Fractal Forest - Vase Mode

These nine decorative trees based on fractals have increasing levels of complexity, with Tree #1 printing in 1 minute and Tree #9 printing in over 9 hours.

I was inspired to design this project using Vase Mode after printing some excellent Christmas baubles downloaded from this site.

I printed in PLA at 105% extrusion. For the set shown, they are all scaled down by 46%, the scaling required for #9 to print in the Prusa i3 M3KS+. I used 10mm brim for 1-8 and 20mm for 9.

I highly recommend trying smaller trees (≤5) to dial in settings before going big!

At 46% size scaling, trees #1-8 printed easily for me. I noticed that in #8 it vibrates a lot as it prints due to stage Y motion.

In order to print #9 successfully, I had to slow down the print around the 7th level of tree-branching to reduce the vibrations. You may notice vibrations will introduce ripples into the layers before the point where it would fail. To adjust during your print (on M3KS+), just use the “Tune” setting during print and reduce the number down a lot from 100% till the vibrations stop. For #9 I both reduced speed in PrusaSlicer, then reduced further at the end with “Tune”. I was probably around 30% of max speed at the end.

This was built with Fusion 360 (.F3D file included. Largest/last few trees make it very slow.)

Approximate print times of the 9 sizes scaled down 46%:

1-5: Around 1-20 minutes each

6: 40 minutes

7: 90 minutes

8: <4 hours

9: 9 hours if you don't slow it down, but that would probably fail. My first successful print was 17 hours long.

Scaled down 46% the branches on 1 & 2 don't show up completely using an 0.4mm nozzle.

I included one 3mf file which was for steel 0.4mm nozzle, 10C hotter than defaults.

With the settings I dialed in, if I fill the trees with water to use as vases, they leak… I'll update these instructions if I get that working.

Please send a message if you run into issues with the print, and I'll fix if I can.

Design and description by rocks247365 , licensed CC-BY.