Articulated Lung Oriental Dragon

The long dragon of Chinese myth is a serpent rather than a lizard: a river of body ending in clawed limbs, a whiskered lion-like head and a mane running the length of its spine. Rendered as an articulated model, that anatomy becomes an obvious candidate for segmented jointing, since the creature has always been drawn coiling and rippling through cloud anyway. Articulated dragons have become one of the defining objects of desktop 3D printing, the thing people hand across a table when they are explaining what their printer is actually for. This is the eastern silhouette rather than the western winged sort, which gives it a very different presence on a shelf: less heraldic beast, more processional creature from a new year parade. At 63 files it is a substantial set, and it will occupy children and fidgeting adults in roughly equal measure.