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Learning to 3D Print

Added 2019-11-28 01:08:38 +0000 UTC

So this came as a surprise this month, but during a conversation with a friend about 3d printing and my art he offered to buy me one.

So well, I've had a 3d printer for the better part of this month and I've got a few things to talk about with it.

The printer is a Anycubic Photon S. It's resin based and the choice that drove this over non-resin printers was to create figures in a smaller size with better detail. I've never worked with a 3d printer before so it made me nervous that my first would be one that might be considered non-standard.

So I received it and then came the problem... What (or really who to print).

A recent render involving Chris turned into a recent fave of mine, so I opted to print her out. I wanted to get the full bang out of this so I opted to try and get it a decent size at 115 mm (aprox 4.5'').

The results were...

Not bad, considering poor chris suffered a print failure and now needs a prosthetic leg. So, I tried it again. Except, more print failures started to occur. I thought to maybe try and print her smaller but that didn't work out well so I thought maybe Chris (in this 3d file) was to complex for me right now).

So I tried Renee.

Despite the translucency of the material making it hard to see her; she came out well at76mm (about 3'')

Well, sorta, from what you can see, there's a dark mark on her leg from where I repaired a failure.

I may have talked about this before, but I enjoy miniatures so I did have some green stuff lying around to try and rehabilitate Renee to something that I could eventually prime and paint.

Still, print failures are not a fun thing and were something, during some free time, that I sought to figure out to eliminate or at least diminish to something far more manageable.

Sticking with Renee, I created a new render for her. It seemed that smaller figures at about 70mm and below were printing with much smaller errors, so I could get a bigger Renee printed if she was knelt, bent over, etc.

Success, sorta.

Here I learned a new lesson about 3d printing that I ignored until it was really unsightly to me. Hair that looks good in a render may not look good in printed form.

I try to keep the work I do, despite the fantastical shapes, grounded in the contemporary, so to create hair that would be easier to print would break from that tradition.

What I created to solve this, easily looks like mud slapped on Renee in a completed render, but for 3d printing should solve the issue. (I believe it did solve the issue.)

So for comparision, here's the hair sculpted and rendered.

Not great, but then again, if I did some texturing to it, it might've come out pretty neat. I might even explore this as an alternative for future renders.

But in print form, I believe it looks great!

Even better, it looks like there was minimal sanding that I had to do compared to my other attempts.

So I printed out another.

and another and another and another and another. (I still have a few that I haven't picked from the support structure)

While some prints accidentally got clipped by printing at the edge of the print area, some green stuff readied them to be primed.

Enough so that I believe I'll be adding these girls to my online store, (once I get the shipping part set up.) So if you'd like a Renee statuette to hang out at your desk, keep an eye out for that.

Really by the end of this practice, I was printing with errors that were manageable enough that I tested what I learned by printing myself a 139 mm (5.5 inch) Venus de Milo scan.