Saturday 20 September 2014

Changing direction

Time to take stock and think about some new ideas.

This blog has had over 40,000 views now. Does anyone ever read these notes or do people just come to look at the pictures? Many thanks to those few people who take the trouble to comment on my work.

I can't sell these prints so I just have to store them all. I'm not allowed to share the model files because of copyright restrictions on the base meshes. The owners are showing no signs of releasing the promised 3D printing license. I sincerely hope this changes soon. The only other solution is to keep working at sculpting until I can stop having to rely on character posing tools.

3D printing is slow and expensive, especially for some of the larger models, which can now take over 24 hours to print. It's easy to forget that 2 times the size equals 2x2x2 = 8 times the volume (and hence time and cost). I recently tried printing Casual Undress at half the normal size and was pleasantly surprised by two things. Firstly, the print was finished in under 3 hours, and secondly, it still had an amazing amount of visible detail. I would definitely try that again.


The one thing I am least happy with, at the moment, is the ugly scars left behind on the underside of parts which have been printed onto support material. I do my best to hide these in the photos I take, but if you look closely at some of the videos it is easy to spot these unsightly blemishes. I have some interesting ideas about how to try some experimental techniques to improve this.

Perhaps more fundamentally though, maybe it is time to move on and start working in a different area. I am happy to maintain this record of what I have achieved with some free software and a cheap home-made 3D printer, but I'm beginning to wonder what fresh challenges await ...

2 comments:

  1. Have you ever thought about scanning a model? A Kinect or photogrammetry do deliver pretty good results. You will loose some detail, especially in the face, fingers and toes. You will gain a lot of realism with the poses though. A real person is a lot easier to pose than Genesis or Victoria.
    The meshes you'll generate will be yours and you'd be free to sell them to recuperate your initial costs.

    I'm not a lawyer, when does a basemesh cease to be protected? I have taken DAZ models and used them as a base. the endresult probably doesn't share a single vertex with the original.

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  2. You should give scultptris a try. I'm not very good at any modeling sofware, but with a few hours one day I was able to make a very lifelike mesh.

    http://i.imgur.com/zZ6cv5X.png

    I didn't spend time to learn any of the key bindings for inverting the brushes, otherwise I think I could have done a lot better.

    It's also able to import obj objects in for remeshing / adding details.

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