#wearecofa

Once the tank was together, all the finishing touches could be added to make the tank complete.

For our tank, we decided to create a bit of an environment for our babble fish and this included making some rocks for the bottom of the ocean. At first, I thought about how this could be 3D printed and then I saw blue work-out mat foam and thought it would be faster to carve rocks out of that!

To start, I cut various shapes and sizes of rocks using a small blade.

Then I sanded the sides of each rock to give it a smoother surface finish.

Finally, I added a bit of green paint using a natural sponge in order to give it some texture and depth.

For our fish tank, I created a fusion final that would allow for pegs and holes to be cut out on a CNC machine and create nice joinery for our little babble fish.

Then after some edits to help it work on the CNC machine, it was ready to cut.

Finally, a base layer of blue paint was applied and all the pieces were glued together.

Howdy again, Alex here. With our fish’s lovely face now physical, it was time to turn our attention to his tail and angler. Josh, Taylor and I had all agreed that we wanted to somehow incorporate LEDs into the fish’s body, as angler fish in real life have bioluminescence. I had seen before how Polylite’s Natural colored PLA filament did a good job of diffusing light, so all I had to do was make sure that the shell wasn’t too thick on either part.

After struggling to make the face and jaw hollow in the previous step, I realized that the best way to make a shell of the tail end would be to use itself as a cutting tool. I duplicated the tail end and then positioned it below the original model and cut off its tail. I then used the tailless duplicate as a cutting tool in fusion and combined bodies to leave behind a super thin shell.

At this point, all that was left was the angler. I brought the model into Fusion so I could make sure it was to scale with the rest of the body parts, and then used a sphere as a cutting tool to leave room inside for an LED.

From here, I was ready to print! I used the same settings that had worked for me on the other fish parts, and while it was pretty scary printing out such a thin shell for the tail end, it worked out really well and the supports were relatively easy to remove!

The final prototype included the tank with the joinery in scale as well as a partially printed fish body that we were able to mount and figure out the mechanics more thoroughly.

Hi there! Alex again. After making the body of our fishy boy both solid and with a whole lot less polys, it was time to bring him into Fusion 360. The first and most pressing issue was separating the jaw from the rest of the face so that they could be printed and moved independently of one another. 

First, I separated the head and hind regions of the fish model. I knew I wasn’t going to print the tail portion of the fish until much later, so I gave myself some wiggle room by separating them. I also cut the sad little fin off of the body, as the geometry of it had somehow gotten really messed up going from Meshmixer to Slicer and to Fusion.

Moving on from here, I started to hollow out the inner region of the face. My methods were a bit unorthodox, making it seem a bit messy, but it got the job done.

To seperate the jaw from the rest of the head, I made a sketch on the back plane and oriented the viewing area so it was top down. This let me sketch a line that connected along a “natural” seam that the polys made, which I then used to extrude cut away the jaw, keeping it as a new body in Fusion.

I wanted the jaw to slide under the rest of the face, so I scaled it down to 90% of its original size. This looked perfect, but there wasn’t enough clearance for the jaw to slide under.

To fix this, I made some cutting tools that would leave just a sliver of material behind. I made one body by extruding a sketch, and then added on to it by creating a loft from one face to another sketch. This worked really well, leaving just enough material behind for the jaw to slide under.

From here, I modeled in some blocks that we could use as attachment points for our pivots and servo mechanism and got to printing! I had the best success using a full raft and Cura’s auto generated supports at around the default percentage. This was the best way to keep both my prints and the support material from being nudged off of the build plate during printing!

Now physical, we were ready to try out our servo mechanism and see our boy speak!

We then began making our prototypes more complex and flushed out so they could be incorporated into the final project. This included a more exact tank structure and a laser cut fish head.

Hello, Alex here again! In between first manipulating the fish model in Meshmixer and moving on to working with it in Fusion 360, my team and I were tasked with making a first prototype of our project to better explain what it was exactly going to be. As I was running our fish boy through Slicer at the time anyway, I used the Retina Engrave to cut out the plans that Slicer was generating anyway. After lots of hot glue, frustration, and a servo motor running with a test control board, we had the first iteration of our fish boy. (Please be kind, as he turned out looking a little more like a sad football than I’d have liked.)