Contemplation in Blue: how to design large 3D sculptures with AI

I created a full-sized cubist head with DALL·E 3 and 3dmaker.ai and then used Blender to break it up into 3D-printable parts

Screenshot of the Model in Blender (left), Detail of a Pluggable Part (center), The Final Sculpture (right), Images by Author

I wrote a Medium article a few months ago on using AI to create 3D printable objects. Due to the limitations of the printers I used, the largest piece I printed for that project was 7 inches tall.

For this article, I explored creating larger AI-generated sculptures with my new Bambu A1 Mini 3D printer. I devised a scheme to build larger creations using “plugs and holes” to join smaller parts together. The scheme is similar to the Lego concept but with bigger and more intricate parts. My final piece, “Contemplation in Blue,” stands 24 inches tall, 17 inches wide, and 9 inches deep.

In the sections below, I’ll explain my process for designing, segmenting, and printing large-scale sculptures.

Designing Sculptures with AI

To start things off, I logged into my ChatGPT Plus account, which integrates with OpenAI’s DALL·E 3 image generator. The Plus version of the service costs US$20 per month.

I used the new ChatGPT 4o model and gave it the following prompt.