3D Printed Minecraft Snowflake Ornaments

Recently, my husband got a new 3D printer so I decided to start tinkering with TinkerCAD to try to come up with some fun things to print. Since it's Christmastime, I decided to visit my Minecraft Paper Snowflakes and make them into 3D printed ornaments. Support material can be such a drag, so this fun snowflake is printed flat in two pieces that are then easily slotted and glued together!

While the supplies are pretty basic, you do either need a 3D printer or need to send this to a place that can print it for you.

Supplies:

• Creality CR-10 3D Printer - use whatever you want, but the ornaments you see in this Instructable were printed with this one.
• White PLA Filament - make sure whatever you get will work with your printer - I chose to do white partially because it's just what I had, but also because they are meant to be snowflakes. Green would also look nice for the creeper and silver with the weapons.
• Ornament Hooks or string
• Glue

I went about this kind of oddly. I took the PDF from my paper snowflakes Instructable, recreated it in my Silhouette program, copied it over so that I had a full snowflake, exported that as a PNG, used an online image converter to make it an SVG, and then imported it to TinkerCAD.

I know, a lot of that is unnecessary, but that's how I ended up doing it.

Both of the snowflakes are very basic and created from squares and rectangles so they could very easily be created on TinkerCAD.

(Doesn't the filled in black creeper snowflake look kind of demonic?)

Once I had my design in SVG, I imported it into TinkerCAD. I experimented once before the final draft, but I ended up making the snowflakes 6.35mm thick and cut out exactly 6.45mm from the middle on each piece. They ended up fitting together perfectly.

I added little square loops to the top of each. The creeper one is sitting square and matches with the design, and the weapons one is turned to be a diamond and works with the design of the sword.

For both designs, I had to cut out the point on the edge where the snowflakes go together because without doing that, that end of the design got all messed up. It was just easier to cut it out.

I added a picture of my printing specifications, but basically, I used support (it is only added where the hanging loop is) and used a gradual increase for infill. I did not use build plate adhesion because I tried that for the first iteration and I couldn't get it off and it just didn't work.

Now you just have to stick the two halves together. They are already snug so this is just to make sure they don't get pulled apart.

Add a little glue where they are going to overlap and stick the two halves together. Use a paperclip or something similar to scrape off any excess glue.

Add an ornament hook or string and you are done!

Both ornaments are assembled the same way.

I was really happy with how they turned out but I like the Creeper one the best.