This Huge Scorpion is 3D Printed in 53 Articulated Parts

When 3D printing really began catching on among at-home users about 2 years ago, it was fairly common to see various designs for figurines, most of which were not very poseable or articulated. Over the past year or so though, we’ve begun to see designers start coming up with ways to make more articulated figures, figures which feature several movable parts.

For one 25-year-old Greek designer, named Vasileios Katsanis, moving to London presented him with an opportunity to use his creative ability to fabricate unique 3D printable objects when he joined the MyMiniFactory Academy.

“I believe that 3D printing is an amazing way to express yourself, create art, useful objects and interesting mechanisms and I think that there is a lot of future in it,” Katsanis tells 3DPrint.com. “Since I joined the academy, I was flirting with the idea of creating a poseable creature.”

And that is exactly what he ended up doing. Katsanis didn’t just create any 3D printed posable creature though, he took it to the extreme with a very unique, and very large 3D printed scorpion. It consists of 53 parts, and measures 110cm x 40cm x 60cm in size.

“The body of insects bend only at specific points – they are like ‘mechanical’ creatures,” Katsanis tells us. “So, I thought that a 3D printed insect with moving parts would look way more natural than, for example, a mammal with moving. From that point on, I had to decide what insect [I was going to design] and I chose the scorpion because I think it is one of the most fascinating beings in the world of insects.”

Katsanis’ scorpion was modeled in Zbrush, and then he used Rhino to split it into the 53 individual parts. Then joints were added, which he downloaded the design for from MyMiniFactory. The joints all had to be resized to fit the various body parts of the scorpion. Instead of adding all of the joints vertically, Katsanis instead had to angle them to different degreess in order to ensure that they moved in a similar fashion to how a real scorpion does.

The head of the scorpion is split into 6 parts and the upper claws into 2, in order to avoid the need for any support material going into the joints. The parts were glued together once printed on his Dremel Idea Builder 3D Printer. In all, the 53 parts took approximately 35 hours to print out. After fully printing it out and assembling it Katsanis proceeded to paint his creature all black with a grayish blue color on its sides, the stinger and the eyes.

Katsanis has made the design files for his scorpion available for anyone to download and 3D print free of charge on MyMiniFactory.