Veronin a.k.a. the CrowdCow was a project we worked on back in January 2015. It took Maz about two months to sculpt the cow, fragment all the pieces to be printed for the cow, as well envision how a life size cow would come together after being 3D printed by the Portland 3D Printing Lab community. This project was donated to the Urban Farmer as an educational installment to teach about cuts on a cow. Maz And Attero did not get any paid compensation for the time put into this project. The biggest challenge was designing all the pieces in a way that would allow for each piece to be slightly different due to all the different 3D printers owned by members of Portland 3D Printing Lab who volunteered their time to print the pieces. We enjoyed being part of the project and working closely with Portland 3D Printing Lab to get this crowd 3D print completed. If you haven't heard of the Portland 3D Printing Lab, be sure to look them up. They are a great community we are proud to have been part of since the beginning.
Read Forbes article about Veronin here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2015/09/29/the-logistics-of-3-d-printing-a-cow-in-portland/
Read OregonLive article about Veronin here: http://www.oregonlive.com/multimedia/index.ssf/2015/05/portland_3d_printing_meetup_gr.html
Learn about Portland 3D Printing Lab here: https://www.meetup.com/Portland-3D-Printing-Lab/
Also Portland 3D Printing Lab Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/pdx3dplab/
We greatly appreciate any tips. Proceeds will be shared with the Portland 3D Printing Lab.
Printer:
Cartesian Style
Rafts:
No
Supports:
No
Resolution:
0.25mm
Infill:
18
Notes:
I didn't see a way to keep the files organized like they were for our production group. Make sure to follow the diagram for assembly.
Use the dove tail biscuits to assemble Veronin together. You will need quite a few of them and it doesn't hurt to have extra. It is best to start building from the bottom up and if need be, build the top as one section and the legs as the other, and finally assemble the two halves. This print is very heavy once assembled and be sure to have your friends or community to help with assembly.
Due to the pieces being printed by so many different people who had sliced the files slightly different than others and having their printers in different stages of calibration, not every single piece fit together. Most of the pieces fit together but there were a few that needed to be sanded down. Since some printers experienced more warping than others, not all the seams lined up and needed to be heat molded and later soldered together. This definitely gave Veronin the feel of being made by a community and hand made.
Two Very Long Months
When I first started sculpting the cow, which was Veronique, a dairy cow, I was using ZBrush. At the time I was having trouble getting a water tight sculpt from the software. I had to start over using Meshmixer. This was okay because I was informed to sculpt a different cow, a more specific breed requested by Urban Farmer. After I had finished the sculpt in Meshmixer I hollowed it out and then moved onto 123D Design for fragmenting. I laid out a diagram in Illustrator to figure out how the cow was going to be split up while keeping in mind the build volume requirements from the group members. This part I did over and over again until I had a solid plan on having the pieces sized in a way that would allow for the most members of the meetup group to be able to help with printing.
Once I had my solid plan I started cutting up Veronin into pieces. Attero figured out how all the pieces would be put back together using dove tail like pieces and similar dove tail cavities. This was a very large print that we both knew would have a lot of mass which required being able to handle staying together, besides the strength of glue. Once Attero figured out the dove tail part of the project we both started working on placing dove tails simultaneously to speed up the process. At the time we were actually pretty far behind the soft deadline placed by Urban Farmer. I started from the front of the cow and Attero started from the back of the cow. Before we were even finished with the design we had to start sending out the files to be printed because each piece took anywhere from 7-14 hours to print. Since we were sending files out before we were even finished designing we had to be sure we were confident in each piece fitting back together, which was very stressful.
After the meetup group had printed all the 100 some pieces, amounting to just over 700 print hours, we had a build party at The Nines Hotel provided by Urban Farmer. Veronin was then displayed at various places around the country by Urban Farmer and later returned to Urban Farmer here in Portland.
