Mini Low-Poly WALL-E for 3D Printing

Like many parents out there, I have a kid.

Like many kids, my kid LOVES WALL-E.

She also loves EVE, and MOE, and the cockroach, and the plant, but this instructable is solely focused on our little friend, WALL-E!

I've recently began 3D printing as a hobby, and one of her FAVORITE parts of the day is helping me start a print, or checking on it as it prints. She has asked me many times if I could print her a WALL-E.

There are models available on Thingiverse and such (you can even find THIS one on there!), but I wanted to make her something special, from the heart.

So - I designed a low-poly basic model of WALL-E in Tinkercad, exported it as an STL and used my trusty Snapmaker (with Luban software for slicing and settings)

This is a design that encompasses some of my favorite things. WALL-E, visual math, and 3D printing.

Plus. HE'S SO TINY AND CUTE!

Here is what you will need to make the 3D object:

TinkerCAD - Make a free account on https://www.tinkercad.com/

Reference Images - I just googled "WALL-E" and found a multitude of referential images.

If you have no interest in the creation stage, skip to Step 14: 3D Print Your WALL-E where I've included a link to my .stl file on thingiverse for easy printing!

If you want to 3D Print your tiny low-poly WALL-E, you'll need the following:

STL File - This is the model to be printed. We'll be making this in TinkerCAD, but you can find the file from my model and the settings that I used on Step 14: 3D Print Your WALL-E

3D Printer: I am using a Snapmaker 2.0, but I am fairly sure this will print on any machine

3D Printer Food: I used black PLA from Snapmaker!

3D Printing Software: I am using Luban for Snapmaker, but any slicer should do the job.

Post-Printing Supplies: Flush cutters to remove supports, superglue to put back anything that you break.

Open a New File in TinkerCAD.

To make an artistic representation of any object, you must first consider what main shapes make up the body.

WALL-E is an EXCELLENT starter project for 3D modeling beginners looking start more complex designs.

Since this is a "Low-Poly" WALL-E, we're going to be using basic shapes to construct our WALL-E in a simplistic manner. This saves on design time, and makes for an excellent 3D print as sometimes when 3D objects are miniaturized they can loose a lot of miniscule detailing in the process.

So...We start with a cube. I'm not super strict on the measurements, this is all about how it looks.

Make the cube WALL-E Colored.

The box makes up WALL-E's body, but if you look closely at the reference images, you may notice this portion of WALL-E doesn't rest completely on the ground.

So we're gonna elevate it a bit. Now your WALL-E-colored cube is floating!

Does WALL-E float? NO!

What keep's WALL-E off the ground? HIS WHEELS! HIS TRACKS!

Those look pretty complex in the reference images, so we'll break it down into 2 parts.

Part A: Wheels (and/or Oversimplified Gears)

When looking at WALL-E from the side, we can see ~4 main gears or "wheels" that WALL-E uses to turn his tracks and get around.

We are absolutely NOT making all of those gears, so let's just call them "wheels" and make a day of it.

For those wheels, we're just gonna use some looong cylinders. I made them dark grey, so they would easily stand out when we add the black tracks.

Make 4 cylinders the same length, slightly longer than your cube is wide. Change the diameters of the cylinders so that you have 4 different sizes from larger to smaller, and arrange them according to your reference images.

I did one at a time, duplicating the last one and sizing them down/positioning as I went. As you can see, sometimes positioning them from one angle doesn't always align with the others.

Make sure these are all centered with the cube when you're looking at it from the front, so the edges stick out well past the cube. Using the "center" function from the front can help you align them without losing your arrangement from the sides.

Don't worry about it not looking "right" yet, we'll tighten it up on the next part.

Part B: Tracks and Oversimplified Hardware

Let's start with a basic triangle. We used a black triangle and rotated it until the longest side was on the bottom.

I made it thinner than the length that our cylinders stick out from the cube. The cylinders will go through the tracks piece like they did the cube, and be slightly visible out from the edges of the triangle.

I aligned it with the far side, then moved it and resized it little by little until it covered all of the cylinders the way I liked it.

This took a LOT of trial and error for me. Just play around with it until it looks kinda like the # picture

WAIT! WALL-E's tracks are NOT pointy!

You are absolutely right, and that is an IMPORTANT observation. So how do we round off those edges?

Take a "tube" shape, cover a bit more than half of it with a cube. Make the cube a hole, and combine the shapes. This gives you a semi-circle.

Make a copy of the half-tube and turn it into a hole. Align the hole over the pointy ends, and combine the shapes.

Remember to DUPLICATE the half tube and turn the duplicate into a hole -> We're gonna use this method a lot in this instructable, and it helps to keep the half-tube around for later.

If you need to move some of your cylinders/wheels to make this all turn out right, that it okay. This whole design requires tweaking as you go.

