Workouts for PreForm courtesy of the Smithsonian

I wanted to find something fun to print after getting frustrated with the Tough resin, and I ran across something cool today and thought I’d share it. The Smithsonian has posted a few extremely high resolution models from scans from objects from their collection. I just downloaded a model of the “Cosmic Buddha” statue, which if you want to go completely crazy, offers a version with 10 million triangles. This decompresses to an OBJ that is roughly half a gig in size, and PreForm needs about 6GB of RAM to manipulate it and include supports. I have this sliced into 5295 layers at 0.025 resolution in Clear V2, scaled to about 0.010 of original size to just about hit the maximum possible size for the print volume.

Other scans include the original Wright Flyer from 1903, two different life masks of Lincoln’s face, an ancient Greek slave statue, etc.

Smithsonian X 3D site

Good Luck! Hope it’s hollow, otherwise I don’t see this printing at 0.025mm. Still, I’m hoping you’ll prove me wrong :slight_smile:

Looking forward to seeing a photo of the (hopefully successful) results :)…

I can’t wait to see the result, Justin! I’ve also found a few good files on the Smithsonian X 3D, my favorite of which is the 18th century chair. The resolution of their scans is remarkable, but it means some pretty tricky configuration in PreForm. I ended up downloading the smallest file format and printed at 50 microns (have used black as well as white). Even with these “compromises,” everyone who sees the printed chair marvels at the finesse of the features and surfaces.

Unfortunately it didn’t go as I expected, though it was probably my fault. I operate my printer remotely using a cheap little ($29) Windows tablet to host the Form 1+ with USB sharing software, and I am not entirely confident regarding it staying powered on without going to sleep during an upload that will take hours with lots of complex slices. So I decided that I would not press the button to start the print until PreForm had uploaded all the slices to the printer to avoid a failed print. I think that the complexity and very large number of slices probably hit some functional limit in the Form 1+'s embedded computer (Maybe not enough RAM for all the slices, dunno). After about 4 hours of uploading slices, lets say roughly 85-90% done uploading slices, PreForm said it had lost communication with the printer (actually it said that the printer was currently in use by another process). I suspect that if it had been printing the whole time this wouldn’t have happened. I am currently running an ~5 hour functional print for something I’m building using the kinda-flaky MakerJuice SF Grey, but when it is done I’ll have another go at the ridiculously complex “Cosmic Buddha”.

Hm, that’s a shame! You can probably have a successful (and much faster) upload if you download the lowest resolution version from Smithsonian X 3D. \PreForm’s speed is more strongly affected by the number of polygons than the number of layers.