gaming character and objects brought to life

Pup, a character from a yet to be named Pixel Interaction Studios AR game

Pup at 100% and 200% scale

My friend Andre, at Pixel Interaction Studios http://pixelinteraction.com/ is working on some pretty cool Augmented Reality (AR) kids games.  For this he wanted to have a few of the pieces of the game as physical objects that, when in view of the gamers camera, become an interactive part of the game.  He exported the 3d models as .stl files and sent them to me to see if I could print them. 

The character, Pup, was in really good shape, and I didn't have to do anything special to print him.  I sliced the file in Slic3r with .1mm layers, a 5 mm brim, generated support, and a relatively slow 35mm/sec print speed.  I noticed that the model was really tiny, only 15mm (about 1/2 inch) tall, so I scaled him up to 200% and printed one of each size in a single 45 minute print job on my Airwolf3d v5.5 in gray ABS.  There's a little clean up to be done, but the little guy came out better than I expected

Windmill house from the video game

The windmill and house were actually quite a bit more complicated because,

1. The design files were not optimized for printing.  they consisted of several overlapping solid objects
   
2. There are a lot of overhangs that won't print unless I generate support, which usually leaves messy parts and/or a lot of finishing work.
3. The blades on the windmill are really very narrow, <5mm which requires very slow print speeds
   

This works fine inside the game, but they don't render well in the physical world.

y didn't slice very well be   brown ABS  fff

SketchUp to the rescue.  I don't have any sophisticated 3d modeling software, nor the skill to use them effectively, so I do what with SketchUp.  I imported the STL file for the windmill house and this is where I first noticed the potential printing problems