3D Printing Neytiri from Avatar Plus My Ficus Bonsai
Hi everyone nigel saunders here welcome to the jungle we’ve had so much sunlight lately that all my trees in the plant room here have just been taking off in growth and it is looking like a jungle over the winter i pruned up all the tropical trees here making them more compact and now with all this sunny weather we’ve been having they’re just growing like crazy it’s becoming like really dense in here with greenery this is my very first bonsai tree a ficus microcarpet that i grew from a seed and in the winter i had defoliated the tree pruned it back i root pruned it repotted it and i mentioned that the pot was looking kind of small and stefan from germany approached me and he said have you ever thought of making a 3d printed pot for the tree and i thought yeah i hadn’t thought of it because it it’ll need to be quite a large pot and you know printed in sections and then glued together and then finished but stefan was willing to take on the task and i’ll be meeting with stefan later on this afternoon to discuss more details of the pot and have a look at the rendering of it and all that kind of stuff so very exciting the foliage is growing out on the tree really nicely and i’ve kind of been managing all that foliage as it’s growing in you know picking my best shoots any shoots that are growing really vigorously i’ve been pinching them back trying to kind of get the canopy to grow equally and that’s what you want to try and do in your bonsai is try and get kind of equal growth all over the tree so you don’t get you know one big long shoot sticking out you want to balance the vigor in the canopy so today it’s starting to get really dense up top and probably in another week or so it’ll be so dense i won’t be able to see any of the branch structure and you know it’ll just be left to grow then for a while so today might be my last few chances to go in and actually see all the new shoots individually and maybe do some light pruning on it once again here’s a close-up look at the canopy and it’s not that dense i can still see all the individual shoots and there’s still a lot of new shoots growing in multiple shoots from one spot some of the shoots are getting really vigorous they’ve got you know maybe four to six leaves on them and they can be pinched back kind of balancing the vigor so i think i’ll do that today because i think in a few weeks this is going to be so dense that i won’t be able to see the branch structure at all there is a lot of new growth on this tree it’s just amazing even the little growing tips are starting to sub branch now i’ll show you a close-up of that here’s a growing tip here and it has one two three four five six leaves on it and there’s a sub-branch growing right here at the base of that leaf this one’s just about to come out at the base of this leaf so if i pinch the tip back it’ll develop more branching so that’ll be kind of exciting to get the canopy even denser over the winter i found a free 3d model of nateri from the movie avatar and i was going to 3d print that and put it at the base of one of my ficus trees to look like the home tree in the movie avatar so the 3d print is done i’ll show you what the model looked like and then we’ll have a look at the 3d print okay there it is so you can see it rotating around it’s quite detailed and i hope it you know when i go to print it it’ll look really good um yeah so i was happy to find that free online and it’s on thingiverse if you want to download the file the file for it is quite large so you need some pretty good computing power to make use of it [Music] so [Music] originally i was going to get the 3d model printed about the same size as this woman here and i chose that size because i thought if i made it any smaller i would start losing a lot of detail in the 3d print eric at the library told me that he’ll put it all on the finest settings and so i made it quite small and i was really happy with the print i’ll show you what it looks like all right let’s open up the bag so it was printed in three parts and again it’s very small which is good it’ll make the tree look really large okay so there’s the parts this is the top right here or the torso here’s the legs and tail so this will go up top like um like wait a minute like that like that so that lines up and then on this piece there’s the hand and i think that might be the tip of the tail sticking up there so a really good height and the detail is incredible on it i’ll give you a close-up of the model there’s a close-up of the model and let me put the hand in there too so there’s the size of my finger so the detail is just absolutely incredible for this size of a 3d print i’m very very impressed look at the hair you can even see the braided hair here see that now these are supports here that have to be removed they supported the ends of the hair because otherwise they’d be floating in space so there’s some work to do some cleanup on the model but yeah just absolutely incredible i mean i can see all the detail in the face there hopefully it’s in focus but uh yeah all the stomach muscles there all the details it’s just i’m really happy like just incredible i never expected that kind of precision out of a 3d model like look at the tail here the tail is incredible printed in 3d space there yeah you can see every every bit of detail on the model and like even the hand here see the hand you can see all the fingers now they only have four fingers so there’s a thumb and three fingers but uh yeah just incredible that size that you can see all the detail compared to my finger so yeah i was just blown away i never expected this level of detail in a 3d printed model so amazing just amazing i also think it’s going to be the perfect height if you imagine nati standing beside the tree here it’s just perfect for this size of a tree it makes the tree look really giant yeah so i’m really happy i i think it’s going to be great addition to my ficus home tree i want to give eric at the library a big thank you uh 3d printing isn’t easy there’s a lot of setup involved to get your flow rates right the right diameter nozzle the right layer heights the right temperatures to get everything to work properly getting all the supports in place he did a really good job i think you know 3d printing is almost an art form and so thanks eric that