Small Tahu Statue

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tahu505

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For those who are out of the loop and stumbling upon this, here's some context. Lego's 90th anniversary is coming up and one of the sets they are releasing is a Lego Classic set with instructions and pieces to build miniature versions of significant Lego sets throughout the company's history. Bionicle got include in this with a small Tahu, which I instantly loved because look at how adorable this is!
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One of the creators for Bionicle, Christian Faber, posted this image about it on his Instagram (@fabframes) and posted a comment about how the matoran (villagers in Bionicle's story) could have carried around hand crafted artifacts for protection before the toa arrived to their island.
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I thought that was a really cool concept and gave me the idea of "what if the matoran also carved statues of the toa around the island?" Knowing that I have marble PLA that I haven't really used yet, my plan was to use that to 3D print a marble statue of small Tahu! This means I had to make a 3D model of small Tahu for printing. Wanting the model to be as accurate as possible, I used Stud.io to recreate small Tahu. The Technic 90 degree tube piece needed for small Tahu's arms is not currently in the Stud.io parts library, so instead I used a system 90 degree round brick. This piece should be about the same size, however the Technic pins in the hands do not fit in them. To get around this I had to turn off collision and snap then manually move the hands into the position they should be in. Unfortunately, the .io file I had somehow went missing after I exported the part so I can not show what it looked like in Stud.io, but I did export it as a DAE file since in Stud.io STL exports are not an option. To convert the file from DAE to STL, I imported the DAE into Blender and then exported it as a STL from there.
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The STL had some errors in it so I loaded it into Microsoft 3D builder and let it auto correct it. I then saved the corrected STL and uploaded it into Cura. Tomorrow I'm going to start the print.
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After a while of printing, the print came loose from the bed and failed, so I had to restart it. I did bring home part of the failed one though and turns out it came out scaled to the correct size for the Lego pieces and even connects to other bricks! I've tried exporting individual Lego parts from Stud.io then into Blender then to a STL just like I did here, except those parts would either be way too small or large. Not sure why this came out the right size but I'll try to look into it more for future projects.
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I've tried exporting individual Lego parts from Stud.io then into Blender then to a STL just like I did here, except those parts would either be way too small or large.
Maybe the marble filament doesn't expand/contract as much as other filament does?
 
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