I paid an artist to model this as a gift for my grandparents...they are very old, and not exactly in the best of health, but I had hinted at this for a while and really want to get it to them while I still have time.
At 6" tall, I was getting a price of over $150 in the WSF material. That is just
way beyond my price range, even more so since I intend on printing two...one for them, one for me. We're going to paint them by hand and send the best looking one as the gift.
The artist I work with was able to make it look pretty much exactly how I envisioned it, but he's a low-poly modeler by nature and this really wasn't a good job for him, but I was desperate. He's also not familiar with 3D printing and the specific quirks of the technology...I only recently introduced him to it by printing a starship model I commissioned from him, which came out much better than I expected.
Aside from hollowing the mesh to use a minimal amount of material, the runes also seem to go in far too deep. The depth shouldn't be much greater than the thickest lines that make up the font, which will greatly help in hollowing the mesh (as-is they would require the front half of the runestone to be pretty much completely solid). We're going to antique the finished product, so the runes will show up very well without needing to be insanely deep.
The wall thickness should be as little as will still provide a relatively stable, free standing object. The bottom of the base can be completely open, though the walls of the base should probably be thicker than the rest of the mesh to provide more stability.
Considering the amount of solid material that the mesh can do without, I'm expecting some good fixes should be able to reduce the print cost
dramatically. The mesh is in .obj format, and quite hefty (compressed size of almost 44 megs). Now, I can't afford much, which is obviously why I can't print it as-is. However, if someone here would be willing to fix the mesh up so that it can be printed for a reasonable amount of money, I can provide reasonable compensation.
Also, if anyone has any opinions on which material would be best to print the finished product with (as far as the processes go, I'm not sure which would be best for this sort of object), I would be glad to hear your opinions.
-Jonathan