I'm Ready to Print

[RKapuaala]

Colin,
Yes, you can size and truncate anyway you want. That is what appealed to me about DS. Originally I tried my hand at sculpting in scale using sculpty and other polyclays. The results were OK but not good and if I did have a good sculpt, I couldn't enlarge it to another scale. I tried some of the cheaper freeware scanners to try and convert the proto sculpt into a digital file so I could resize it, but the scanning process is processor intensive and the results are questionable,,, at least the free stuff is. I think Pokrad put up an article on Sculptris with a link to the application download (see sticky at the top of the page) and I was amazed at how close it was to sculpting by hand that forgot all about scanning.
That being said, I have recently been playing with a kinects digital scanner from my xbox, so, I maybe back to my original idea of sculpting in 1:1 and scanning my figures again. You gotta love technology.

 

[RKapuaala]

Note here is how simple it would be.

This is a freeware application called Meshmixer. I am demonstrating how you can use the plane cutting tool to slice up a 3d model. Afterwards, I would build a stand in Hexagon and imported in to the scene and attach it.

 

[Colin_Fraser]

A

Ah, peace perfect peace. By the way I was privelidged to meet President Kennedy once. It was his first visit to Gt Britain after being made President. He told us of when he was in the Navy during the War.

A memory many would envy you.

Colin

 

[Waterman]

Yes it was Colin, that's is why I felt a bit upset when he died, a bit of History passing and I had played a minute part. Everyone raved about how beautiful his wife was, and compared to the old world leaders at that time, they did stand out as a young couple, a change in the old world order,and a sign of better things to come. None of that happened in the end though, nothing ever really changes.

 

[Colin_Fraser]

Best we could do here in the North was Pierre Trudeau....not Kennedy but better than today's crop IMO.

Colin

 

[Blue Thunder]

At long last I have acheived the level of detail I wanted for this project and I will be ready to print in 1:20.32 scale and 7/8ths scale. I improved the likeness so I will reprint the 1:6 head also.View attachment 148305
View attachment 148306

Richard, you see, I know sometimes screens are a bit harsh to pass an idea and I sincerely hope I can pass it well.


You are trying simultaneously to learn and to profit. That is great! And you are asking for feedback, that is great too!

So, what I am about to say, publicly, because in democracy some or even many may disagree with me, is that your figure looks "too digital". Please allow me to explain:


Please don't take this as a shot. Take is as an open chance to improve. The suit, particularly, resembles a video game character of about five years ago. Please hold your fire! I am saying this because it clearly needs detail but it also needs naturalism. It is a problem of digital that has parallel in traditional: Ordinary sculptors knead putty and clothes resemble exactly that - kneaded putty where you can see in the putty the negative of the tool used. On the other hand, elite sculptors make this very same putty looks like folded cloth that changes immensely with the type of tissue. In digital, it really takes your nerve to create naturalism - it is not a problem of just the clothes - it touches everything. And I strongly advise you to revise the sleeves, because the are solid. Working with a living mesh takes time and it is just like traditional : Look all the time at someone wearing a suit. In traditional art schools this has two names: Brain learning and shape analysis.

About the head, while facials are beginning to match, I see another problem of digital - over enhancing. Traditional sculptors that are portrait masters are quite few but very very few and subtilness is a winning weapon when you pretend to capture an existing person. The frontier that separates a character from a caricature is tight. So, lightly reduce the musculature enhancement: It's a trial and error: luckily in digital you can always go back and retry and retry and retry. Finally detail the hair - here, I strongly advise you to see the work of Ju-Wong Jung, a traditional sculptor, because the naturalism of the hair he creates will really test your nerve. Detail in digital is just as time consuming as traditional, but you really need an operating media as sharp as a scalpel - otherwise forget it!

The proportions look like a big head in a small body. However the cause may be the screen perspective. I would like to suggest that you take JFK height and estimate body proportions of him using the male anatomy canon to see if everything is ok.