was just fantastic like i said it just blew me away the detail and the incredible print i got so thanks a lot in the next few days i’ll be finishing the model of netery painting it all up to make it look super realistic and then we’ll try it out underneath the tree so that’ll be really exciting there’s other 3d models from avatar available online there’s that six-legged horse that they ride that would look cool at the base of the tree so you could make kind of a whole avatar diorama underneath you know a giant ficus tree it would look really cool i just love that movie it was uh it’s a great movie james cameron at the last meeting of the toronto bonsai society an online meeting the guest was matthew quinn he was the curator of the montreal botanical gardens penjan collection he studied in china studying penjing and all the different styles of penjing and he brought all his knowledge back to canada to take care of those trees at the montreal botanical gardens and it was a really interesting talk he did he talked for four hours uh slide shows talked about techniques chinese styles chinese philosophy it was ah it was the best evening of my life i think so thanks matthew that was just fantastic i enjoyed every every word of the whole whole presentation um it really opened my eyes to you know that lingang style of penjing the growing clip bonsai or clip and grow bonsai and so my style i guess is a little different than traditional chinese lingang style they they grow their branches quite long and then they cut them back quite short and then they let them grow long again and cut them back again and they try and get you know very short sections so they get really tight movement in their trees and they let them grow long really long because if you let it grow long and kind of it gets a little bit woody and then when you prune it the new shoot comes at more of an angle than it would if you pinched a tender shoot if you pinch a tender shoot the shoot tends to just keep kind of growing in the same direction as the original shoot if you cut off more of a woody chute or branch that new shoot that comes off of it will change direction quite dramatically and so the ling yang traditional ling yang and this is an interpretation of it by a westerner sort of has more taper and more abrupt tighter angles in it um it can look quite natural at times and it depends on the species of the tree i think my style is a little more flowing uh i use that those techniques growing clip or clip and grow techniques and i try and get a smooth nice flowing tree whereas the chinese style is more angular and more abrupt all the angular changes so i i guess maybe it’s a hybrid style somewhere between you know a natural flowing tree and that chinese lingang kind of style so yeah so my goal for bonsai and i’ve said this before is to create a realistic miniature looking tree um one that mimics the branch and growth patterns of its full-sized counterpart or if there is no full-size counterpart if you’re dealing with a plant that isn’t a tree mimicking a tree of a a different species so for instance my portulacary afra i’m mimicking the giant baobabs in africa totally different species but they’re both kind of a succulent tree so there’s some simulator similarities but they’re very different so i guess that’s my kind of style is to again it’s a growing clip or clip and growth style and i like that technique i think it gives you a very natural looking tree in the end and so what i’m doing i set up the conditions for the tree to grow so by pruning a branch off you’re setting up the conditions for that new growth to come in i’m not bending the new growth into a desired position that i think is the right position but i am pruning it back trying to encourage growth where i want it so it’s kind of you know it’s not natural growth on the tree there’s nothing natural about it but i am letting the tree grow where it wants to grow i mean you get branches like this branch here i did not want this branch to come off the back of the tree and kind of come out in this direction that’s just the way it grew it used to be a branch coming out the back but that branch kind of died off and all the vigor went on this side chute and i left it that way it’s not perfect it’s not how i would have envisioned the tree but that’s the way the tree grew some of these roots that grew down from here it grew down the top it wrapped around the trunk of the tree spiraled around it to the front if i were to make a root system i wouldn’t have roots like that on it but that’s the way the tree grew and i set up the conditions for the tree to grow i gave it a humid environment i let the top grow really freely so it encouraged all kinds of vigor and i got all these aerial roots but again everything on this tree is the way the tree grew i just set up the conditions for that growth you know directional pruning root pruning the conditions the trees in so yeah that’s kind of my philosophy in bonsai is i set up the conditions for the tree to grow in a certain way and then i let the tree grow how it wants and then i set up those conditions again and then the tree grows how it wants is how it wants so yeah so there’s you know there’s i don’t know i i like to say it’s 50 me and 50 percent the tree maybe it’s more 70 me and 30 the tree or maybe it’s the opposite maybe uh 40 me and 60 of the tree but in the end you know the tree you get the natural characteristics of the tree in your tree in your bonsai or penjing um that’s another thing i guess most of my trees are probably more what i would call penjing rather than bullseye because bonsai is kind of the japanese traditional japanese version of penjing tree pinching i like to include a bit of a landscape under my tree sometimes rocks and elements that enhance that natural appearance of the tree whereas you know bonsai is just the pot moss and the tree um there’s no rocks there’s no figurines there’s no certainly no nathiries from avatar that’s for sure so i i would say my my trees are probably more pensing and very not traditional bonsai that’s for sure so yeah maybe i should have called my channel the pensioning zone but or the miniature tree zone or miniaturized nature zone something like that but it’s probably not traditional bone side that i’m doing but i’ll call it bonsai i mean everyone’s heard of bonsai no one’s heard