What do you get when you mix a group of 4 veterinarians, a dental surgeon, and a 3D-designer, who all love animals? “Animal Avengers!” This group, based in Sao Paulo, helps animals who are injured. Freddy, the tortoise with a burned shell, was their first patient. However, one would never know this tortoise was their first patient because their work was impeccable.
Meet Freddy
Freddy is a female tortoise who got severely burned in a forest fire in Brazil, losing 85% of her shell. After surviving the fire, Freddy also lived through two cases of pneumonia and 45 days without food before the Animal Avengers found her.
Veterinarian Rodrigo Rabello, told Fantastico, a Brazilian outlet:
When we saw the animal in that state, we said, ‘Wow! It looks like Freddy Krueger’
When the team found Freddy, her chances of survival were slim. However, Animal Avengers did everything they could to save her life, and the results were very successful. Freddy is now the lucky owner of the world’s first 3D-printed prosthetic shell.
Freddy’s New Shell
Turtles need their shells to survive, so Freddy was in big trouble when hers got burned. Thankfully Animal Avengers knew what they were doing. First, the shell was designed using a 3D computer program by Cicero Moraes, the graphic designer of Animal Avengers. Moraes reconstructed a 3D computer image based on various photos he took of Freddy. Then, he sent the final design to a dental surgeon, Dr. Paulo Miamoto, who turned the design into a real-life tortoise-shell using a 3D-printer.
Moraes said:
It took about 40 photos [to build a model and reconstruct the shell]. We took a healthy animal, took the same 40 photos, reconstructed that animal in 3D, and put it into the computer.
The design was printed out on a corn-based plastic into four individual, jigsaw-like puzzle pieces, that would connect around Freddy, resulting in a complete shell. Each piece took 50 hours of printing. Once the shell was intact and fitted on Freddy, a Brazilian artist named Yuri Caldera painted it to life. The shell was just a boring white base, but with good quality paint and experience, Caldera turned it into a real natural-looking turtle shell. One would never know it was 3D-printed!
The “Animal Avengers” are here to make a difference in the animal kingdom, one animal at a time. They plan on helping out as many other animals as they can through their Animal Avengers group.
If you’re interested in this turtle with its 3D-printed shell, check out the turtle with a lego wheelchair.
