If you've been following me, you know I've been working on the Going Merry from Netflix's One Piece.  I took a big step in testing the Going Merry. I decided to print the entire white part of the bow, including the ram's head, scroll work, trim around the cannon, rails, ballisters, posts, and filigree all as a single piece. My goal was to dramatically simplify assembly and ease some of the fitment issues that are so common on complex pieces.  Note: the pictures show that test piece set on the hull, but it's not attached, so it might be slightly off. I'm hoping the next print will be the one I keep. I have mixed feelings on this: it felt wonderful to see the primary focal point of the piece finally take shape in reality, but disappointed by how many issues there were. So many things became an issue! First of all, the initial model was too complex to render. Nomad kept aborting when I tried to export. Finally, I split off the piece to its own project, which helped. I simplified, re-structured, etc. When I exported, it tried to put out a 5 GB file - incredibly huge and not practical. I worked on that for quite a while and ultimately got it down to about 300 MB -- large, but useful. Several attempts to print the piece all failed until I re-oriented the piece. Then it printed.  Then: so many flaws!The ballisters in the railing all failed, but the square posts printed fine. The ears to the ram's head were too thin to print properly.The bottom rail for the ballisters, something I added for print stability, was not on the bottom plate, but floating.The filigree around the front face wasn't anchored properly, and came off with the supports.The fit was close, but a little out of scale.I've taken steps to address each item, and I plan to test-print tonight:Since re-orienting isn't a possibility, I thickened the ballisters by 30%. It doesn't noticeably change the look, a good thing.I thickened the ram's ears front-to-back. It doesn't change the look, but should fix the print.I repositioned the rail so it should now sit properly.I put the filigree into the face a bit, then worked on the "twist" so that it was more flush to the face as well.I had scaled up the total piece slightly so it would fit on the hull. I'll do a lighter touch there.Since I had to go back to the parts to fix the issues, I haven't gotten the file size down enough. In my last export, the piece was 1.9 GB - simply too big. I'm going to use the "decimate" function in Nomad to see if I can simplify the piece without losing meaningful detail. The "simplify" function in Orca (and derivatives) is too heavy-handed for this kind of work. I'll also mention that one thing that has been a huge help has been an ultrasonic knife. It allows a very light and precise touch when separating supports and brims from very delicate parts. I do have my support settings nicely dialed in (slim tree support, 0.3 top z-layer gap, 3 interface layers) and they separate very nicely from the model, but for the most delicate parts the knife allows separation with no pressure on the pieces. I'll work again on bringing down the file size for the piece, then test-printing it tonight.