Parametric Coronavirus model

thingiverse

While stuck at home for about the 14th day in a row, I decided to burn off some nervous energy by creating a model of what has brought our world to a grinding halt. This is a parametric, scripted model of the COV2 coronavirus that you can customize and play with. You can make it bigger or smaller, change its size and count of the spikey glycoproteins. The model makes heavy use of the hull() function to create the spikes and then randomly nudges them around the top of the "stalk" of the spike to give each one a semi-random, organic appearance. Tweak the ring_density and density parameters to make thicker or more sparse glycoprotein covers of the underlying ball. I whipped this up in about half an hour, but I'll probably tweak it over the next few days to add in some of the other proteins that are presented on the surface of the virus. I'm not sure how printable this is. This might work better on an SLA/DLP machine than an FDM. Give it a shot and let me know how it goes. Stay safe!