A Dragon printed in 3D + tutorial

The 3D printing has endless facets, you can create from houses, through toys and clothes, even food, everything is a matter of knowing what materials to use and what parameters should be configured, I have several years in this branch and I have dedicated myself to reproduce spare parts for industrial machines, but now I want to give myself a break, I'm a fan of the series The Game of Throne and I've put myself back to see the whole series since the first season, it has occurred to me to print Dracarys, son of Daenarys Targaryen.

If you have a 3D printer and you don't know what parameters to use, here I show you in summary form what you must do.

1st Step: Choose that you are going to print, there are different pages in the web of amateur makers who place their designs and we can download them, the extension of the file is .STL, this you will be able to open it easily in any program of conversion to Gcode, later I explain to you that it is this one, if you do not get the design also you can make it with programs like inventor, among others.

-Pages to download designs:

Natives

Thinguiverse
This is my favorite downloads page, there you can find all kinds of designs, is divided by categories and from time to time launch challenges that are paid in dollars, belongs to the company Makerbot and is one of the largest communities of 3D print makers.

Cults:
It is a French community of designers, creators and makers who make life and share their interests by sharing their designs, some designs are free and others are paid for a minimal fee.

Youmagine:
It belongs to the ultimaker company, it is a smaller community of creators, however it offers protection to the creators of designs that upload theirs to the page.

You choose which one you like and where are the designs that suit you best.

I downloaded the Thinguiverse Dragon Here

Sin tÃtulo.png

2nd step: you must use a program that reads .STL files and transforms them to .Gcode, with this extension you convert the file into layers, to print on your machine.

Source

There are different programs to convert your file to .Gcode, these will help us to give better finishes depending on the parameters that we put to our printing, also influence the time and quality of printing.

source

Each of the parameters can affect time, cost and how the outside is seen in addition to the weight, in addition to it speed can give you advantages in time but can make the finish is not the desired.
Not only the software influences, also the nozzle with which it is printed will give me neater finishes, the nozzles range from 0.1 microns to 0.6 microns.

Source

We choose the program for conversion, in my case will be CURE, however there are other very sound and easy to use as they are Repetier and Slic3r, feel free to use the one you want.
Download Cure Here
You open the file you're going to print:

Basically, the parameters to be configured are the following:

Layer thickness:

This parameter indicates the height of the layer to be printed. The layer height is a parameter directly linked to the quality of the piece, the lower the layer height the higher the quality, but it will also considerably increase the printing times. The value of the layer height must not be equal to or greater than the diameter of the nozzle.

Wall thickness:

This parameter determines the width of the edge of the object The value of this parameter will be equal to the diameter of the HotEnd nozzle multiplied by the number of turns we want to give to the object.

Upper and lower thickness: With this parameter we will indicate the thickness of the upper and lower layers.

Density of filling: