I finally got around to working on a new 3d print! This one is a test for a ball joint design I was hoping to use for future projects, based loosley on the ones on tinkerplay figures, albiet a bit better on smaller figures.

Hence, this dude. He has as much range as a standard tinkerplay character, but all of the source files are available for free!

Unfortunately, as much as I'd love for this to be the case, the beautifully rendered 10/10 masterpiece faces have to be put on manually with a sharpie. I wish I could provide files, but alas, we aren't there just yet.

In all honesty, this figure is just a test of how all of this fits when printed and assembled, and as such minimal effort was put in to make it look "cool". Feel free to fix that with the provided .blend files, or use the ball joint base files to make your own figures!!! I even provided the ball and socket generator file so you can see how I made it!

As for my future projects to use what I learned doing this, there are a distinct lack of actual transforming Transformers figures on thingiverse outside of the stuff made by DaBombDiggity, and this is the first step towards fixing that.

Creality

Ender 3

No

Yes

.2

20% or so works.

At somewhat base cura settings (tree supports, increased density of support interface to make the ball joints better, not really needed) it took about 4 hours using the basicBotFull.stl layout I provided.

Parts are layed out the way they assemble, and the individual sections are labeled where they need to go. The sockets themselves are designed to be resiliant, and how they are layed out is what I've found to be their strongest position, so all you really have to do is put it together lol.

I liked the joints on tinkerplay figures so much that I was gonna steal them, but then decided that making my own "Great Value" version was easier somehow. To be honest, it does make a more solid figure IMHO, and it can be scaled down and still work pretty well, if I do say so myself.

See file "BallJointVer2.blend" for how I made the ball and socket, and see "BasicBot.blend" for a easy to copy/paste version of said ball joints.