3D Printing has become a great way to create custom trophies for real world events, as well as turning fictional trophies into real ones with an example from Mario Kart 8 Deluxe being the latest example of this.

Artist Brent Werder is the person behind this project based on the award for the Lightning Cup.

He tells us that he started modelling the trophy in Inventor Professional 2018 back in July of 2017, while having to re-learn some aspects of the software to get exact features such as the lightning bolts on the top.

“Overall, I’d estimate that this model took me anywhere between 2-3 weeks to complete, start-to-finish,” Werder says, “Modeling took me 18-20 hours to complete, which was certainly slowed down by the fact that Inventor doesn’t support image files- I had to hand-trace the Mario Kart logo as well as the Lightning Cup emblem.”

Printing similarly took a long time with all the parts working out to over 24 hours of total print time. Each of those bolts took between 5 and 7 hours to complete, the base around 7 and the cloud faces 1.5 hours each.

Aside from waiting for the printing to finish there was also the need to swap out different filaments as this print is sliced according to colour, negating the need for any painting to be done. If you’re using a single filament printer as Werder did, prepare to do the same.

The individual pieces were assembled with glue, but extra help from a 3D printing pen was needed to attach some of the parts together.

Once finished this prop measures in at 17 X 11 X 30 centimetres with the aim being to not make it any bigger or smaller than a real trophy.

You can see the finished product in the gallery below and, if you’d like to make one yourself, the files are available for free from Thingiverse.