Blending a Cow

A quick online search, and indeed a visit to the hobby shop, confirmed that populating my pasture with a herd of Ayrshire cattle is going to be a pricey proposition. Moreover, even if I were to spend $20 or more on a hand of cows, they will be in three different poses: grazing, mooing, and lying down. In the one photo I had with cattle in it (and should have saved because it has since disappeared), the whole herd was grazing. So 60% of the little injection-molded cattle would be waste.

To make a long story short, I decided to apply my money to an inexpensive rigged 3D model of a cow, instead. Using Blender, and an hour or so of puzzling and watching YouTube, I can set up the poses I want and then – theoretically – print as many cattle as I like.

I’ve struggled through a full Blender tutorial in the past, but that was years ago, and after therapy, I’d mostly forgotten. So, here, for future Renes that may wish to pose and print other figures but would like to save on medication are the directions.

Get a rigged Blender model and open the file.
Export to STL to find out how big it is on export.
Scale the mesh so that it is the right size when exported (menu behind the yellow-orange box on the right)
Select the bones in the object list at the top right, and change to Pose mode (menu on the bottom labelled Object Mode in the screenshot)
Select a bone, and manipulate it: R to rotate, M to move, S to scale (or select from the Pose menu on the bottom, which is now visible because of Pose mode)
Once finished, select the mesh, rather than the bones.
Enable the Mesh: 3D Printing Toolbox add-on by going to Edit/Preferences->Add-ons and turning it on if it isn’t on already
Click N to bring up the View menu on the right. That is pretty much the whole reason for writing this post!
Open the 3D Print dialogue.
- Check All indicates if there are any issues with the mesh
- Make Manifold fixes the issues
Export to STL and import into ChituBox or Lychee Slicer