Lotad Dish

TL;DR: I made a two-toned Lotad spill tray upon which the Oddish planters (or really anything) can sit. This model was easy to split into two colors—one for the body and one for the dish. Initially, I manufactured the part using a pause for a filament swap… this turned out ok, but ultimately I decided printing two separate parts gave better results.

Here’s the gallery:

I finished making this Lotad spill tray a few weeks ago, but hella lagged in writing this post >.<;; For those who haven’t kept up with newer Pokemon, Lotad is a Gen 3 water/grass type which has a lily pad on its head. It pretty much looks like what I modeled ;P The dish was made using both the more traditional CAD model workspace to create the lily hat and the sculpt workspace to create the main body in Fusion 360. I created this model with the idea of trying multi-colored prints in mind. The lily pad is to be green and the body is to be blue. I started the prototyping off with a single color print at first to validate the model. After it turned out well, I went ahead and tried changing the filament partway though. The only color I had at the time though was the same bluish-green color I used for my Oddish prints, which was less than ideal. I bought a light blue filament from a new company, 3D Solutech on Amazon. The filament was a great color, and is cheaper than my normal filament, but unfortunately, this material requires a lot more tuning of my print settings (which I have not done yet) to get the same quality of print I can get with my usual filaments. Completing the filament swap during the print was surprisingly easy to do, and the prints turned out quite well. However, the geometry of this model simply requires a huge amount of support for the large overhangs, which seemed wasteful. In my initial design, Lotad’s belly was suspended in the air, so the print required some hard-to-remove supports. To eliminate the need for support material, I made two important decisions. First, I split the print into two parts—the lily pad, and the body. Second, I altered the design of the body so Lotad’s belly would sit more flush on the tabletop. The belly change is hardly even noticeable from a visual standpoint since the entire part is so squat to begin with. Although I need to manually glue the two parts together, the result is much cleaner looking and takes less effort than cleaning the support material.

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