Finally. please don't guess work: I don't know if you are used to wear a suit. I am. The kind of suit, so folded, like linen, is a casual suit normally used without a tie in an informal context. A cashmere or wool suit does not fall in the body like this (unless it is old or badly ironed). The expression naturalism that I am using also applies here: See photographs of him and see how a wool suit doesn't wave but creates tight creases. Take care of the missing upper pocket and add an handkerchief. See well the tie knot and the way it stays in the body, same to the collars of a formal shirt. Clothing and hair in digital are really patience testers. But take your time!

Richard, summing up, I think you are heading the right way, with enthusiasm and try to see what I told as a way of surpassing yourself: If you create a great master you can establish your name - it takes time and suffering just as it took to the traditional Elite guys that post here the very best crafted in this world. Please try to see what I say as advises to improve: Climbing hills won't make you rich because everyone can do it. However if you climb high cliffs few can pass, you may well succeed. And that is what I sincerely want out of your project!

 

[RKapuaala]

Blue Thunder, your honest feed back and your pinpointing of real details is much appreciated. I know I came off as a hot head to waterman, but waterman was being irresponsible, elusive and unclear and unfair unlike the helpful info you are providing.
One of the struggels I have with digital sculpting is no touch. I feel that you have some very valid arguments, I felt the same about the hair and suit and the proportions. Some of this stuff I will correct when I get the print and do my first casting. I had trouble adding the top pocket myself and looking at photos is not the same as a model I can look at. You make a good point about the wrinkles. Much of 3D is done with what are called bump maps. The reason for this is so when you animate the figure you can have less polygons to calculate and because the physics of real cloth is processor intensive, but for me, the tools don't give me the tactile feed back I need to make that cloth look just right. That will be cleaned up with the first casting.
And thanks again for the feedback I love to hear this. I will post images of the process so that there is no confusion in the future. Part of that is actuall reworking the first cast because the print is done in Acrylilc an acrylic isn't easy to sculpt.
BTW very good eye on the proportions but I do have one argument. I did take measurements of the Kennedy photos and I calculated virtruvian proportions based on his height. The issue was that those proportions made his head look way too small for my minds eye, so I changed them. Sculpting is as much interpretation as it is accuracy. When I see Kennedy I see him in this photo, the one I remember most from my youth.

His head looks huge in this photo, so as I turned the figure around on the screen I tried to interpret an acceptable size. Hopefully I got it right. We will see when the print is finished. Thanks again.

 

[RKapuaala]

BTW, I'm also making a smiling Kennedy because when I recall seeing him on T.V. he was always smiling.

 

[tomifune]

BTW, I'm also making a smiling Kennedy because when I recall seeing him on T.V. he was always smiling.

You'd be smiling too if you spent last night with Marilyn Monroe

Bob

 

[Blue Thunder]

Richard, thanks for your great feedback!

Richard refers a very important question of the digital world: The polygon dimension of the generated mesh. Briefly: more and small polygons, more resolution. Less and big polygons, less resolution.

As the digital world of mannequins touches so many areas, not alone scale modelling but also movies and video gaming I took the liberty of linking here a well known character to show the evolution of the digital mannequins trough time:

It is easily clear where we are now. In the digital world, we arrived to life likeness. And this is a product of the recent years: From about 2006 to present time.

Gaming is an industry that alone is bigger than motion pictures and music together. One of the best paid jobs in the world is gaming screenwriters. We have millions of video games but everyone only know Tetris, Sonic, Tomb Raider, Angry Birds and alike, so this extraordinary degree of development is easy to understand.

However there are certain things to consider. The image exhibits a promotional Lara and a Gaming Lara. The gaming Lara is softer in detail as it will run in entertainment computers. Otherwise, the mesh in motion in a normal PC would require a gargantuan amount of RAM and also a nice graphics board.

But the promotional Lara is almost indistinguishable from a real person. However, as strange as this seems (and here is the challenge to digital sculptors) if this Lara was printed results would not be good. Specially her hair - a high end machine would attempt to replicate the hair exactly like in the digital file, but strengtheness would be seriously compromised.

There are other things to consider: Just as Richard said it is important to save polygons. So, certain industries "flatten" the characters. They look like 3d, but they are quite thin. An example is Merida from movie Brave.

Merida is also a perfect demonstration of what would happen to her hair, if she was printed. As a matter of fact the doll from the movie is substantially different from the screen character:

Obviously her hair is not printed and her clothes are not resins the market is different here.


