to some of the edges and flattened some of the faces in a symmetrical pattern, and also added horizontal ring edges around the cylinder which I shrunk to create an undulating effect. I did the opposite for the ring along the top rim, which I grew to make the thing look like a vase. Later on, I decided I didn't actually want to make a vase, and it would be better to make a sphere that fit perfectly on the top of the cylinder. Way cooler than the low-poly Stanford bunny, I always thought that voronoi diagrams were kind of mind blowing, and intended to make a voronoi sphere. I quickly found that doing a pattern like that on Fusion's janky platform would be impractical and annoying, so I went with a solid sphere instead. My first print attempt printed the entire sphere, but only the first layer of the vase thing. After blankly staring at my screen for a while, it turned out the BambuLabs software didn't approve of the vase's thickness and decided not to tell me. Making it a bit thicker fixed the problem, and the second print began. It turns out I had not properly configured the supports, so the sphere just rolled away and the print was botched. Thankfully, Mr. Hodge noticed and started a third print on Wednesday morning, which was successful.

Reflection

I abhor Fusion 360 with a burning fury. We were on decent terms after working with Sketches for a couple of projects, but this was something else. I think its "Create Form" platform is a stain on humanity and should be scrubbed immediately from the face of the Earth. Navigating that interface was like navigating a bad dream. That being said, once the STL files were exported, I enjoyed working in BambuLabs (despite our earlier misunderstanding), and was impressed at how it generated the tree supports, calculated print time, provided an insane amount of information about each nozzle movement during printing, and how good and intuitive the UI in the application was. Literally every part of this project that came after the Fusion part was genuinely interesting and fun. That being said, I will concede that for free-form, abstract, unplanned designs, Fusion could be worse. Miraculously, I was able to make something (after some time and many references to Google) that I thought was worthwhile.