Moon Bird Cube X 3d Print

Joan Miro's Moon Bird occupies a special place in my heart as its the first true piece of sculpture that I can recall. It is also the first piece of modern sculpture that I had attempted in Zbrush. The Cube X has the largest build area of any desk top deposition printer currently on the market so I figured lets see what a 9.5" tall Moon Bird looks like. So far, it hasn't meant to be. It required 6 attempts just to get the base to stick. After abandoning Cubify's Magic Glue, being unable to make it work no matter weather or not it was fully dry or slightly tacky, I ended up using blue masking tape. It seemed to be working but then one end of the base started to curl up. As irritated as I was by this, I decided to let it run its course to see what would happen. I let the machine continue to run and went out for the evening. When I returned, I found that the print had stopped half way through the head. The Machine's dialog box read "File Read Error File Line 407595". I have no idea what that means. In order to see if it was a problem with the model I printed a smaller version. 9 hrs. and 44 minutes later I had a 4.5" tall Moon bird. Initially I was pleased just to have something but, upon closer inspection, I found the model to be fairly crude and to make matters worse, the support material was completely fused to the model. The support material is supposed to simply snap off of the model but, this was not the case. It took more than an hour to get most of the support material off and there are still some pretty serious scars that are in need chasing. 

Another worrisome aspect to the print is the lumpiness of the base or floor. It almost seems quilted and as such would be impossible to efficiently iron out, so to speak. I suspect that this is a result of using the lowest infill setting. Future models will be attempted with with medium infill.

Joan Miro's Moon Bird

The above images are HDRI composite renderings. The amazing thing about HDRI is that the 3d model derives all of it's lighting and reflection map information from the rotatable background image. The result is at first glance remarkably convincing. The image below started as a shot taken at the MOMA of museum goers enjoying a Jackson Pollok.

Moon Bird is one of my earliest childhood art memories. When I was 4 or 5 years old, my mother would take me to the MOMA and let me climb all over it. It really is such a playful shape. It's almost balloon like, an inflatable in bronze, cool, smooth and very friendly. Graphically, it's an enormously, strong shape composed of convergent arches and crescents. I set out to recreate the sculpture from photographs in Zbrush. When the model was finished I had the need to see what a couple of my favorite Miro paintings would look like reflected into it. I was delighted with the results. Birds and wonderful creatures dance and stretch, sweeping through rippling waves of undulating forms. As seen in these photo composites, many stills from this  animation experiment would serve well in the filling of large canvases.

The images above and below are Keyshot renderings. Shapeways offers the 3d prints in 6 vibrant colors.