Skull Chaser 3D Print.

Still grasped by the 3D printing bug, over the late May bank holiday weekend (and another two days) I went back to some Jake Parker illustrations for resources and inspiration and decided to take his Skull Chaser as inspiration.  I'm not going to post ZBrush shots as there's plenty of end result real ones to get through and as Slimer proved, the end result is precisely what is in the virtual realm!

As before all the visible joints are the model's own.  All Revoltech.  These were much easier to get in this time as the material printed in is plastic rather than the much harder multicolour material Slimer was.  Again, all printing by Sculpteo.  Onto the pics then.  He's about 15cm tall.

Neat huh?  I really need to get my own IP so I can sell this stuff hah.

I like:

• That he can stand on his own without the stand (that admittedly fits lovely into his backpack.)
• The plastic material.  It has WAY more give than the multicolour.
• How spot on to the reference it is heh.
• How nice it all fitted together.  The only glue is on the tips of the white antennas to attach the visor.
• The helmet pivot.  It's a standard pivot joint, but so satisfying to click in place.
• That I've managed to fit in a 6mm joint as a neck inside the helmet.  Not a lot of range of motion on this one but enough to offset the helmet being unable to look up or down.
• That the knees and elbows can't bend the wrong way due to good cuts when slicing the model up.
• All the extra bits (spare head, hands, gun) makes it feel like a proper Revoltech piece.
• That he can facepalm.  Always a good test of a figure.

I dislike:

• Snapping the antenna when gluing the visor on.  Grrr.
• Paying extra for "polished plastic" on the black plastic.  I can't discern much of a difference.
• The angling of the hips pivots.  They needed to be angled off horizontal to fit both into the slim hips.  It's making posing harder than it needs to be.
• My pictures.  Don't do him justice, especially on the white plastic which is quite translucent.
• The gun.  I didn't hollow it, so it's overly heavy, and I didn't hollow enough out for the grip to go in and had to file away a chunk of material.  You can see the uncoloured white plastic at the top of it in the pointing pic.

My First 3D Print!

So the *other* ZBrush Workshops course I was enrolled in was "3D printing for artists", hosted by Pixologic's own Joseph Drust.  This week I got my finished piece(s) shipped to me after having them printed through Sculpteo, woop!  So diving straight in, here they are!

Yep, Slimer from Ghostbusters.  Technically from the IDW comics version of Ghostbusters.  An old sculpt tidied up (improved musculature, creases, and hopefully appeal.)  Here's a quick ZBrush render:

The joints in the first shot are standard revoltech joints.  I've had to cannibalise some of my regular action figures for them, but that's fine, someone else made those hah.  Here's some closeups to show off the multicolour material:

As far as materials go it was a good choice for colour purposes, but it has literally zero give in it, and is quite heavy (despite the body being hollowed out, what a mission that was!)  I did test filing down some of the ridges, but it took too much colour off, so stopped that pretty quick!  The material is akin to ceramic, and as such has really good compression strength.  However, not so good if you are trying to twist in joints into holes that have set a hiccup too small.  Here's a pristine hand, and after me screwing in a joint.

D'oh.  Then I promptly went and did the same with his other hand.  They're not even symmetrical pieces!  Ah well, live and learn.  Next print will be in the Sculpteo plastic material.  Interesting to see the cross section of the multicolour material though.  It shows how deep the colour goes.  Anyways, after a bit of judicious gluing and a lot of not so gentle wearing away at the holes with watchmaker's screwdrivers, here's the finished piece:

That, is pretty cool.  Note the tongue, it's on a joint, although due to me angling the hole so I couldn't get access straight on (the hole points at the pallete rather than forward, silly design decision) it's not as perfect as I'd like, and I don't want to start twisting it to pose it in case the torque does bad things to the eggshell of his body.

And finally, a source, ZBrush, print pic all in one.

Learnt a lot from the course, and it's really fired up my drive for getting more stuff made "real".  Next project is actually almost finished, and will be in plastic, so will hopefully be even more refined.