My Modelled Characters 3D Print Out

After finishing my character model I then got it printed out. The first thing I did was meet up with Jake who works in prototyping and deals with all model prints. He gave me some pointers as to what I needed to do to get my model to a printing standard.

I firstly discovered that it was an unrealistic hope to have my model printed with its props, as the props were not properly attached to the actual mesh of my character. So the best thing to do was to get the character printed without its props such as the helmet, bayonet walking stick and the ammunition tin. Jake then took a look at just the mesh of my character and pointed out that the arms, hands, legs and feet were way too thin and wouldn't survive the printing process. Another problem was that the eyes of my model were not correctly sewn to my characters mesh, this was a problem because in order for the print to work the model has to be a hollow water tight shell with no faces competing with each other.

So with these changes in mind I spent a lot of time tweaking the model in order to get it printed. Firstly i scaled the arms, hands, legs and feet to the maximum they would go, if i scaled them too much then the mesh would break and go crazy. I then used the sphere's that I used for my characters eyes and used  booleans to cut holes into the mesh of my characters head. After this I sewed my characters eyes to the mesh of my character making it an all in one mesh. With these improvements made i exported my character as an obj file and sent it to Jake. He emailed me back telling me that their were still problems and my mesh was still not quite printable. For some reason there was now a hole in my model in the obj file but in maya this hole did not exist.

So I meet up with Jake again and he went through it with me, he told me to download some free software that's helped to get my model to a printing standard. This software was called netfabb, meshlab, and multitool. Jake showed me the software Netfabb which shows you the problems with your mesh and fixes them for you. I then opened up my model in meshlab which just doubled checked my model to make sure it was ready to print. My model was now ready! I then sent my stl file of my model to Jake for it to be printed. I then paid for my model and when Jake received the receipt he got my print underway.

So I waited a few days and went to check to see if my model was printed and too my surprise not only was it printed but it was not bad if I may say so myself. There was only one main problem and that was that my character's left hand had broken off. It was quite obvious as to why this had happened as you could see that the hands were still extremely thin and feeble as were the feet and ankles so i quickly took some photos. Below are the images of my printed model.

Front View

Back Left View 

Front Left View

Back View

Birdseye Front View 

Front Right View 

Birdseye Front View

Top View 

Front View

Overall I was extremely happy with how my printed model turned out. This was mainly due to the fact that I did not expect it to all be in one piece as I had lots of problems and tweaking to do in order to get it to a printing standard.