MELS 3D LABS

  🫧 CORAL🪸 ARTICULATED 🌊  TURTLE 🐢 Born from three months of technical sculpting and refinement, this articulated turtle carries a mesmerizing coral shell, unique flippers, and lifelike textures. Engineered to move with natural grace, it showcases the hidden beauty of gyroid patterns while remaining FDM-printable with almost no supports, a rare harmony of design, art, and technical mastery. 🌊 The Journey  🐢✨ The Coral Articulated Turtle was not born overnight,  it was technically sculpted over months of persistence, trial, and discovery. It began with a vision. I had always wondered how to design articulations as fluid and natural as waves. But there was no ready-made tool or shortcut. What existed felt limiting, so I set out to build my own way, a path that would take me through months of testing, sculpting, and refining and creating various  CAD software, custom algorithms, and hands-on sculpting into a process that was as much invention as it was cre...

  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...