It's been a while since my last (and first) two creations, the Inchworm Caterpillar Automaton and Koi Fish Automaton. Ever since, I've had a third animal-themed mechanical piece in mind to complete a trio. And guess what, this is not the one!

Instead, I was inspired by the basic mechanics of a braiding machine, with the idea to make some kind of figure skating creature, which I thought would fit nicely with the Trip To The North Pole contest.

The inchworm and the koi fish were entirely made using CAD software. And while they do their job in conveying the basic idea of the respective animals, I knew this one would need some more detail to really work. So this time I challenged myself with learning some 3D modeling using Blender. It's not my strong suit, but I think I managed to make some pretty cute bears in the end, after a lot of trial and error.

So here's two polar bear friends figure skating on an ice floe!

Printing

As usual I used mostly standard settings, only changing to gyroid infill and lowering the infill percentage to 10%. The model requires no AMS and no supports.

The only thing to keep in mind is that the polar bears - while designed to be printed without supports - really benefit from using adaptive layer height to smooth out some of the steeper overhangs. My print profile has the bears printed by object instead of by layer, and adaptive layer height slider set to maximum quality, with additional smoothing. If the Polar bears fails despite this, I'd recommend using slim tree supports on the print bed only.

Ironing for the base and the cover is also very beneficial, but obviously takes a lot of time, which is why I left it out of my own print profile