I picked these two samples, of industries that are ahead in the Digital World in an attempt to illustrate what you guys going digital are facing:

First, a figure must be thought exactly as a figure: a statuette - over detail and true life likeness such as hair features will output a creepy and fragile miniature.
And second, a figure must be planned exactly for a specific context: A gaming character is different from a movie character and is different from a doll.

But third, the positive side is that you guys going digital may be doing in the upcoming years either your own creations printed to order, or developing characters to billion dollar industries that are clearly leading the way smashing barrier after barrier.

Let me just refer also to Richard that the Vitruvius canon, firstly described by Vitruvius Pollo and later represented by Leonardo da Vinci is a good start for a person of a "normal high". I would like to encourage you to detail this matter of the Human Figure Drawing Proportions because normally artists use 1 to 8 heads to create the body in spite of the more conventional 1 to 7.5. Here, 1 to 8 (or even 1 to 9 in the case of super heroes) result in a more aesthetic and athletic figure, but when capturing an existing person this rule may be ignored in order to represent him as it is.


Richard touches also the key difficulty digital artists have - nothing to touch: Looking to a screen and imagining in a TFT a 3d object requires a great degree of abstraction and it really takes time! Lara, Merida and so many more are the product of months or even years - just as everything, exceptional creations really take time to output.

 

[RKapuaala]

Thanks for that sweet graphic on Lara Croft Blue Thunder. One other thing about digital hair, especially the kind you see in games and movies, is that it is really generated by the rendering application and not the sculptor or even the texture artist. That requires a bit of physics as you have to write a script that will actually apply the incremental deformations of the hair a frame at a time. Crunching vertices is time consuming and processor intensive so Movies like Avatar depend on the rendering application to process and plot the physics of the textures on the 3D model. Effects like gravity and wind, bump maps and displacement maps and reflections and refraction are calculated and rendered by the computer application. One second of animation is 20 frames of film and 30 frames of video. A full frame of HD animation can take hours to render. So it is very processor intensive, which is why they have rendering farms to make these CG Movies and gaming machines have the rendering physics written write into the chip so it is closer to real time.
Part of the artistry of Digital Sculpting (even static objects like miniatures) is overcoming the challenges of the machine and the application capabilities as well as your own. But it is slowly getting better. It is quite amazing to watch this technology grow as much as it has.
You can now make convincing cloth and hair in sculptris, but the printer I use wont be able to print it. There is a trick though. Cut your project into pieces so that you can get more polygons in each part. Through shapeways you get a millon poly gons per object, the only draw back is build space on a shared printer If your project gets printed in different build then the sizes could vary from part to part as much as .02 inches. Seems like a small number if you don't consider that you are printing an object that is only 3 to 5 inches tall. Its especially irritating if parts need to mesh back together.

 

[Blue Thunder]

Yep! Right on the mark Richard! Digital hair in digital animated characters is a "software inside the software". It is an .app generated specifically developed to a certain purpose. In the case of Merida, I remember reading that she had a team of technicians whose sole purpose in the movie was her hair. Another parallel case, just to see how deep things can go in the Digi World, in the movie "Cars 2", to replicate la Seine water in a digital Paris, a guy with a PhD in fluid mechanics was responsible for the software to replicate the river water modelling. After that, in Ice Age 4 a scene with a raft lost in the ocean, made the previous scene look almost prehistorical. We are really moving fast


Obviously these examples are just to color that digital entertainment industry can output nowadays just about anything. In this small business, I know many are, how can I say, a bit not adherents to this new world. Specially because many digital mannequins are ill fated and many prints are a true disappointment.


Regarding the digital mannequin, the best advise I would like to give you Richard, and any other guys reading this, is to clearly target the digital mannequin you are composing to resemble a hand sculpted figure - not a real person (for example with one by one hair or floating buttons), not a toon, but a true figure - looking at the very best traditional sculptors of this world do: From the great classic names of many decades such as Mike Good, Ray Lamb, Carl Reid or Adriano Laruccia to contemporary raising talents such as Sang-Eon Lee. Each of these elite names has a feature that clearly sets him apart: For example Carl Reid is a true story teller - each of the figures he composes tells a story, Julian Hullis uses hands in body balance like no one, Ju-Wong Jung gives hair a completely different brilliance, Mike Good figures, regardless of size, even tiny 1/48 pilots, really stir: They have a unique naturalism inside them. Artistry is something highly difficult to capture and there are very few names capable of doing it. So, ID clearly in the best of the very best what really sets their works apart!

