Really? Oh man that's gonna' make life so much easier. Of course, some stuff I like to export for 3d printing on a fdm printer so I'd still need to clean those up, but that should make sprueing all the parts together for Shapeways so much easier. You seriously just made my day, man! [Edit] sprued it all up and uploaded to shapeways. Got to see which areas I need to fix and learned that it'll be about $22 to print in hda (keeping the supports on) which isn't too bad. Less than $7 if I were to go with swf but I think it's worth it to spring for the extra detail. I'll have to see if it's more economical to take the collar and neck off and get them in swf. I can probably bring all the pieces a little closer together to use less material on sprues and the areas that are too thin shouldn't be too difficult to fix. Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to make the faces available in SWF: I think I can fix the areas near the eyes for HDA without much trouble but swf would need it to be even thicker and I think I'd start losing the shape at that point. [edit again] Turns out that's not true: fixing it for HDA was enough to fix it for SWF as well. This is Shapeways' "heatmap" of the piece. The red areas are too thin. [Edit Again] Here's some shots of the latest revisions to the faces, taking suggestions from those who've posted here (lower brow on the happy face, and narrower mouth on the neutral face and sad face) and also thickening up the "walls" near the eyes to get the faces to pass Shapeways' tests. I think fixing the eyes on the sad face has made her look sleepy. Might have to tweak that s'more.
Maybe this can be good reference. IMO, Makotron nailed the animation look in 3d form here. 3D Artwork: - 3D Arcee head (for TFA Arcee)
Arcee head sculpt by Makoto Ono / Makotron intended as an add-on for TFA Arcee , posted 2010, here at TFW2005. I don't understand why he removed it?
I like the one he did in 2007 I think there is an even better render someone did, but I need to go through my old saved pics.
Looks a little mean for my taste. And I kinda like the shape but I'd never get away with a head that wide on this figure: it wouldn't fit in alt mode. That's why mine has roughly the same silhouette as the original.
Somehow I missed this post earlier. I really like the look of that model. Hm... Do I wanna do the neck on my headsculpt like that? So, having seen these face sculpts, it made me realize I may have humanized my Arcee face a bit too much. Here's a flatter version of the neutral expression. Thoughts?
I've flattened all of the faces a little like the image above. I've ordered a test print in strong white and flexible with the head and neutral face sized normally (identical to Generations Arcee's head size) and the head and smiling face upscaled to 110% (Yes, I remembered to keep the ball socket the same size). I'll try both on her and, if the larger head will work with her transformation, I'll make it the default size. I'll also be checking if everything assembles the way I expect and if the collar needs tweaking to fit her chest (had to wing it a little with no way to measure the curve of the underside of the collar piece).
These look amazing. Loving that head sculpt. Much nicer than the one neurowing posted - not that it's bad it's just a bit angry and hardcore for Arcee - the larger headcrest is a bit cobra/ snake-like. Loving it if you're able to get the head up in that new HDA material for a good price! I haven't used it yet. the Fine Extreme and Ultra Detailed are good although there's still a tiny bit of striation on them . A decent undercoat, colour coat and a gloss finish smooths them out pretty well though. Can't wait to see this in hand. Are you planning on putting the feet up as well? At this stage, the hip/thigh mods, a new set of feet, a new head and some articulated hands will really make this pop - and probably bring the total cost for the figure up to the price of FT's Arcee. I think I'll need to think carefully before I go to far into this. Amazing job though.
I can make the feet available as is but it would require modifying her legs: the large round ankle covers (or whatever you wanna' call those circles) interfered with their fit. While that's the solution I chose (I didn't like the circles anyway), I don't think many people would be into that solution. I've been meaning to redo the feet to fit properly. Now that I've more or less finalized the head design (at least until I get my test print from Shapeways), I guess I have time to redo the feet. And yes, this is expensive. I haven't been keeping track of how much money I've put into his project because, if I did, I'd have to punch myself in the face for being so wasteful. Still, I'm not just putting money into an Arcee figure: I'm putting money into an enjoyable activity that I've had a lot of fun with and there will still be plenty of tools and supplies when I'm done for other projects. I'm planning on getting a 3d printer sometime in the next few months (just got a promotion at work so putting the money together should be a lot easier) and I can use the practice I've gotten on Arcee to make some nice 3d printed figures. I'm planning on doing this Voltron at some point, attempting to make some improvements along the way.
Awesome. Congrats on the promotion by the way! Yeah I've done my far share of expensive custom figures trying to make so IDW stuff. It is very enjoyable. But I lack the skill or patience to do those torso mods you did. Great stuff Out of curiosity, what are you looking at as a 3d Printer? I've investigated them on and off over the years and have been waiting for prices to drop to a more reasonable range and for the print quality to improve. Would love a decently priced one that can print without to many of those lines and layer marks. The voltron pic looks crazy smooth
Thanks! My wife and I are pretty excited about my promotion. You're always gonna get the layer lines but if your printer has a high enough resolution, you can minimize the sanding\filling needed to get rid of them. I'm looking at getting the same one my buddy got: a monoprice maker select. It's one of the cheaper 3d printers around at under $300 and there are so many mods and upgrades available for it that for around $400-500 total, you can have a printer that easily rivals models that cost triple that. It claims a min later height of 100 microns (.1mm) but it can actually go down to 50 microns. The 400 micron nozzle can be replaced with a 200 micron one giving it a damn good x\y resolution as well. I'd still order head and face replacements from shapeways but it could easily handle low detail and medium detail pieces. For example, the feet on my Arcee were printed at 100 micron later height before my friend made any mods to his printer and I was able to easily sand it to the point that it looks injection molded. Still, that Voltron in the picture has got to be after a lot of sanding and filling. 3d printing is not for crapping out high quality toys: you either content yourself with stripey pieces or you put in the work to make them nicer. You can find a few prints of Voltron that people have done on YouTube and you can see they look a lot rougher than that pic up there.
