Manic Miner gets the Boot

Here we are with some more Manic Miner inspired retro 3D printing. Here we have a bit of fun with the old boot graphic many retro gamers will be familiar with. For those who may have never played Manic Miner, this is the scene when Miner Willy has lost all his lives.

The aim of this post is to make 2 items using the same boot bitmap from Manic Miner. We'll be making a 3D printed picture of that memorable game over scene and also another of our "Trophy" objects where Miner Willy actually escapes the boot.

As the boot (plus leg) on the original bitmap is fairly tall and also because I want to add a little colour to the printout I have broken up the boot bitmap into three spearate models. The model above is the boot only and we will be printing this in Gold plastic for our trophy.

For the top section we will print in Blue and Cream and all three parts will clip together to form our completed boot. For the trophy we will add a Plaque to the front and also a Miner Willy model created from the original character bitmap.

With the design completed its time to feed the design files into the 3D printer! As this is a fairly large trophy it takes about 7 hours to print all the objects out.

Assembling it is easy, the parts clip together and for extra strength, we add plenty of super glue.

As mentioned earlier we will re-use the models we have created to make a 3D picture. For this we managed to get hold of an A3 sized deep frame. As the depth of the frame was 30mm we resized the models to ensure the depth was 30mm.

For this we also created a platform from the original bitmap that Miner Willy is sat on as the boot is coming down. Just what every home needs on the wall!

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About the author:Dan Birch is a 3D design and printing experimentalist. I'm also an experienced Web developer, games developer, retro gaming enthusiast and occasional hardware hacker.