Neuronauts — 3D-printable standees

Flat relief standees of the five Neuronaut characters (Captain Cortex, Axon, Dendra, Syn, Glia), generated directly from the character coordinates used in neuronauts/index.html. Each figure includes the neuron-styled details from the page art: the trailing axon-cable tail with myelin beads and a glowing synaptic bouton, plus a raised chest emblem, eyes, and mouth.

Files

• neuronaut-cortex.stl, neuronaut-axon.stl, neuronaut-dendra.stl, neuronaut-syn.stl, neuronaut-glia.stl — one figure panel each, ~38 mm wide × 79–88 mm tall × 4.5 mm thick, each with a small tab below the boots.
• neuronaut-stand-base.stl — a shared base block (46 × 26 × 12 mm) with a slot cut through it sized to any figure’s tab. Print one per figure you want displayed at once.
• neuronaut-all-five.stl — all five figure panels plus one stand base, arranged on one plate (298 × 101 × 12 mm), ready to slice as a single print job.
• generate_stl.py — the generator script (Python + shapely + trimesh). See Keeping this in sync before editing character geometry in neuronauts/index.html.

Assembly

A figure panel is only 4.5 mm thick — balanced on that edge it’s not stable on its own. Press each figure’s tab into a stand base’s slot (a firm push fit; add a dot of glue if you want it permanent) to display it upright. Both pieces print flat with no supports.

Design

Figure panel — a two-layer relief, extruded from the flat SVG artwork:

• Base layer (3.2 mm): the full body silhouette — legs, boots, torso, arms, gloves, helmet, head, hair, and the axon-cable tail — fused to a rectangular tab below the boots.
• Detail layer (+1.3 mm on top): the chest emblem, eyes, and mouth, for a painted-relief look.

Stand base — a solid block with a through-slot boolean-cut to the tab’s size plus clearance, so any figure snaps into any base.

Print settings

No supports or brim needed for either part — both have a flat bottom. Suggested starting point for FDM:

• Layer height: 0.12–0.16 mm (captures the emblem and facial detail best)
• Infill: 15–20 % is plenty for the figure panels; 15% is fine for the base too since it’s mostly a friction-fit shell
• Orientation: print both parts flat, as-is, exactly as exported — for the figure panel this means detail-side (the raised emblem/eyes/mouth) facing up. The panel isn’t uniformly flat: only the base layer (3.2mm) is meant to sit on the bed, with the raised detail layer (+1.3mm) facing away from it. Print it detail-side down instead and the raised bumps become the only points touching the bed, leaving most of the panel suspended 1.3mm above it with nothing under it. Base block: either large flat face down.
• Nozzle: 0.4 mm; hand-paint the raised details after printing for the full multi-color look from the page

For resin printers, either part can also print flat with no supports; there’s no need to print the figure panel on edge.

Keeping this in sync with index.html

generate_stl.py reconstructs each character’s geometry by hand in Python — it does not parse neuronauts/index.html, so editing a character’s SVG there does not automatically change the generated STLs. To catch that drift instead of silently generating stale models, the script hashes each character’s <g id="nn-*"> markup in index.html and compares it against EXPECTED_SVG_HASHES at the top of the file; if they don’t match, it refuses to run.

After intentionally changing a character’s SVG in index.html:

1. Update the matching shape function in generate_stl.py (e.g. cortex_shapes()) to reflect the new geometry.
2. Run python generate_stl.py --freeze-hashes and paste the printed hashes into EXPECTED_SVG_HASHES.
3. Re-run python generate_stl.py . to regenerate the STLs.