How I Designed the World’s Smallest FDM Articulated Turtle We all love minis — they’re trendy, collectible, and satisfying to print. Most of the designs I develop are full-scale articulations with well-sculpted details and refined geometry. But for a long time, I’ve wanted to create a true miniature — something tiny yet mechanically functional. The problem? I was never satisfied with the detail and articulation quality when scaled down. While I was sculpting the standard articulated turtle, an old friend reached out. He uses a 120mm print bed exclusively for research purposes but always wanted to try printing an articulated model. That stuck with me. As I worked on the full-size turtle, I kept the X and Y dimensions within 120mm — though it eventually crept up to 126mm. After releasing the full-scale version, I began researching how to scale it down without sacrificing clearance or articulation integrity. That led me to revisit one of my older designs: the ball-joint links from...
(work in progress blog) I want to tell my experience and story about the creation of MELS 3D LABS Articulated Seahorse. Of all the Articulated designs, this has a unique story and place among them all. Early 2024, i was researching for an articulation no other designer has ever made. It should be an interesting creature as well, my research led me to seahorse, a beautiful creation of nature. THE SCULPTING My sculpting workflow evolved over the years, a systematic, hence its time consuming but foolproof approach to perfection. Typically i sculpt 2-3 days straight, mostly skipping breakfast as i get hyper obsessive. The sculpting path : Typically i could create a link and the body section, where then i can duplicate it, then scale it down and keep duplicating it up to the tail. That would save a lot of time and effort. But for the seahorse, This wasn’t the case. The body is curved, hence even after duplicating, each link has to be precisely sculpted to preserve th...