Nefertiti 3D printed

The Nefertiti Hack refers to the release of a high quality 3d scan of the bust of Nefertiti without permission of the Neues Museum who held the piece. Read more here. I believe that we as a society should feel obligated to digitize, catalog, and make it easy for the public to access art. I'm a big fan of the work done by Cosmo Wenman and his commentaries on these topics.

Anyway, once it was released I printed the Nefertiti head in 80% scale. I split it up into 8 pieces (using the Boolean object modifiers in Blender and a large cube object) that would be manageable for our army of Flashforge Creators here at Sector67. The pieces were the neck, face, left and right head sections with ears, middle left and right hat sections, and top left and right hat sections.

They were printed in ABS black plastic and glued together with acetone. The hat pieces warped a lot and the surfaces were not flat enough, so those were glued together with dowel rod pins and hot glue. I used Tamiya putty to fill in cracks and then did a lot of hand wet sanding to get the creases less noticeable.

Putting Tamiya putty on the surfaces to fill out striations and then sanding worked fairly well. At this scale, filament lines aren't that obvious anyway. It felt like I was rubbing lotion onto her skin. Only it was nasty toxic smelly lotion with fumes that cause some neurological damage. I did most of this outside but it isn't really worse than the other poisons I use like spray paint or wood stain or whatnot.

I don't have more photos but I basically left it at a very gold color (after a few more coats of the paint above, which is a brass containing paint). I was going to patina it but it is making rounds at various makerfaires and other events and chips caused by falling are easy to repair when the color is a flat brass, but would not be easy to fix if I had to also redo the patina.