I have a Monoprice Maker Select mini. It does a really good job after it is properly calibrated, there is even a v2 version out now that incorporates a few of the community mods right out of the box. If you get one be sure to join the facebook group set up by other owners of the mini. It is an invaluable resource to getting started. Log into Facebook | Facebook As far as the resolution, everything under 0.1 resolution is pretty acceptable looking after being primed. If you get something like a Polymaker polysmooth polysher you can probably get some impressive looking stuff. You just gotta buy the device and the fillament to do it.
I'd rather get a Maker Select than a Maker Mini. They're about the same quality but the select has a larger print area and is more moddable. Also, I have to disagree with the "everything under 0.1 resolution" thing. Even with .06 resolution, I have to sand like crazy to get a printed object looking even close to a factory part. Time for an update. I guess it's been almost a week. I got my test pieces from Shapeways today and learned from all my mistakes. Ball sockets are perfectly sized (the head pops onto the stock neck ball just fine and is nice and tight but not too tight) but the balls on the neck are too small. I need to move the ball socket in the head in a little: the head sits too high on the stock neck. The collar doesn't fit: I made the front part - the joint that connects to the chest - a little too long so it can't fit properly in bot mode. Easy fixes but the kind of things I couldn't see without having the parts in hand, which is why I got the test print in the cheap swf. A more difficult fix is going to be fixing the faces so that they can be easily installed and removed - I was pretty sure they wouldn't be installable as I'd printed them but since I had no idea what I'd need to do, I just decided to print them as is and mod them by hand until they fit and then make those changes to the model. I got them to fit but not easily, so I'm going to have to spend some time tomorrow working on that. As for the print itself, it's unsuitable for use on the actual toy. No surprise there: I figured I'd try to sand it down and see if I could get a decent part out of swf but I didn't really expect it to work out. The mouth especially didn't come out at all. In the photos below you can see that, even though I spent hours sanding, the heads are still really rough. SWF seems to take a TON of sanding to get rid of the texture. I also tried carving the details back in since the printing process didn't capture them very well and the sanding reduced it even more with... ok-ish results. I gave the larger head a coat of primer so I could see just how smooth I'd gotten it (hard to tell when it's white) and... yeah, not smooth at all. I think I got the smaller head a little better, having spent more time on it after seeing just how bad the larger one still looked, but there's still quite a bit of texture. So yeah, larger head in grey and standard sized one in white. Also the larger one is the smiling face (though it's kind of hard to tell given the low quality of the print), while the smaller one is the neutral face. I like how the larger one looks on her (though I might reduce it to 105% instead of 110%) but it doesn't fit in alt mode. I'm debating whether I want to file down the parts that get in the way: it's just the hinges connecting her backpack; but either way, I'll make the finalized part available in standard size so that no filing is needed. [Edit] Ok, nevermind about the larger head. I just held her up next to my MP hotrod and her big ol' melon looked ridiculous next to him. Standard sized head it is.
The amount work required to make printed parts look good post-print, is really off-putting to me. Performing that, on something as intricate as the detail in your face design - I do not envy what you will need to do to make her head look good. Your computer model is awesome, but I just don't think we're quite there with the prosumer printing yet. It will be great when it is attainable for an average consumer to produce parts that look like they came from commercial molds. But I digress, she's looking really good.
Thanks! You're right that it's a lot of work but, as I mentioned, this is the cheap material. Barely better than you'd get a consumer printer (though much more reliable). The hda is a damn nice material, though, that's almost as good as injection molded plastic. Still requires sanding but not as much. I sanded and painted the helmet on the smaller head. Decided I don't like Tamiya Pearl white as it's more off-white. Also, that swf requires way too much sanding. I sanded it for hours and it's still rough in a lot of spots. Still, it gives me a decent indication of what the final print will look like (and all the stuff I need to fix). I'll try to get a quick coat of paint slapped on the face and eyes to show later.
I decided to test paint the normal sized head. I used the Tamiya Pearl White I ordered a while back and I mixed up some metallic lavender for her face by mixing Princess Purple with Vallejo's silver which is the brightest, whitest silver paint I've ever seen so I figured it'd easily replace white in the mix to lighten the purple. Neither color worked out: the pearl white is too off-white/beige for my taste and the lavender could've used a little bit more pink and I should've used about half as much silver and mixed in some white. Also, I'll probably mix a little purple into the red I used on her lips next time. I sanded and sanded and sanded this head for hours until it looked pretty smooth. Once I hit it with the primer, I saw that, yes it's smoother than the large one from the other day, but it's still really really rough. So I will not be using strong white and flexible for any of my customizing needs in the future: I get better results from my friend's fdm printer with PLA. Still, I'm optimistic about HDA so I'll still be ordering the finalized head in that. So how rough is it after all the sanding and painting? Ok, that's not too bad. I mean it's still pretty rough but it could be worse right. If you're not standing too closeto your monitor, it might almost look acceptable. Let's see how it looks zoomed in a little more. Yech!! That's awful!! How much time did I spend sanding that? Whatever it was, it wasn't enough. Sadly, I had to stop sanding because I was losing too much of the detail: and that's after I actually carved some of it back in. Anyway, I'm making my tweaks to the model now. I've had to exaggerate some of the details because they weren't visible at all (the little circle indents on the sides of her buns were just nonexistent, and the corners of her mouth just kind of disappeared). Should've known that would be necessary: I'm modelling it at a large size on my screen but the whole thing is less than 2cm wide in real life. I should have the final model ready for printing later this week or during the weekend. Here's her happy face after some tweaking
