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The 24th of June is my girlfriend's birthday and I was thinking about what I could give her for her birthday, and I struggle a lot figuring out what to give to people, especially because I always want to give something that has some meaning.
But this time I had the best idea I've ever had for a gift.
This is one of our cats, Maddy:
Maddy is a great cat, he's a very loving boy but he's also funny because he doesn't have any fur in his belly and sometimes he strikes the funniest poses when he's grooming his belly, resulting in photos like this one:
So I though "What if I turn that into a 3d model, print it with my 3d printer and painted it to make it look like Maddy?".
That sounded like a great idea but I wanted it to be more than just an ornament, so I decided to initially make it into a cookie jar. Now, because I don't know how to do 3d sculpting I needed to find another way to create the model. So I went on Fiverr and found someone who could turn the photo into a 3d model.
I decided to get things done as early as possible because I didn't want to rush, but my first few attempts to print it were a complete failure because my 3d printer decided to act up on me.
It took me weeks to finally fix it and by the time the printer was working fine again, my girlfriend's birthday was a week away, so I had to print it slightly smaller than I originally wanted, which made it more of a candy jar than a cookie jar. Which is okay because I don't know how food safe this whole thing would turn.
I printed the whole thing in parts because the full model didn't fit in my printer, so after the printing was done, I had to join the whole thing with epoxy adhesive and putty.
Once that was dry I enlisted the help of my friend Andrew to paint the thing, so we made some more adjustments with puddy, especially to the lid because it wasn't fitting properly, then we sanded the whole thing and painted it.
After that Andrew used some fishing lines to make the whiskers:
And this is the final result, I cut the whiskers a bit shorter and one of the cats decided they also wanted to chew on them.
And that was it, I'm so happy with how it turned out, it looks so funny. And Maple got really scared the first time she saw it.
But she's okay with it now.
