Introducing Ulala! (v1 3D print)

Greetings space cats!  This project is the intellectual culmination of a lot of the classes I've taken over the last two years.  The appealing character design from Mike Defeo's class combined with the 3D print knowledge from Joseph Drust's one.  Did you know you can't get a good Space Reporter Ulala figure?  Well, you still can't, but I have one!

So the combination process: I had Ulala finished from an earlier 2D piece, then I chopped her up for joints (after dressing her in trousers as her traditional short skirt would be too stiff to be useful when posing).  Shipped to Sculpteo to print (more on them later) and then painted with Games Workshop paints.  A bunch more involved than this paragraph would indicate!

Sculpteo then.  She's printed in their white plastic but only on their standard layer thickness (100-150µm).  I wanted the fine thickness (60µm) but apparently she's too fragile for that.  Now I chose to combine her pieces on a sprue to keep the cost down (Sculpteo wanted to charge me four times as much to print each piece on separate runs, so I made a sprue to force her to be printed in one go) but doing this didn't help isolate which pieces of her are too thin (probably the microphone).  I do intend to re-print her after working out the fragile bits and re-orientating parts to mitigate the tree-ring effect of 3D printing, but not for a little while.  I had thought to sand her down to remove layer lines but trying that had a tendency to give the material an almost furry quality, as though I was pulling apart a block of nylon, so I didn't do too much of that, so her fidelity is not as high as I would like.  This wasn't mitigated at all by three acrylic undercoats and two coats of colour paint and three layers of matte varnish.  Lots learnt though.  Oh boy lots learnt!

On to more pics...  She's about 16cm tall BTW, there's no real scale indicators in the pic.

I like:

• She's the best action figure of Ulala you can (can't) get, which is almost damning with faint praise, definitely not my intent!  I think she's just great.
• The outfit is a faithful recreation of the spy suit from Space Channel 5 part 2.
• A large proportion of pieces are reusable for a different outfit.
• That she stands on her own and can facepalm (two of my aims when making a figure).

I dislike:

• The thick layers.  Should there be a next time I'll work out why Sculpteo reported that the model was too fragile for thin layers.
• The muddy face paint job, it's a side effect of the thick layers I'm sure.
• The midriff joint.  It's big and invasive for what it does (adding the potential for some contrapposto swing in them hips).  Ball pop next time maybe as opposed to a Revoltech joint to give the capability for more sublte movements.
• The thigh joints.  I knew it would be touch and go how high the knee can lift upwards before the hips got in the way but it was a trade off between that and cutting chunks out.  I should've cut more.
• Paint chipping despite all the coats of paint and varnish to finish.
• She's too fragile to really get in there and pose like I might with a store bought figure.

More dislikes than likes but they don't have the same weighting.  She'll be posed, not too outlandishly, and probably stay that way, so the paint chipping and joint dislikes aren't such an issue, and from a distance she reads just fine, largely mitigating the layers and the face.  At some point I'll do a version two with the finer layer thickness.

Having said all that I think she's fab-u-lous.  Aah to have enough hours in the day to make the entire cast of Space Channel 5.  That is most definitely not a teaser for a future 3D print project.  I do not have that many hours in the day hah!

Memo to self:  Recreate the Max Fleischer - Betty Boop pose with her.