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Turkey Decoration

(Work-In-Progress)

Sometimes I wonder if there's a theme percolating in the brain's inspiration zone. I guess for me the theme has recently been the holidays, ones bent more than a little out of their usual form with pandemic modified behaviors and household-only gatherings. Maybe that's why this third door/window hanging turkey followed the recent pumpkin and skull. These things may not be exactly "planned" so much as tripped over in my cluttered mind.

This stylized turkey can hang from a piece of fishing line in your door or a window like a suncatcher as the skull and the skull and pumpkin did earlier for us.

The design is non-parametric, elements designed bit by bit, starting with the stylized tail feathers with details gradually added as cutouts from the spread of the feathers. Each feather is an extruded polygon. Most of the details are polygons or module components.

Examine the OpenSCAD code for any learning value you may gain from it. Use the STL file to print. On my Lulzbot Mini, this took just about 1 hour to print my first test print. As is, the wattle, comb and beak details are not crisp; the bottom layer of PLA seals over, partially obscuring them. Up against a window, they are "not bad", but it looks like some size adjustments are worth doing. The second image looks better, and the "neck" was also widened, which I also think is an improvement.

The OpenSCAD console window panel also indicates that there are 2-manifold problems. That typically means some elements are "just" touching in a way which might break the print. On my printer, using Cura for the slicer program, the print does work. I'll be exploring as time permits to find and eliminate the places where the overlap/touch of elements occur. The documentation link shown below explains how to automatically fix the issue using MeshLab Free Software, as an alternate to fixing the spacing manually. It can often be difficult to find the conflicting code in complex OpenSCAD designs.

Volumes: 3
UI-WARNING: Object may not be a valid 2-manifold and may need repair!
Rendering finished.

UI-WARNING: Object may not be a valid 2-manifold and may need repair! See https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/STL_Import_and_Export
EXPORT-WARNING: Exported object may not be a valid 2-manifold and may need repair
STL export finished: /home/algot/Documents/runeman.org/3d/turkey2/turkey2-01.stl

Available Files:

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