Design of the Week: Spiderman!

This week’s selection is the life-sized Spiderman 3D print by STPL 3D Printing.

STPL 3D Printing is a manufacturing and 3D print service located Surat, India. They provide a wide variety of manufacturing services well beyond 3D printing, including CNC, Laser and even diamond cutting.

The life-size Spiderman was created for a client who wanted something dramatic to adorn the walls of their fine-art entertainment store in Surat. STPL 3D Printing obtained an open source 3D model of Spiderman and modified it slightly for this project. The specific 3D model they used was no doubt “Spiderman” by Brazilian artist Mateus Arantes from his Thingiverse page.

I have a suspicion that Arantes never imagined that his Spiderman 3D model would be reproduced at life-sized dimensions, but nevertheless, it has been done.

STPL 3D Printing used plastic extrusion 3D printers for the Spiderman project, but had to break the enormous model into 30 parts. Printing was not an issue, as the company operates an array of 15 3D printers, and they were able to 3D print all components in less than two days.

That is a testament to the power of parallel 3D printing, something we should write more on in the future.

However, much work remained as 30 parts do not a sculpture make. Each part had to be positioned and glued together to form the final shape. STPL 3D Printing says this effort took three hours. Finally, the sculpture was sanded and painted.

The resulting sculpture was large, but at the same time was also quite lightweight, as the 3D print design can easily generate a hollow internal structure. This means the object could more easily be mounted and not require substantial mount points.

The message here is that those 3D models you might encounter while browsing Thingiverse or other 3D model repositories hold a secret: While they are seemingly designed to be 3D printed at handheld scale, they can, with relative ease, be 3D printed at far larger scales.

The next time you see an interesting 3D model, imagine it at large size: what if it were as tall as you?

And do you have enough material to print it all?

Via STPL 3D Printing