Hugo the Hippo - Low Poly ZOO

Hello, my name is Hugo

A chunky, good-natured low-poly hippo, built for multi-material FDM printing. Fewer than 800 big flat facets and four colours - a grey body, white toes, dark grey nostrils and ear, and tiny green eyes.

It is a simple, forgiving print: a round body on four short legs with almost nothing thin or fragile. A good first multi-colour project.

Hugo is part of my Low Poly ZOO series - animals made in the same style, scale and colour language, so they look good together on a shelf.

What you get

Three pre-painted project files with the colours already assigned as MMU painting. Open the one for your printer in PrusaSlicer, load your filaments and print - no manual painting needed.

• Hippopotamus_CORE_One_INDX_8T.3mf - Prusa CORE One INDX, 8 tools - all four colours

• Hippopotamus_XL_5T.3mf - Original Prusa XL, 5 toolheads - all four colours

• Hippopotamus_CORE_One_INDX_4T.3mf - Prusa CORE One INDX, 4 tools - all four colours

On a printer with two tools, print the grey body and the white toes; the small dark and green details can stay in the body colour.

Recommended filaments

Prusament PLA: a mid grey (Galaxy Silver or a warm grey) for the body, Pristine White for the toes, Galaxy Black or a dark grey for the nostrils and ear and a bright green for the eyes. Any colours work - a purple cartoon hippo or a pink one is a filament swap away

See it before you print it Preview3D opens 3D models and G-code the way Quick Look opens a PDF - on a Mac, an iPad, an iPhone and Apple Vision Pro. Point your camera at the code and this hippopotamus stands on your own table in AR, at the size it will actually print. Nothing to install: it opens as an App Clip, shows the model, and leaves. Check the fit before the filament. See how big a print really is next to the shelf it is meant for. Open what can't preview. STEP, painted 3MF, STL, OBJ, glb, glTF, FBX and about a dozen more - plus G-code with a layer slider. Thumbnails in the Finder and Files, so a folder of downloads stops looking like a folder of blank pages. Publishing a model yourself? Make the same animation for it at preview3d.xfanta.com/qr - paste your model's link and get a QR code and a ready-made GIF for every file in it. Free, and it runs in your browser.

Print settings

Print settings

• Size: about 120 × 49 × 66 mm as delivered (length × width × height)

• Layer height: 0.2 mm (0.15 mm for smoother facets)

• Nozzle: 0.4 mm

• Infill: 10-15 %, any pattern

• Supports: about 14 % of the surface overhangs, mostly under the head and the belly. Let PrusaSlicer add organic supports where it suggests them; they leave little trace on the flat facets.

• Orientation: as in the 3MF, standing on its four feet. The contact area is decent (about 420 mm² in total), so a brim is optional.

• Scaling: delivered at 120 mm long. The thinnest parts are the ears and the nostrils, so don't scale it down much; scale up freely.

Show your print

Post your colour combinations as a Make under this model - I'd love to see them.

Please don't re-upload the model itself: recoloured copies published as new models (here or elsewhere) aren't allowed.

More animals from the ZOO series are coming - follow if you want the whole herd.