Make sure to NOT combine the "Track" triangle, with the "wheels" cylinders - You want them to be separate.

This gives you a nice rounded edge to your wheels, but also leaves some weird floating "bits" in the model. We'll clean that up next!

To clean up those bits, cover with cubes set as holes and combine the objects. Be careful to only capture the floating bits and not accidently cut new holes in your tracks!

This can be tricky, and I spent a while rotating, resizing, and moving around the cube-holes to ensure it would cut where I wanted it to, and not where I didn't.

Once I got all the floating bits cleaned off (almost, there was a bit I didn't catch at this stage that stayed until the end) I duplicated, aligned, and centered the track on the other side of the WALL-E cube.

If you need to, resize/realign your wheels at this point so that they are even on both sides of the cube.

If you want to resize your cube to fit your wheels a bit better, now is the time to do it - I made my cube into a rectangle, a little longer than it is wide/tall to account for the wheels and help it look better.

It's starting to look like a WALL-E!

Now that we have the bulk of the body out of the way, let's make the neck. If you look closely, WALL-E's neck boils down to a couple cylinders connected by a cube. Easy enough!

Make two small and thing cylinders, rotate one of them until they are perpendicular, and align them at their top corners to make an L-shape. Make a cube the same size as your cylinder's diameters, and align that over where the two cylinders connect.

Move the group to the top of your WALL-E and resize each piece as needed. I needed to make the cylinders longer, but my cube stayed the same. I also rotated the top cylinder to match the usual angle we see on our reference images.

When the angles, size, and position look right, join the 3 neck objects (cylinder, cylinder, cube) and make them WALL-E colored. I used the orange instead of the gold for this, to help me distinguish during the next few steps.

As WALL-E would say..."TahDa!"

WALL-E's head and eyes are a bit hard, because they aren't *exactly* one of the basic shapes that TinkerCAD starts with.

But neither were those tracks!

We're gonna use the same method we used for the track pieces to make WALL-E's eyes!

Start with a heart object, and cut it in half. We cut it in half using the same method that we used to cut the tube, placing a cube "hole" object over the half we want to remove.

Then we're gonna round it off using the same method we used to round off the tracks. Duplicate your half tube (you DID keep your half tube around, right?) and align with the pointy sides of your half-heart to round it off into a shape highly reminiscent of WALL-E's general eye shape.

Once it is rounded, duplicate it. Make one shape dark grey, and the other light grey. Resize the light grey shape slightly smaller than the dark grey one, keeping the aspect ratio of the piece the same.

Make a duplicate of each part and align them together, centered, with the light grey offset from the bottom of the dark grey one. Turn the light grey piece into a hole, and combine the objects. You should have a weird shaped "bowl" in the shape of Wall-E's eye!

Duplicate your light grey piece again, layer it into your bowl and resize the height so it is below the edge of the "bowl". The result is a beautiful inset head piece for WALL-E!

To make the lenses for Wall-E's eyes, we're gonna take two cylinders, make one smaller, turn the smaller one into a hole, align/center the objects (ensure the smaller object is offset from the bottom, we don't want to go completely through the larger cylinder!) and join the objects together.

It should make a bowl-style object, similar to what we were working with on the last step. This makes the "lens" of WALL-E's eyes and goes on the head piece we made before!

Resize and align the "lens" with the inner/smaller section of WALL-E's head piece.

Select ALL pieces that make up his "head" (dark grey, light grey, lens) and duplicate them TOGETHER. While they are all selected, flip them horizontally. Do not join the objects as it will loose the color differences.

Now you should have (most of) WALL-E's head/eyes! You can rotate one or the other to make different WALL-E expressions. I chose his "concerned" face!

Note: It is okay not to have the pieces directly touching each other, we'll mount them together in the next step.

To attach WALL-E's head/eyes together, and to the rest of the Make a copy of the light grey piece, rotate, and position it where it connects the two head pieces together.

This piece will help mount the head on the neck.

Once you have it lined up and where you want it, join the piece with the two largest pieces (the dark-grey pieces) to make a single object. ONCE AGAIN do NOT join the inner head piece (light grey) or the lens piece (black) as this will make everything one color, and we lose the cuteness.

WE CANNOT LOSE THE CUTENESS.

Next, grab all the objects and try to align it with the top of the neck. If you notice, my WALL-E head is WAY too massive for the WALL-E body.

You may need to do some resizing at this point. Ensure all objects are selected when resizing to ensure the ratios remain the same. I chose to resize the head rather than the body, but the choice is yours!

This alignment is all about making it look right, so you will need to play around to get everything *exactly* right with his head.

When you get it aligned, you'll probably spit out another WALL-E soundbyte - "Woah!"

At this point I was quite impressed by how well the low-poly WALL-E was coming along, and figured I could add a few details.

