Low budget 3D-printing again ...

Guess what happened totay!
When I came back home from buying the Beer for the evening a small green stranger sat on my keybord. He grinned and suggested to me to have a little break from printing Tamara, to enjoy Easter holidays, visit the children and the grand child and relax. Will do!

 

HOLY CRAP!
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All the time since I try to print avatars and items I had the damn problem with geometry of thickness 0. Thickness 0 is really hard to print, believe me - lol
Today I played around with a model from Skyrim (because it's part of the main goal). Again I was unhappy about the hair.

And than I found it: "Shift Polygon net" with "Volume body" enabled:

Ohh man! That's kinda revolution for me. This changes nearly everything.
Volume hair! I LOOOOVE IT! The grey hair below is ONE volume. Each part added with boolean operation. OMG!

I will be able to print Jamira! Can't believe it ...

 

Well, the whole project will take a while ... until I'll have my 30" statue :-)

 

Thanks for your interest. And no, I didn't talk to my friend yet. I postponed that task because several other problems have to be solved before.

 

Back from vacation. Next step: Upper body ...

The holsters didn't work. No way to merge them with the other parts in Rhino. Even the bracelet causes problems. I assume it's because of self intersections of the parts. And I'm not patient enough and not willingly to put much work into it. So I decided to let them out. It's not the goal of this stage to make a super detailed model. It's still just a test and learn project.
I told the modeler to make only a pistol dummy. I searched for some free models of slightly bigger handguns today and found this precious:

;-)
I'm running a test-print right now.

 

Okay, I took the model as it was ... overlapping geometry, holes, single faces. Each other printer-software than the one from PEARL wouldn't have accepted such a crap. But here we are:

Not so good at some details ... but I was curious if it's worth it to put some further work into it. Answer: Yes!
Wich means in this case I will use it as blueprint only and build my own model ... just to avoid problematic geometry.

There is really a huge difference between models for games or visualisations and models for printing. Don't fall into a trap folks, when someone tells you, that you can get thousands of free 3D models for printing in the internet. Even buyable models are usually for visulisations, not for printing. And if you ask professional modelers for printable models be aware of immense costs.

 

Well ... short weapon excursion finished ... the main part is waiting. It looks like I have to make six further prints:

This will become exciting!
Nice: It was easy to split the upper body into six pieces:

 

I will start with one of the most important parts to check out tomorow ... the head:

I'm a bit anxious about how it will look like and how easy/hard it'll be to finish it in an acceptable way. The modeler made other eyes and added brows. Both didn't work and I replaced the eyeballs and left the brows out.

 

Yes, it MUST be painted to get a quality model. I hope to hire someone for the job. But it's not my current problem. At a pinch I'll do it by myself for this stage. But I'm not really good with such works.

Btw ... this stage is for learn about splitting a model for easy painting as well. Small details may be difficault to paint and it's probably easier to print and paint them as single parts and glue them together later.

 

Here she comes:

 

It's not treated with sandpaper yet.
Happy? Hmmm ... well, I've learned that this size is the minimum for my printer. The quality isn't the best indeed. But sandpaper and colours will help hopefully. "Satisfied" describes it better than "happy".

 

Well, next tricky parts will be the hands with such small fingers and many details:

Finishing and colouring will become time-consuming too.
Ohh btw ... the raster you can see in most of my screenshots from Rhino is 1 mm. But many details below 1 mm vanish during the printing process. And some other details become victims of the sandpaper. LOL - sounds like the titel of a horror movie: "VICTIMS OF THE SANDPAPER" ... Hoohhhhh