3D Printable RC Porsche

Welcome back to Curve Lab. In this video, I'm going to show you how I made a super realistic 1/10enth scale 3D printable RC Porsche. And the best part is I have 3D files available and instructions if you want to build one at home. Everything is available for download on curvelab.com. All right, let's jump into the video. For this project, the chassis I'm using is a Tama TO2. I think it's the perfect chassis for this project because it's versatile. There's a bunch of aftermarket parts available online and it's relatively affordable and easy to build. Also, the wheelbase for this chassis is a really good match to the 930 Turbo. And I'm lucky enough that someone on the internet has 3D scanned this chassis before. So, I was able to download a mesh file of the scan. Using this scan as an underlay, I started to build the body in Autodesk Alias. Alias is a surface modeling program that is really optimized for building these complex automotive exteriors. Surface modeling the whole car is extremely timeconuming, but it's necessary because I need clean parametric surfaces that can be manipulated, offset, thickened, and otherwise edited to create features and to hone in the design of each part to be 3D printed. And that's just not something you can do with a mesh file. I could make a whole two or three hour video talking just about the process of building the surface in Alias, but I think that's not very interesting to most people. So, I'm going to skip ahead about 60 hours to the fun stuff. So, here's the finished alias surface model, and I can move on to reverse engineering the chassis. And this process was made a whole lot easier this time around, given that I had access to a 3D scan, so I could get away with doing a lot fewer measurements by hand. So, you might ask, why build the whole assembly in Solid Works if I have a 3D scan already? But the chassis is not static. You know, it has suspension, it has steering, and that kind of detail matters for designing around a functional RC car. So, at this point, I imported the alias model into Solid Works to thicken all the parts. And you can see the pink layer here is sort of an inner substrate that all the body panels will attach to. And this substrate is going to attach back to the chassis. So, the entire body will be able to lift on and off of the chassis like a typical RC car shell. In order to be able to print this inner substrate, I have to split it into two separate parts to fit on a build plate, which can later be glued together.