Celtic Owl

Off, this reads as a lithophane: a white owl carved in Celtic knotwork, sitting in a black frame. Turn it on and a 16 x 16 grid of light cuts straight through the carving lines. That collision was the idea, a rigid geometric matrix living inside an organic relief.

My workstation laptop crashes if I try to compute an internal grid bigger than 16 by 16, and this piece sat right at that edge. I bought an owl model online and split the work between SolidWorks and Blender, and subtracting 256 cells out of the knotwork was about all the hardware could take. The early prints leaked light everywhere. Stopping the bleed first meant 0.8 mm walls, which took two passes of the nozzle and never came out clean. Moving the job to the X1C with an AMS solved it. A double wall of 0.4 mm black PLA+ now isolates every cell.

The owl looks like a carving until you plug it in.