Manic Miner Willy

Posted: Dec 03, 2014

By: Dan Birch

Here is a familiar character from the 1980's ZX Spectrum game Manic Miner. In the game you needed to guide Miner Willy (the character we have printed) through twenty caverns of increasing difficulty.

It is exactly 1 Spectrum pixel = 4mm, so overall 24mm x 64mm x 16mm
Created from the original Manic Miner bitmaps
Fully Scalable

When designing our characer we created a single "box" shape and this would represent a single pixel of our character. We simply copy and paste the box for every pixel in the bitmap. This works great on smaller bitmaps, though on larger images we need something better.

Manic Miner Willy: Individual Pixels

Here is our character with all the pixels merged into one model:

Manic Miner Willy: Pixels merged

Printing our character is straight forward, though getting him off the build plate can be a challenge. In this model we can use the Fillet tool in the 3D design package to round off the edges making the character easier to get off the plate with a knife or spatula.