> [!summary] At a glance > **Completed:** September 2024 > **Primary focus:** printing/painting moving parts ## Overview In a work chat, I recently came across a post of The Rocktopus, which is amazing and I had never heard of. Maybe I'm behind the times and trends, but that's ok, it's never too late to smell what the Rock is cookin'. It turns out our company logo is a sort of octopus, so for my next office trip I decided to print and paint one to spice up the office decor. ## Build Notes ### Printing I have never printed an STL that actually had moving parts, nor realized I could. Sure, I've seen people build gears and complicated things on their FDM printers that they use to build gidgets and gadgets after printing, but I didn't realize I could just hit go and out comes a fully wiggling rocktopus. Surprisingly, the first print job also came out a 98% success - one minor hardly noticeable flaw. As usual, I originally had bigger plans of going a bit overboard and was working on second print, but it failed and printer needs to be re-leveled, so I quickly shrank my plans. ### Painting It's good I downsized my plans to a single rocktopus because of printing troubles, because the painting turned out to be a bit more annoying than expected. In my head, the color scheme and plans were nothing too complicated. I expected I would spend most of my time getting good practice painting heads and faces and eyes. Instead, most of my time was spent on the legs, which was going to be pretty simple base colors. Because the legs moved and wiggled, this way and that, painting them was frustrating. You can't just prime and airbrush because when they move unpainted parts become exposed. I tried to do a couple more rounds, adjusting the connections to expose more to paint, but I just kept finding more. Because I printed in white, it was a stark contrast to the paint color as well so pretty noticeable, so I kept spending time with a brush trying to get all the white covered. The head and face I really wanted practice painting realistic faces, so I stick with some normal plans. It is a vallejo beige red base which in my opinion came out pretty well for the right shade. In the recent bulkamancer competition I saw some great lips and faces and tried to at least add a splash of highlight to these lips - little lighter highlight in the middle and added some gloss. Eyes I tried adding a slight pink border based on a recent video watched (bottom eyelid has this on people) and I think it turned out well, although maybe it could be slightly more subtle. It is fine from a distance but up close a little much. I added some more reds to ears, nose, cheekbones. Blues (wash) to the lower half of face. Overall I can't complain and didn't actually spend too much time on the head. The legs and body I was going with pinks/purples mostly, because there was a work puzzle (remember, this is a work thing!) of an octopus I believe had similar colors. I intended to print more and have different bodies, such as a metal or steel one, and so on, but the first would have to do. Because the head was actually a fairly realistic print, the legs felt like they didn't match. The print was smooth without any details - they moved and wiggled which was cool but when painted they stood out. I tried to add a bit more variation by adding some dots and all, although it would've been nice if they had more texture. I considered using a sponge to add some, but by this point I had added two-tone base tone and I didn't really want to spend the time doing sponge with thicker paint and having to redo some colors on top. Final clear coat - gloss on legs (octopus live in water right?) and matte on the head. ## Lessons Learned - **Painting moving parts/connections can be challenging:** printing moving parts can be challenging to paint, especially if they come pre-connected and cannot easily expose everything at the same time for painting. One option that would reduce the frustration would probably be to print using a resin color closer to the final base color (or black for shadows, something) such that if you do not quite get all the nooks and crannies painted where parts connect, it will still look fine. Using white resin with dark base colors though means you really need to get the nooks and crannies well which is time consuming. #lesson/printing ## Related Notes - [[Model Metadata and Tags]]