3D Printing Figures in Color
As I promised, I've printed out a figure, that I made in 3D, directly in full color.
This one is printed by Shapeways as well ( http://www.shapeways.com/model/190101/_santa_girl__figure__full_color_.html ), in their "Full Color Sandstone" material (which is basically stuff printed by a ZCorp machine with some additional post processing for extra strength).
The result looks pretty decent, and the figure is quite heavy...
It's about 16.5cm high.
I went a little overboard on shading in the texture (which I shouldn't really do, but it's just for testing purposes here), and this resulted in some black spots which seem to blend out quite a bit, so that's something I'll have to avoid, other than that the colors turned out roughly as I expected them to be.
Anyways, here are the pictures! :)
Printing the figure is one thing. But the sculpting/ design isn't bad either.
Thanks =)
somehow I'm getting intrested in seeing how the 3D printing is done
Knock yrself out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHxp9Ail6MY
Thank you very much.
That 3d printer looks really expensive!!!
Is that what majority of the toy companies use to print figures?
Which printer does Max Factory use?
The figures you buy from large companies are not 3d printed, since it's not economical for large production runs. Mostly, it's just sent off to some injection molding company in China, with some workers spraying the airbrushed colors on it, and some stamp-like thingies for detail paint.
They do, however, sometimes use these sort of printers to make certain parts for the original copy. For the most part, in large figure companies, the original copy is hand sculpted, though, and printing is often just used for more technical parts (on a high detail printer).
And yeah, the printers are expensive, but there are a good amount of printing companies around where you can have something printed for you.
I'm considering using White/Strong/Flexible (with imprinted dye depending on whether the color I want is available) to build formfitted armor pieces for Atiyaah to collect bullets with. But first, I need to get a full body scan to model from. I've emailed several local 3d scanning services to see which one doesn't thing this is eww-town to them.
Why should Saber be the only Dollfie with armor in town?
that's pretty cool! But why does it look so.. speckled? Any restrictions to the models? I might give this a go if it's worth it.
That's the printing powder grabbing a bit of attention there. It's not actually very noticeable when looking at it in real life, but for some reason, the camera focuses on the roughness instead of on the colors, which gives this weird blurry effect in the colors.
It should be possible to polish it manually so that it becomes more smooth, though, and that should also somewhat improve the sharpness of the print, since that's mostly just blurred on the surface due to the strength improving post processing. The colors are printed 1mm deep.
The only real restriction is that you have to make anything that sticks out, or basically all walls, at least 3mm thick, so you need to be really careful with the placement of the hands, and the modeling of the hair, in your design.
Thanks for the tips! Is the post processing optional? 1mm seems pretty darn thick, especially on something small scale. I totally know what you mean with the color printed 1mm deep.
How "sharp" can you get the details? If you were patient enough and came up with a high-detailed Mudbox model, would it fail?
How much did your figure end up costing you?
It's always post processed, otherwise it would just break during transportation. The post processing layer has no relevant thickness, it's pulled into the material. The color being 1mm deep, means that you can sand away up to 1mm of the material until you start seeing white.
Clearly visible detail goes down to 0.5mm, lower than that will kind of make it blend away slightly.
It costs me less than the price you see on the shapeways link. ;)
Ah I see what you mean! I thought you meant the color layer is 1mm in from the outside post process layer. If that's the case, then 1mm deep is really cool!
If it's not too expensive to make, then I might have to make something too. :D
Thanks for the tips!