Drowned Watchman — barnacle skull, four-colour anatomical decoration

A skull that has spent a long time under water: one temple is broken open, shallow cracks run from the hole, six barnacles have settled around the break and low patches of olive growth spread between them. It prints as one piece in four colours: bone, barnacle shell, dark crust and moss. The jaw is fixed and it rests on its own flat contacts, tilted back 26°.

89 × 128 × 94 mm · 1 print · about 145 g · tree supports required · no assembly. The photos are the actual print, from a Bambu Lab P2S with AMS.

Files

file use

drowned_watchman_4c.3mf the whole skull as one object with four parts, filaments 1–4 already assigned. Start here.

bone.stl, shell.stl, crust.stl, moss.stl the same four colour bodies for slicers that take no 3MF. Import all four together as one object: they share an origin. They are not extra copies to print.

Colours

part filament where

bone aged ivory / warm beige skull, jaw, teeth

shell chalk white / pale cream barnacle walls

crust dark brown or black deposits under the barnacles, barnacle mouths

moss muted olive green low patches around the growth

Three colours: give crust and moss the same filament. One colour: assign one filament to everything and paint the growth afterwards. Matte PLA reads best.

Printing

Open drowned_watchman_4c.3mf in Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer. Keep the orientation and 100 % scale: the fracture edges and barnacle lips are already near the minimum wall.

0.4 mm nozzle, 0.2 mm layers, 3 walls, 15 % infill, ironing off.

Tree supports, automatic, everywhere, 30° threshold, 0.2 mm top gap, 5 mm outer brim. Build-plate-only supports are not enough: the inside of the cranium needs them too.

Check the eye sockets, cheek arches, fracture rim and barnacle lips in the layer preview before you print.

Let it cool, then break the supports out in small pieces through the 28 × 36 mm opening underneath and through the temple hole. Fine pliers help. Hold the bone next to the edge you are working on.

A one-colour slice is 145 g and 9 h 13 min including supports and brim. Four colours add filament changes and a prime tower on top of that. The colour changes only happen between about 32 and 85 mm of height, where the growth sits.

Credits and licence

The anatomy is High quality skull by Dr Mariano Coretti, a dentistry thesis model from the University of L'Aquila, published on Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0. This is a derivative of it: scaled, thin bone plates reinforced, bones, teeth and jaw fused into one printable body and flat resting contacts added, then the broken temple, cracks, barnacles and growth sculpted on top. It is shared under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Credit Dr Mariano Coretti for the anatomy and Morass for the adaptation. No endorsement by Dr Coretti is implied. It is a display piece, not a medical teaching model.

The rest of my printable catalogue, with photos and links, is at https://morass.github.io/prints/