3D Printing - Prototyping

My first chess piece was a king printed as two objects. The stamp and the cap for the bottom. 

I knew this wouldn't be functional to begin with as I hadn't really figured out how I was going to attach the cap to the base yet, but it was a great chance to see experience printing out my own design. It helped me a lot to see what worked and what didn't. 

Before my second print the technician suggested I take my models in Rhino and run them through the Mesh command and increase the polygons. After doing that my prints started coming out a lot smoother!

On my following print I fixed the base of the stamp so that it could snap onto the cap, and I began making the pieces modular so that if and when a piece failed it could still be salvaged. 

From this point on, despite having moved towards a finished product I was able to continuously prototype and try new things as I worked since I could now print out small alterations instead of entire pieces. 

As I continued to work on them I found different issues and different fixes. 

One of the big ones that caused me some grief was making sure that the faces of my models were oriented correctly. Whenever I was mirroring my designs it was inverting the faces. So I made all of my backfaces bright pink and that made the problem a lot clearer, and a lot easier to fix.

(Oh, there it is)

(Although not perfect, it helped a lot!)