As an addition to PrusaLab’s lecture room (the so-called “Paluba”, or Deck in English), we 3D printed a life-size replica of Venus de Milo. It took about 70 kilograms of filament and 2800 hours of printing to create it.
If you want to print your own version, you can download the 3D model (including a bunch of other ancient statues and monuments) thanks to the Scan The World initiative.
And why did we choose Venus, anyway? Simply put, we liked the fact that the object is a 3D scan of an actual ancient statue that was sculpted over 2,000 years ago. By recreating one of the most memorable and striking statues ever created using 1:1 scale 3D printing, we wanted to show that virtually any piece of history can live on thanks to modern technology.
The object was perfectly scanned, so we didn’t have to modify the model in any way. As for the splitting – we used the Split Body feature in Fusion360. After dividing the volume of the model by the print volume of the Original Prusa i3 MK3s 3D printer, we got a rough idea of how many parts we would need to split it into. We still wanted to have control over how the parts looked (due to overhangs and such), so we placed the split planes manually. In the end, we had a total of 72 parts.
The pieces were printed from Prusament PLA. After assembly and lots of sanding, we applied spray putty, filler, and acrylic spray paint. The total printing time was about 2800 hours, the post-processing took another 40 man-hours.
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