The great guys attempting digital are now just beginning to learn how to operate with software, and to trail the long path of trial and error, but I hope that you all really focus the concept of the scale figurine in order to be accepted in a very traditional market and to generate profitability - the essence of any business.

Then, there is another issue to discuss - printing - that today is a knife with two edges: From quite rubbish to quite smooth - this is becoming the critical matter for those willing to output creations.


Food to talk!

 

[RKapuaala]

That is a good point you made about printing Blue Thunder, but keep in mind that my prints are the cheap kind because I'm still learning (this June will be my second year). I haven't by my own estimation create any thing good enough to warrant using the better printers. I got close on the Plump Belgian (which people mistook for Poirot) and Mz M (which people mistook for Mz Marple). I've been told that there are really good printers. MAX posts images of stuff they print in the Ukraine I think and they look very good, but I can't say for sure only having used Shapeways.
After completing this guy's digital 'mannequin' (I like that term, it really does describe)

(I apologize to the critical masses in advance for my poor painting so please don't bother to point it out unless you have something constructive to say because I know and I'm working on it.)
I realized that using shapeways, you can't get the level of detail you want. I tried to do the shirt pockets, but they would not print out so I added them back in with clay as I also did with a few of the buttons. I further took the original casting and added tiny creases here and there and smoothed out some of the rougher areas I could not remove on the print without breaking it.
So if you are going to do this cheaply, you are going to have to rely on some of the skills you acquired using wax and clay and carving wood (because resin is not the same as clay). And back to some of the points you (Blue Thunder) brought up in the above post, Science and Art are again United as they were once during the Renaissance.

 

[Blue Thunder]

Hi Richard! Forgive my delay

I agree with your last remark! Art and Technology are embracing themselves again after so many centuries spited apart.

Observing your miniature and seeing the great video you uploaded , I remembered something useful: Keeping ourselves in the Renaissance, the great Michelangelo Buonarotti made the two most known statues of mankind even before he was 30 years old. Michelangelo was a man of seven jobs, and later in life, being wealthy and having the biggest architecture and art office of the world of his time, he taught his trainees to sculpt a statue with the very same speed from the head to the toe

He was advising to spent in the chest, then in one upper arm, than in the other upper arm, than in the belly... exactly the same amount of time one invests in the head. This would be the biggest advise I would have to give, because the JFK video shows how well you are mastering the ... most difficult part of the body in this market! (artists consider the hands, but in figure modeling rare are the ones that buy a figure just for the hands...)

Richard, do not fear brush paint to find flaws. Even injection molded kits are brushed with chemistry fluids in order to find flaws. Pity that's a bit late around here, I think I know a bit about the major technology printing trends that may be useful to pioneering guys like you

 

[Colin_Fraser]

Richard - maybe I am alone but I rather like your style of painting. I looks to be a mix of staining and traditional shading and it looks pretty good...at least it's your own style.

Colin

 

[RKapuaala]

Blue Thunder. Yeah, I just ran out of polygons when I got to those areas so I'll finish them when I get the prints with wax or clay. Please share all you know about 3D printing on this forum. I've been doing it as a customer for about 2 years now. I would like to hear about it from someone who actually knows more than I do.

 

[Blue Thunder]

Richard, you see, if you are lacking RAM you can, for example, use an online render farm. Autodesk has one online. It works with just about every possible 3d concept you can create: From tiny electronics to soccer stadiums.

About 3d prints, there are some, how can I say, "essentials" that are better to know in advance, Richard

The very first one is the digital quality of the mesh to be printed. What is this term "digital quality" ... well it is the very same as a plain cad file: Many times, one draws lines superimposed one over another, other times one changes layers in a very same contour, other times people use auxiliary lines ... and if the final file is not digitally cleaned all these tweaks will be plotted. As a matter of fact a clean file is quite lightweight and a creation file is quite heavyweight. This last one has the whole creation process saved and superimposed.

