Strigoi bust — Romanian folklore vampire, one part, no supports

Strigoi bust

A strigoi — the vampire of Romanian folklore, the one the villagers dug up and staked — as a small bust for a shelf. Gaunt skull, deep-set eyes under a heavy brow, hooked nose, ears swept back to points, and a jaw hanging open on two long canines.

The detail that matters is the collar: a band of folk cross-stitch diamonds round the neck. That embroidered collar is the Carpathian tell — it is what makes this a strigoi out of village folklore rather than another opera Dracula.

70.7 × 42.0 × 49.0 mm · one part · one colour · about 55 g of PLA · no supports, no glue, no hardware, no assembly. Print it and it is done.

Printing

It prints upright on its flat plinth, exactly as exported. The base is trimmed flat at z = 0, so no raft and no brim.

0.4 mm nozzle 0.12-0.16 mm layers 0.12 reads the collar stitching clearly 3 walls 15 % infill supports OFF

Supports are off on purpose. Everything on the model carries itself except one place: the roof inside the open mouth, a ceiling about 2 mm across. It sags very slightly on an unsupported print and it is inside the mouth, where nothing is visible. Turn supports on for the mouth alone if you want it clean; do not put supports under the whole model to fix a 2 mm ceiling.

A matte filament flatters it far more than gloss — the skull dome is a large smooth curve and matte hides the layer lines on it. Stone grey, bone, dark red and black all read well. The photo is a gold silk PLA at 0.16 mm, which is the least forgiving finish you can give it.

Scaling

The fang tips are blunted to Ø1.2 mm and the ear tips to Ø1.8 mm so they print as real walls rather than as a single extrusion trying to be a point. Do not scale below 100 % — under about 90 % the fangs and the collar stitching stop resolving. It scales up happily; at 150 % (106 mm) the cross-stitch diamonds and the tendons in the neck become properly legible.

What is in the file

strigoi_bust.stl 1x 70.7 x 42.0 x 49.0 mm one watertight shell

One solid body, watertight, base flat on the bed. It slices without repair.

How it was made

Sculpted procedurally: the whole bust is a Python recipe driving Blender — plinth, shoulder cone, collar ring, neck and tendons, skull, cheekbones, nose, ears, jaw and chin are built as primitives, joined, and voxel-remeshed at 0.35 mm into one solid; then the eye sockets, nostrils and mouth are cut and the eyeballs and fangs fused in with a second remesh. Every proportion is a named parameter, not a sculpted vertex. No AI-generated geometry.