Creepy Halloween Spiders

thingiverse

[2014-10-27] Added large sizes, SCAD option to make 4 spiders at once.\n.\nHappy Halloween! Here's a simple tweakable OpenSCAD script that produces a variety of spider shapes with ease. The spider is designed for easy printing flat, and then the legs can be heated and bent into more interesting poses. These spiders even make a great decoration, flat or not, for any occasion!\n.\nSpecial thanks to co-designer Marlo-Ann for valuable help and inspiration! Post-Printing Posing the legs makes these spiders appear larger, more animated, and creepier than ever before! After printing, remove the spider from the build plate and use a heat gun, light bulb, or other heat source to soften leg joints and pose them. To achieve a lifelike appearance, bend the legs upward at the body first and try to get sharp angles on the leg joints. You can also bend down the mouth parts to appear more authentic. How I Designed This One great thing about OpenSCAD is its ability to use variables for creating variants of models (and even animating with them). When designing in OpenSCAD, I try to include a few levers that make it easy to adjust and modify dimensions and other parameters. If you've only tried downloading and printing STL files so far, open up some of those SCAD files to check them out. With these spiders, you can change the angles of leg joints, the lift and length of the abdomen, and the relative sizes of each body part. Instructions You'll find these spiders very quick and easy to print, with medium sized ones printing in under 15 minutes! Use the included STLs or edit the spiders.scad file to create a spider that suits your style! By default, the spider is asymmetrical with a slightly raised abdomen (an aggressive posture). There are a few explicit parameters you can change right away. For example, spider(fat=true); produces a spider with thicker legs suited for printing at smaller sizes, while spider(elbow=[25,25]); makes a spider with more bent joints. We printed these in glowing PLA and they look amazing, as you can see!