3d models going to be printed are the same: even a small floating polygon, invisible on the screen will be printed. And many times people see digital messy prints because of this. Floating lines in space without no apparent correspondence to the subject matter. However as 3d print is expensive, many times people run away from cleaning the digital model and prefer to hand clean the digital print to keep costs down.

Well, and now comes the prints. Printing technology of today looks a bit like the time when dot matrix printers, inkjet printers and laser printers coexisted in time in the very early 90's. The first ones were comparatively cheep and no one wanted them, the last were tech wonders but no one could afford them. In the middle inkjet printers become the best of both worlds. 3d printers are a bit this way today... but we still don't know where tech is going to get stable... There are many technologies. I will only speak of the major ones.

First we have Fused deposition modeling: Essentially, a controlled extrusion technology plugged to a CNC command. The plus of this tech is that it is quite affordable. The tweak is that it outputs things really resembling dot matrix prints... but in 3d. The term "resolution" is deceitful because the machine head adds layers of material and this is palpable in the shape of small steps. Many FDM machines are extremely lightweight. Therefore, even the balance and vibrations of the printer head interferes with precision. Many of these machines look something like the "Apple one": They are really garage made machines created by enthusiastic guys.


Then we have Stereolithography (SLA): It is also an addictive process but with a major different thing: It uses a photo curable resin that once shot by an ultraviolet laser it will level the consecutive additions getting an outstanding surface and the possibility to create, let's say, "impossible shapes". Shapes impossible to create in a single part in machining or injection techniques. As good as this seams, SLA resin is incredibly high priced today. Resulting in parts costing an average of $50 per cubic inch.


And finally we have Selective laser melting (SLM) that many people confuse with Selective laser sintering (SLS). SLM overcomes the major problem of SLS: The grainy look of binary laser powder hitting. SLM machines cost quite more than a car. However they can output unbelievable shapes with extreme accuracy and quality. NASA is testing jet engines with parts created in SLM environment. Most probably, SLS technology in a future nearby will also outcomes it's tweaks because it is a great technology to mass create auto parts or electronic plastic parts for short lived gadgets with no need to invest in plastic molds.


FDM is a great tech in areas where extreme precision is not needed with applications so wide as cake decorations to a full house print (already done) to recreation boats. It will be the first to arrive to cost efficiency.

The other "S" techs: SLA, SLM and SLM are in a heck of a war these days struggling the market with consecutive news and advances. This market value is immense. In my personal opinion SLA will become the first in house tech, SLS will triumph in mass industry and SLM will always be a high end tech just like laser color print is still today in plain paper printing. What these three techs need to do is to lower the price of consumables- something clearly possible in the first two, but highly unlikely in the last one - so high end materials and high end parts will team and find a good nest here.


Where we are today is in this.Randomly I located this very good example:

A figurine digitally created:

And a print:

The chain floating in the air is the best example of the possibilities of 3d print . Something impossible to do in another technology. As there are no molds here, you can also print the most incredible dynamic figure in a single print.

Pity these prints are not yet cost efficient ... but by the end of this decade, this issue will be just a memory of the past we're typing today.

 

[RKapuaala]

Wow, incredible information Blue Thunder and what an amazing print. I think at this point it is important to point out that Shapeways technology is probably the FDM type of printing. As asked for here are some of the prints of this project I just received.

Incredibly these are the uncleaned (by me) prints. As you can see they are extremely hard to make out any detail on because they are frosted and semi transparent. My cursory inspection consists of holding them up to various types of light, at various angles to see if I can detect any obvious flaws. I also use my finger tips for this since viewing is impossible when you first receive your prints. The finger tip tests also reveals how waxy the models are when they arrive, but in this instance, they are not waxy at all. That has never happened before. This is a first! So without elaborate cleaning with Simple Green and/or alcohol I but a coat of test paint on them to reveal what I could not see or feel.

