Fan of the site, CardScientist, and his wife, Liana.can.art, decided to create an original Krystal model intended for 3D printing. And with such a model, it was only natural that they would print it at a massive scale. Fully assembled, this figurine will be 21 inches tall not counting the base, an approximate 1/3rd scale model of Krystal! They still have final sanding, assembly, and painting to do, but as you can see, they're well on their way to the finished product.

Below I'll share photos and details of the build.

Originally, the model had quite the muzzle, but it was later shortened up into a cute snoot.

With the final design ironed out, the model had to be split up into parts for printing. As you can see, they split up the various parts into segments with notched "keys" to provide alignment and more surface area for the glue.

CardScientist went ahead and did a test print at a smaller size of about 6 inches tall. When printing this and the full-sized body parts, he used organic supports. (He used grid support for the staff parts.) The small print came out well, though a lot of the detail was lost at this small size because of this kind of printer's resolution. Once scaled up to the full size, however, many more details would be captured.

As a side-note, CardScientist came to visit me during this project for some unrelated business transaction. He brought along some of his prints. I got to see this mini-model in person. He was even nice enough to gift me this test print. Thanks again for the momento, CardScientist!

With testing complete, it was time to start printing the big stuff, starting with Krystal's head, probably the most complex and difficult part. After one failure, this piece would take 29 hours and 6 minutes to print. He would suffer at least another 5 failures on other parts during the printing process. In the right-most photo, you can see that although he used supports, there is only so much that they can do. There was a lot of cleanup on the underside of Krystal's muzzle to smooth it out.

Several of the parts, like the two staff halves and the tail had to be printed at diagonal angles in order to fit their massive size inside the printer's volume. That, combined with the fact that these parts didn't have good flat points to print from meant that a ton of support material was needed.

I'll skip posting about individual parts for the rest, but CardScientist was very good about keeping us up to date on the Discord with progress. By my rough estimate, well over 160 hours (at least 8 solid days) of 3D printing time was used to create all the parts, which doesn't count the many hours wasted on failed prints.

In the end, they created a very nice figurine. As mentioned before, it still needs final prep and painting. Plus, there's still the base to figure out. They are held up a bit with some other projects that must be completed first, but the figurine will probably be finished by late summer at the latest.

Godspeed you two! Looking forward to seeing the finished product!