I mainly added his panels at the top of his body, and the all-important "WALL-E" text at the bottom of his body.

To make the panels stack two dark grey rectangles (one larger, one smaller) and join them. Duplicate your stack cut out the shape from the body cube where you want to place it. Place original in the slot, ensuring the top/sides are covered by the yellow cube.

Our WALL-E is looking cuter and more complete with every step, but he still needs...something.

Something like...Arms. Arms would be nice. Hands would be better.

For arms, I made two simple cylinders and colored them WALL-E colored.

Hands are a bit more complex, though!

Remember that light grey piece that we duplicated from when making his head? Duplicate that again!

WALL-E's hands have one claw on the inside, and two on the outside.

For the side with two claws, I made a rectangular cube, turned it into a hole, and aligned it to cut a hole down the flatter side (from the smaller angle towards the larger side, but only 3/4 of the way). This separated the light grey piece into more of a "C" shape. I duplicated and resized the original, turned it into a hole, and cut that out of the center to further define the "C" shape of the claws.

I used a small rectangle hole to cut a slot between the two claw pieces on the top rounded side, and two to cut out extra on either side of the singular claw piece on the flat side of the "C".

After the shape looked approximately correct, I "squished" the whole thing by resizing it to a smaller length while keeping the height and width the same.

The result? WALL-E's iconic claw!

Now, let's give him a hand...

To attach the claws, I made a simplistic "arm" out of a cylinder. I made the cylinder WALL-E colored, and positioned the claw at the end.

To attach the arm to the body cube, I added a cylinder to be the "joint" where we can easily attach the arm! Made it WALL-E colored, then duplicated and aligned on the other side.

I aligned the cylinders for the shoulders before adding the arms so that we could position our WALL-E's arms any way that we want!

Once those are in place, put on your arms. Have fun, find the most WALL-E-EST position you can possibly find!

Now, we just have to add the finishing touches.

First off, the WALL-E text. I used the "text" shape, and just put "WALL" (no quotes) in black using Sans Mono font.

I used a small black cylinder for the dot between WALL and E, and a larger red cylinder as a background for the E.

The E was the same process as the WALL text. Type, Settings, Rotate, & Align.

I used a black cube resized into a flattish rectangle to make a little panel for his battery level display.

For the red button, I used a "Dice" shape, resized into a small rectangular red button positioned beside the display.

I noticed around this time that I still had a few floating bits, and went back to clean them up as well.

Congratulations!

If you have come this far, either you have made yourself a WALL-E in TinkerCAD OR you have watched/read/skimmed through me doing it! That takes a lot.

Now, if this was the object of your exercise, then you are finished.

HOWEVER.

If you would like to turn your little digital WALL-E into a handheld tiny WALL-E, then there is one more step.

Believe it or not, this next step ACTUALLY took the longest.

To 3D print your adorable WALL-E model, remember a few things.

1. If you had outstretched arms, WALL-E needs supports to print.
2. If you do NOT have outstretched arms, WALL-E has a BIG head and a LITTLE neck, and needs supports to print.
3. Depending on your visual math and if you used ANY of my measurements on your model, then this is an ITTY-BITTY model, which means if you put on more details than I did, you may struggle to see them in the print. For example, the red button was 1mmx2mm on my model which was barely more than a blip on the print, and the dot in his logo was 1mmx1mm.
4. Even a tiny WALL-E print can take a few hours.

I exported the file from TinkerCAD (no photo, hit EXPORT and choose STL) then opened the file in Luban for Snapmaker.

If you do not want to go through the first 13 steps, then you can find my model available here on Thingiverse.com

For my first print, I used the following settings:

• Material: PLA (Snapmaker Brand, Black)
• Layer Height: 0.2
• Infill Density: 5% (Tri-Hexagon Pattern)
• Wall Thickness: 1mm
• Heated Bed Temp: 70C
• Material Temp: 200C
• Auto-Supports Generated
• Supports: Everywhere
• Support Pattern: Zig Zag
• Support Density: 15%

Print Time: ~3 Hours

This worked VERY well, however I managed to pull off a few features while removing the support. WALL-E's head/neck came off, along with one of his claws. All EASILY re-attached with superglue. WALL-E's eye lenses didn't attach on my first print, as there wasn't enough overlap, but DID attach to the supports so I couldn't recover them.

Be VERY careful when removing the supports, as some of the parts are barely a few mm thick! I dismembered my first WALL-E print while removing the supports and had to superglue him back together, but all is well that ends well!

The eye/lens attachment issue has been fixed in the Thingiverse file I uploaded for this, and I'll upload a picture of the next print when it finishes.

Did you make a WALL-E model? Did you print out my model for your very own?

Did you apply my visual TinkerCAD process to your favorite robot, character, or toy?

Ask questions, share your creations, and

let me know what you want to see next in the comments below!