And wow! I general just slop some cheap ancient paint on to reveal imperfections. The paint is so old it washes off with a bath of Simple Green and water so I can put on a working coat. As you can see this is a very good print. There are imperfections on the right shoulder of the biggest model, but not on the smaller one. These are registration issues and if they were anywhere else I would ask for a reprint because these are way over the .2mm tolerance. But the suit is in need of additional detailing anyway and more than likely the issues with registration are my fault having selectively reduced polygons in areas that lacked detail so I could make it within the 1million poly count limit.
Another sweet thing about this print is that they were supported on their backs where there is even less detail so I will be able to feather in the slight support material line you can see. And I do mean slight. Usually the support material lines are like 1/4 scale inch of gunk that has to be carefully scrapped off, but this time it is barely noticeable.
Anyway, I'll post some images of my working cast and after that my master casting.

 

[zodiac]

Hi Blue Thunder,
Is that a print or a render? Who did the print? The light and shade has that rendered look to me, keyshot perhaps?. Can you supply more information?

 

[Blue Thunder]

Hi again chaps!

Richard, without having the prints in my hands it is difficult to analyse. For me, it seams, but please note this is just by looking through a screen, to be an SLS output. Particularly in one sentence you state - they look frost.

I may be wrong, after all I don't have the parts with me, but they really look SLS outputs. SLS is a sintering technology where briefly a laser hits a powder making it harden. This technology is evolving quite fast - meaning that a high end machine about three years old belongs today to a museum.

So, what are the tweaks: First it is "resolution". A complex shape of concave and convex curves is translated to laser hits in x-y-z coordinates along paths. Obviously, the bigger number of precise hits (meaning x-y-z coordinates of the model match x-y-z coordinates of the laser hits) the greater the resolution, the bigger the accuracy, and the bigger the time to output a part. And on the other hand, the less the precision the softer will become the print and faster it will outcome too. As I said, this technology is evolving quite fast, but results of standard, old or cheap machines still resemble a bit those Laras of the nineties. However, some high end printers can output extremely accurate results right now.

SLS advantages are mostly two: The first is the possibility to color each dot, this means that printing a "painted figure" is already possible. Even printing a 3d model of a scanned person in scale. But the major one is still underdevelopment: It is the possibility to use not one laser, but 10, 100 or even 1000 simultaneously, ensuring a gigantic output of parts. Just imagine the kind of machines we're about to see in the next decade.

But now comes the major drawback: Being an aggregation of a powder, parts look too matt. Like it they were made of wheat flour or powdered soap. Their tactility is not the best for the consumer if we consider this tech to print, for example, light switches, cell phone covers, tupperware and so on. This technology has the ambition to fight in the field of plastics but really need to improve the aspect it has with human tact.

So, summing up, many SLS machines lack precision, accuracy and unfortunately too, profitability to mass print. Positively, a brand new top machine outputs really great parts to cast but unfortunately not to sell directly as their dust aspect is not highly commercial to many people.

Many of you, digital guys will face the old dilemma between client and supplier: "hey why is this print so frosted, and what happened to detail?" "not our fault Mr. The model you brought has small detail and resolution, we just print it out". So, where is the truth? Many times an old machine will output crap of a great digital model and a top digital print will print a spectacular sharp print of an ill fated digital mannequin. My advise - find a partner who has a real passion for scale figures: He will understand your requirements and will even help you getting the best out of your model.


Zodiac, that is a real physical print made by Ownage. They are based in Hong Kong and they are one of the finest in this business. If I remember correctly I heard already of them, right here on Planet Figure. In the Zbrush modelling forum, I remember reading they charge around the $300 - $500 mark to print a figure. So, unless there is a hidden market for figures costing $1000, bye bye (but just for now) print and sell: Digital guys still have to mold and to cast to expect sales to dilute the cost of this print.

But ... with so many patents expiring, and the market growing so high hold your breath for what's about to come! I remember the time when a crappy and noisy plotter carrying Rotring pens costed more than an Audi or a BMW. Nowadays an A0 plotter starts bellow the 1000$ mark (and without the Rotring pens too!.. ) ... so save some corner in your houses for a digital printer


Richard, congratulations on your print! Please accept my sincere advise: Take the time you spend in the head as a reference and them take seven times more time in creating the full body. Also, create a concept - a striking pose is always a best seller! And you're going to be!

Cheers!