Brain from Pinky and the Brain – Fun Resin 3D Printing #1 (Tutorial)

Who didn’t love Pinky and the Brain growing up? They started as an Animaniacs side show and eventually became a phenomenon of their own. Would you like to know how I created this Brain resin model with the Moai SLA 3D Printer? A full tutorial follows.

The anthropomorphic mice, both effectively bad guys, consistently tried to take over the world, with Brains the brains of the operation and Pinky the slightly clumsy Egor character.

So, with my Moai 3D Printer pretty well calibrated I decided I wanted to test out some different supports. I wasn’t having too much luck with Meshmixer and in the past I’d learned of Flash Print providing a good alternative with Formlabs style supports for any other printer.

I searched for the models which I’d seen before, they were found on MyMiniFactory, an alternative to thingiverse.

https://www.myminifactory.com/object/pinky-and-the-brain-39379

The brain model came in two parts, a tiny body and a head.

Configuring software and the 3D Printer

The process for completing each was the same. First a trip to Meshmixer to hollow the object and add some holes:

Once I’d done that I opened up Flash Print (set to Hunter in machine settings) and moved the object so that it was straight and rotated and added some auto suipports but with these custom options:

This resulted in a structure like this:

Then it was over to the Moai 3D Printer version of Cura to simply create the GCode and print at 0.1. Resin was heated to 35 degrees c and laser power at 58 due to the translucency of the resin.

I repeated this process for both parts, they came out pretty awesome to be honest. You may want to dial back the laser power a little as I think there may have been some adhesion issues with the vat as 2 of the weaker supports didn’t 100% work, but as the model was well supported elsewhere it didn’t affect the outcome.