Community Centre 3D printed: Part 1/4.

By the end of 2021, as soon as the Spooky House was designed, I was thinking of designing an awesome treehouse, as I love my big Old Oak Hollow Country Treehouse so much. 3D designing and printing is a long and slowly improving skillset, so I finally felt confident enough to pull it off, as I knew that this project would be yet another step up using the necessary skills. As my own crafting skills decreased over the years due to having MS, even before I had Sylvanians, 3D printing brought back all that excitement! 

I did not want a gigantic treehouse as a residence. There are plenty of treehouses as in "house" already. Plus, treehouses only have 1 to 3 rooms up to now, wayyyyy  unsatisfactory. I always wanted a tree, as a Community Centre, where everyone could meet, enjoy an activity, chat and have fun!

I wanted to give it all a fairy themed look and feel. I started glaring and drooling at possible printable files to tweak: bird houses, lanterns, fairy houses and mushrooms.  

I instantly ordered this backdrop wall tapestry fabric cloth to put behind it.

Despite that the designing was done after a few months of tinkering, the execution turned out to give me a new batch of grey hairs! A new printer was ruined after yet another blackout when I started printing this project. Luckily, Amazon refunded me swiftly, as the manufacturer offered no help at all. My new printer also turned out to be an unnecessary challenge. This brand is supposed to print without much effort, as they are used in print farms as a work horse, mine is riddled with problems. 

Their helpdesk failed to fix it by sending parts twice and eventually it was shipped back for repairs, leaving me 3.5 months without a printer. I was not too pleased to say the least. Luckily, I bought a preassembled model to be able to make use of the EU warranty system and that turned out to be a great hunch we had, despite assembling a printer was done twice before and we knew how to do it. It prints now, but it's not fixed a 100%. I plan on complaining again soon and am gathering evidence meanwhile, by taking pictures and making videos. 

 

Trying to create a printable tree, cutting it in printable parts, finding the best slicer, which tells your printer what do do, was a huge bust before it finally succeeded. I will explain that in the tech part below. Eventually I will finally managed to finish the project 1.5 year after I started working on it, as I am almost done!

I made a quick and dirty mood board to gather the ideas at the start, as this was an elaborate project, so I needed something to let my brain get inspired by. Also, since doing a big project like this requires quite a bit of project planning, you might need a to do list.

  

If you are not interested in the upcoming tech stuff, just scroll to the bottom, and maybe just glance at the pics below only. Next blog will also contain more tech stuff with some pics that might interest you. Third blog in this series will have assembly pics and a vid of the result, with a storyline. Enjoy!

Tech stuff:

I found all I needed on various 3D printable file search engines, like Yeggi, Thingiverse and Thangs mostly. Often I just Google for an STL file to find what I need though. For the tree itself, I needed a tree canopy, a tree with branches and a straight tree stump, both with similar bark. The tree stump could easily be elongated into a large tree.

I love working in TinkerCad.com because it's easy and fast to work with as a starter designer. It has its downsides too, and moving objects makes me swear a lot, but still, it's a decent program, especially as it's free. I described how to use Tinkercad in older blogs: Previous blog site

I created a tree with 5 thick side branches. I added a spiral staircase, cut and made it fit around the tree onto the irregularly placed branches. I did not want the tree to fit the staircase, but visa versa. That would make it look more realistic. 

The file was already getting almost too big to handle regarding filesize in Tinkercad. You tend to notice how slow each progress becomes and the edges turn red. I had to remove the staircase to add smaller branches and twigs.

I created activity platforms and added canopies.  The canopies hid the seams well and looked neat. I cut the tree up for maneuverability in Tinkercad. You can also hide parts or show hidden parts by clicking the lightbulb. More next time!

I subtracted the tree, the stairs, the branches and the platforms from them, so they would fit once installed. You can turn an object into a hollow one to subtract easily in TinkerCad. I then removed all the items and exported the canopies. 

This design was not sturdy enough, it needed a much wider base. I feared as much, but once I printed the 2 roots, it was confirmed. Although it would be glued to a thick acrylic sheet, I was afraid it would break off once moved. 

Second design failed. I did not know that it would be harder to stretch and make the bark thicker after subtracting parts. I should have done so before. A slicer, which tells your printer what to do, can have the option to detect thin walls and make them thicker, but that did not work properly as there were too many issues. Luckily, you can detect print issues by checking the preview of a print once sliced in your slicer, or looking at your printable file visibly in 3D viewer.

Third design failed, again still too many non-fixable thin non-printable layers, as it was a low polygon model. I then had to replace it with a high polygon tree, meaning that the structure was way more dense to start with. 

Fourth design failed. Making the bark of the tree bigger in Blender, using "solidify", created an immense amount of holes. Incredible, that defies all logic of how it should work.  Using MeshMixer instead solved that. 

The tree still was not ready to be printed at this point, as I had technical issues with the printer itself which needed workarounds. More next time!