Articulated Flame Dragon Remix

This is a modified version of the Articulated Flame Dragon, which originally came from ThingiverseThis was sliced with Luban and is printed in Red/Blue eSun Silk Magic PLA on the J1s.  It was printed at 210C with a bed temperature of 65C.  The printing speed was 40 outer, 80 inner, 160 infill.  Retraction was 0.6mm.

When I tried to load the STL file into Luban there were a lot of holes in the geometry after being repaired.  I wanted to print this so I decided to rebuild the model. I put the original STL file into Blender and removed all geometry except for the head, one body section, one leg section, and the tail.

At a number of stages, in the rebuild process, the geometry needs cleaned up.  This usually includes merging vertices by distance (usually 0.01mm), fixing non-flat faces, fixing overlapping faces, dissolving vertices, removing very small triangles and, when needed, make the model a closed manifold.  

The head and the body section were split down an axis using a difference boolean operation with a cube. This leaves a half head and a half body section.  (I now know about auto mirror, however I don't think using it at this stage would have helped).

The leg section was modified to remove all geometry except for one leg, and was cleaned up.  The half body section was duplicated and joined to the leg geometry using a union boolean operation.  This creates a  new half leg section and again, needs cleaned up.

The 3 half pieces, head, body section, and leg section, were modified with a few smoothing and sculpting operations.  The the angle of the horns were made a little steeper to make printing easier.  After messing with the geometry, the tooth and eyes needed some attention, so I added another tooth and rounder eyes.  The linkage tab and hole needed adjusted as well.

The 3 half pieces were mirrored and joined to create closed manifolds and cleaned up.  (This is where auto mirror would have helped).  The leg section was duplicated once, and the body section was duplicated multiple times. The body sections  were scaled in the Y axis and Z axis, to the sizes shown in the images.  These were scaled by trial and error to result in something appealing.  The revised dragon, has fewer segments than the original.  It could be made longer or shorter, as you can see with my first test print.

The J1s is printing really well.  There is no stringing between the segments, including the very tips.  During the first small test print, one middle segment released from the bed.  So, I printed the final one with a brim.

The gold and silver mini articulated flame dragons were printed in Bambu Lab Silk PLA, using the same settings used for the full size dragon. These were printed with the J1s in mirror mode.  The mini dragons  are shown stuck to the bed, with the brim attached, and also shown positioned with the brim removed. There was a small amount of stringing in this print.  If it concerns me, I might try adjusting the filament temperature and/or retraction settings for this filament.