When I was really little my grandmother had this glass siamese cat sculpture as a coffee table decoration and it was my favorite thing ever. I couldn’t play with it, but it was just really pretty and I loved it. When I was seven or eight, she gifted it to me and I’ve held onto it ever since, through four international moves and countless other travels.
Since the Clear resin we have has always reminded me of glass, I decided to scan the cat and try to print out a replica! It took some finagling to scan (expecting a laser scanner to behave nicely when bouncing off glass might not have been the smartest move), but some wrangling and touch-up sculpting later, it worked out beautifully!
The original glass and a small scale test at 100 microns.
I wanted to print it solid, but since the original piece is about 5” across, doing it full scale would be tricky. After a half-scale print turned out so nicely, I tried again at 75% and 50 microns.
Again, it came out great! I oriented it as close to the hinge as I could since it’s such a large, dense part.
I ended up mailing the 50 micron version to my grandmother for Mother’s Day and it was a smash hit!