Cross Industry Dynamics 3D prints 8.5-ft dragon for Dire Wolf Digital

Colorado-based Dire Wolf Digital is well known in the world of games for its creative tabletop and digital boardgames. Among these games is CLANK!, a deck building adventure game that invites players to try and steal a dragon’s treasure. At a recent promotional event, Dire Wolf Digital wanted to bring the dragon to life, so to speak, and sought the help of local LFAM specialist Cross Industry Dynamics (CID). The result of this collaboration was a massive, 8.5-foot-tall dragon sculpture that was the pièce de resistance at the gaming trade show.

CID is no stranger to creating large-scale promotional models. In recent years, the company has worked on various cool projects, including a large-scale Día de los Muertos installation for the Adams County Festival Latino in Colorado, and a realistic small-scale hypercar prototype for Lil Zoomers. The latter project, commissioned for a trade show, was particularly notable for being completed within just two weeks. In both cases, the company relied on Caracol’s Heron AM platform for the printing.

In this latest project, CID worked with Dire Wolf Digital to transform the CLANK! dragon into a large-scale physical 3D model. Part of the challenge in this job was turning the game asset into a 3D printable model. That is, the original 3D model of the dragon was designed for a rendering engine, meaning it did not have the “structural, tolerance, or assembly data” required to make a large-scale sculpture. CID therefore had to make it AM friendly by locking the scale, setting the print orientation, and segmenting the dragon into printable sections. The 8.5-foot-tall dragon was ultimately segmented into six large pieces, optimally sized for easy transport and assembly. More fragile details, like the horns, were printed separately to ensure they could be packed safely.

When it came time for production, the dragon pieces were printed using Caracol’s Heron AM 300 platform at CID’s Colorado facility. For the material, CID selected a 30% glass fiber reinforced PETG, which was deposited using Caracol’s HV (high versatility) robotic extruder. Overall, printing the six dragon segments took 24 hours. Notably, these dragon components were printed hollow, and CID subsequently filled them with an ultra-dense marine foam and added metal dowels for facilitating assembly and takedown.

Fully assembled, the 3D printed CLANK! dragon measures 1653 x 2895 x 1402 mm, which made for an eye-catching installation at Dire Wolf Digital’s trade show booth. Not only that, but by using 3D printing to make the piece, CID delivered significant benefits over traditional mold making or hand sculpting, including a lead time reduction of roughly 55%; a production cost reduction of about 40% by eliminating tooling; and a weight reduction of 60% thanks to the foam-cored construction that facilitates transport and assembly. (This last point was particularly important, as the dragon had to be set up by a two-person team.)

“The finished dragon anchored Dire Wolf’s trade show presence and drew exactly the reaction they were after,” Caracol wrote. “For CID, the more significant takeaway sits underneath the sculpture itself. Robotic LFAM lets a team move directly from a digital creative asset to an architectural-scale physical object, sidestepping most of the molds, tooling, and labor-intensive fabrication that one-off work traditionally drags along.”