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The Santaville 2018 Thingiverse Holiday Set

Thingiverse is an incredible collection of a million great things to make with your 3D printer. Inside Thingiverse we have individual thingies and we have collections of thingies. But, hidden inside the verse are new creative opportunities for makers and their 3D printers to take Thingiverse to a new level. Why not curate, combine, modify and create groups of Thingiverse things into a deliberate set?

Think Lego sets. A Lego set is not just a pile of bricks but a carefully selected collection of parts designed to deliver a complete thing or a playspace. It’s time for creative Thingiverse makers and builders to think beyond individual things or groups into a designed collection of things that work well together to create a set. Take it far enough and you're 3D painting in the real world.

How to put together a Thingiverse collection

Santaville starts with the excellent featured Customizable Santa Claus from makkuro.

Santa Claus Thing:3265343

These Santas make terrific holiday decorations, so I printed out 16 in flat white Inland PLA filament to play with and arrange on our dining table. But, as a designer, I could see more ingredients were needed to make it into a Holiday set.

Trees. I need trees.

After printing the Santas, I turned to tone001 Eccentric Turned Christmas Trees. The eccentric tree designs are great, and just beg to be printed in translucent PETG in vase mode. But, the look wasn’t quite right for Santaville. Time for a remix. So, I downloaded the files, selected a design and deleted the slot for the base. Then, in Rhino3D I bent and twisted them into a new Chuck Jones-like collection to compliment the Santaville set. I scaled several new tree designs to fit the scene and printed them out in Atomic Filament’s Translucent Emerald Green PETG.

My Remixed Thing: 3289800
Original Thing:3263939

New Designs

Next, I created a new Ho, Ho, Ho stacked type design to compliment the design of the trees and Santas.
I printed the designs out in Inland White PLA and Atomic’s Translucent Ruby Red. For a zinger, I printed a small version of my Joy thing in Inland Yellow PLA..

Stacked Ho, Ho, Ho Thing:3289800
Joy Thing:3265452

To bring the new Santaville set together, I gave the set a place to live on a small slab of Madrone to sit on our dining table through the holiday season.

Now, friends and family have a lot of holiday things to play with.

Think Thingiverse sets.

Makers and designers think beyond one thing or two things, think sets of things. Come up with a theme, search Thingiverse for things that work well together and create and share your own sets. If you use or remix thingies make sure you link and give credit to the original creators. If you create new thingies then upload any new designs or remixes as part of your new Thingiverse set. Think wide, not vertical.

Happy holidays!

More to come, soon...