Giving a low and slow Fat Dragon clone a go

Another day, another cura profile test for the Ender 3 V2. And this one churned out some great results too!

...although it took a solid 6 hours just to print this one guy so that's a bit of a drawback...

Yeah I'm not sure I'm willing to wait 6 hours for one solitary figurine (without a base even) to print, finishing up late at night because I didn't get home until the afternoon. Especially when the previous profile I was using would usually churn something out like this in roughly two and a half hours.

What probably didn't help was not checking the support settings during the slicing because this guy ended up with a decent load of the support stuff:

Fortunately it broke away cleanly without taking any of the soldiers limbs with it but still, that's a lot of support structure for something that looks pretty solid to begin with.

So for the next guy, I've tweaked the settings somewhat to see if we can save us some print time and excess material. 

Firstly I dropped the support density down to 5 percent (it was set on 20)

I switched the infill to Zig Zag which prints fastest.

Then I tweaked the tree supports to a helpful post I found about it on Reddit:

 And after those changes:

We've shaved off some decent time. Better, he doesn't look as swamped in the preview.

I'll update this guy when he finishes printing to see how we go and continue to work on whittling down that time somehow as the rest of his squad gets printed, but in the meantime:

WHERE TO GET THIS PROFILE

Two days before I wrote this post it was up at 3D printed Tabletop as a variation of the one at Fat Dragon Games yet for some strange reason it's not working for me currently. I will update this if the situation changes.

WHAT ABOUT THE MODEL

Robed Blasters of Hell - Cults3D

Uh oh wait...what's that sound?

Emperors Uppercut! What happened to the squad captain??

 

Oh god, he's turned into warp spawn!!

Yes sadly 2.5 hours into the 5 hour print and somehow the piece lifted off the plate and started to drag around. Sorry partially painted first trooper watching on, we're going to have to craft you up a new commander.

And rather than wait around for another 5 hours, I've switched back to the profile I was using for the bikes previously. Will there be a noticeable difference between the first 5 hour version and this upcoming 2.5 hour job? Let's find out!

SQUAD CAPTAIN

Okay so this time around the Captain didn't emerge as a pile of scrap filament: 

Although the layer lines look a little more prominent on this model than they did on the 6 hour print, especially on the pauldrons:

The ultimate test will come painting time of course and we'll see then if the lines are still evident after a couple of layers of various colours.

And yes, a base coat and a couple of coats later..

The squad captain certainly isn't as smooth as the trooper. Looks like those extra 2.5 hours are worth the wait time.

TO BE CONTINUED!