Tree with leaves

thingiverse

I was motivated by the tree trunks on Thingiverse, so I decided to create some trees with leaves for a sculpture. To ensure stability, I carefully designed this tree not to require any supports and balanced it so that it could stand upright on its own - although it's intended to be glued to a flat surface. The design is entirely my creation. This approach worked for the smaller tree (90 mm tall), but it did need a wide brim (8mm) which I secured with tape. Then, I scaled up the design to 180 mm and made four attempts adjusting parameters to minimize jerk, stray wisps of filament, etc., all of which failed. One photo shows the small tree alongside a failed large print. The issue was that the tree is so top-heavy that any minor disturbance - a small blob of filament, a slight tug from a hot strand of filament - can cause the nozzle to hit and topple the entire print over. I eventually gave up, rotated the print horizontally on its side, and used supports (no brim necessary). I did set the support width to 3mm and Slic3r supports come off very easily. Any roughness can usually be left alone and hidden in the trunk bark or tree's leafy top.