of penjing so it’ll always stay the bonsai zone it just won’t be traditional japanese bonsai now i may i may get some traditional japanese bonsai i may practice that on some trees uh diversity is always good i have you know a lot of different styles of bonsai in my collection so maybe i need a tree that’s grown in the traditional japanese styles uh wiring it uh you know japanese pot uh no rocks nothing just the moss and the tree so yeah i’ve that’ll come in the future i guess i’ll try and expand my styles to reach out just you know different styles um there’s many schools of pension even and maybe i’ve got to try some different styles and those in that form too so yeah there’s lots of bonsai never ends you start into the hobby and you can learn for the rest of your life and the more i learn the more you realize you don’t really know about the whole subject because it is a worldwide hobby um and there’s new schools growing up everywhere i mean maybe someday you know there’ll be pockets in the united states that grow their trees a certain style i know florida they have their tropical trees um they have certain species and styles that are kind of native to florida the button woods and the ficus and that and i mean taiwan vietnam they have their own style of trees india is getting a certain style um the uk they have a certain style they’ve got their hawthorns and a lot of their collected scots pines and things and every country has a specialty i mean canada we grow all these occidentalises or eastern white cedars larches and we kind of make canadian landscapes and that’s really good i i like to see that i like to see each country you know specializing doing their own thing and then i think it becomes more fascinating to the rest of the world when you know someone from india sees canadian landscapes and penjing and bonsai and uh they they’re fascinated by it because it’s so different from what they do in india and that’s that’s the joy of bonsai to me i love seeing different styles and different people’s different people’s interpretation of nature in a pot and you know what the pot looks like what the trees look like what species of trees they’re using and yeah so all that you know all that change and different styles and bonsai really makes the hobby interesting it doesn’t matter how much you read or learn there’s always more to know and that’s exciting for me that it’s a hobby it’s like you know you’re trying to attain perfection in your tree and it’s an unattainable goal but you still strive for it there’s just something in you that i want the tree to be more perfect i want it to look more natural i want it to be in better proportions i want a better pot for it it’s that strive for perfection is what drives a lot of people in bonsai and it becomes it’s an awesome hobby i i really enjoy it it sort of changed my life in a way um it gave me an appreciation for nature um living in harmony with nature and the fragility of nature how fragile these trees are in real life you skip watering for two days in a row and you know your 28 year old tree can be dead so yeah it uh it’s a great hobby i encourage everyone to try it at any level just one tree on your windowsill um five ten trees maybe more if you really get into it but yeah it’s a great hobby and i urge everyone to try it it’s i think you’ll really like it all right enough talk and let’s get to work today holy um i sometimes i watch these foreign language bonsai videos and they’re talking away and talking away and i wonder what are they talking about because i don’t understand it and they don’t do any work on their trees they just talk for the entire video and yeah i always wonder what they’re talking about and probably someone from a different language will watch this video and they’ll they’ll see me rant on and on about something and they won’t understand what i’m talking about and think why doesn’t he just work on his trees so that’s what i’m going to do now work on my trees so yeah some of these shoots are getting long so i’m going to do some directional pruning on them establishing you know balance figure removing any new shoots that have come out that are just not going in a good place and there’s plenty of those there’s a there’s a lot of shoots there’s an area in here that it had two shoots that i selected and kept and now from that same spot there’s another two shoots growing out so i’ve got four now so i gotta thin that out so i’m going to do that i’m not gonna video much of it because it’s the same as what i’ve done before shoot selection balancing vigor and uh you know keeping the tree in the right proportions nice and compact and then that growth will be allowed to grow once again and the process will repeat i also did a big talk about pruning at the community gardens yesterday and i had to talk quite loudly because there was a lot of people there and i wanted everyone to hear so my voice was kind of quite hoarse i kind of lost my voice a bit the other day and today i’m not supposed to be talking that much i was going to rest my voice so i haven’t done a very good job of that have i so i’m going to be quiet now and just work away here you here’s a look at the foliage that i took off not a lot but i kind of got the tree growing in the right direction again you know removing a lot of shoots that were just not in the right spots uh pruning some branches back to better shoots removing some that just aren’t going in a good direction so it kind of cleaned the tree up and got it ready to grow once again here’s a look at the tree now and it doesn’t look much different but it’s got all this new growth coming in really nicely so it doesn’t look disorderly with different length branches and that it’s coming in evenly and in a good direction so i’ll spin the tree around now so there’s the front view coming around to the right view to there coming around to the back view now is the back of the tree to the left side and back to the front i’ll be meeting with stefan soon to discuss the perfect pot for my imperfect tree here that’ll be really fun so there’ll be lots of videos coming up on this process of you know the concept of the pot modeling it 3d printing it assembling it painting it and all that kind of stuff that’ll be coming up in future episodes so that’s it for today i’m nigel saunders thanks for joining me in the bonsai zone you
