Stretching Cat

Many of my projects are organic forms instead of practical "engineered" creations commonly done with OpenSCAD. I'm not as much an engineer as I ought to be, and try to develop my artistic side for the most part.

I take inspiration from all sorts of source material. This time, it was a Christmas Catalog.

It works best for me to get some rough shapes into position. There's not much complexity here, just figuring out where the body parts should go and adjusting to make a reasonable result. I tinkered until I was reasonably satisfied, adding details as needed. The tail is a reuse and modification of code from the elephant's tusk in an earlier project.

Development proceeds in steps, replacing the rudimentary rear legs with more spheres to create heel, knee and hip for each rear leg. One important piece was flattening the bottoms of the paw, using a cube to remove the bottoms of the spheres below the printer bed (zero on the Z-Axis).

Belly and leg parts contact at the print surface by making the Z-position equal to the size of the sphere.

This design avoids the need of any added support.

Available Files:

SCAD files for study/modification and and STL files for quick prints