3D Printing and At-Home Fabrication Tips

Zacharias Reinhardt, whose YouTube videos I've found incredibly helpful ever since I started sculpting for 3D printing, recently published a video about how he made an incredible dragon model  (the one he made for Danny's Lost Dragons kickstarter)!  Anyway, if you're interested in 3D modelling, it's absolutely worth watching.  He has a timelapse of most of his sculpting process and, after he does something particularly interesting, he goes back and explains the techniques that he used.  I'm particularly excited about how he made the scales on the dragon, so I can't wait for an opportunity to use those techniques!

3D Printers are amazing tools, and while they've come a long way, they're still a pretty new technology and so need attentive maintenance to keep them working (as opposed to a 2D printer, which pretty much takes care of itself these days).  One key maintenance technique is the cold pull .  In short, a cold pull is when you pull your filament back out of your extruder while it's mostly cold.  Hopefully, the cold filament has solidified around any junk in your nozzle, so when you pull it out, you also pull out anything that's been compromising your prints! I print exclusively with PLA and a .25 mm nozzle, and while I'm not sure how that context might color my experiences, I figured that I should state that upfront.  Why?  Well, some of my experiences go contrary to the conventional cold pull wisdom.  Primarily, it's that I do my cold pulls with PLA instead of switching over to nylon.  I did one round of cold pull maintenance with nylon filament... and ...

Hands are tough.  From a purely artistic perspective, hands are difficult because they have a lot of different bits that both need to be proportionate and can take a lot of unique positions.  From a mechanical perspective, hands are difficult because they involve relatively small bits that require a finely tuned machine to print, or those bits stick out alone and are super fragile.  I've tried a lot of different techniques for making hands for my models, but the Inox hands are some of the ones that I'm most happy with.  They're also some of the easiest ones that I've ever made! I started with a subdivided cube that I squished into a basic disk in edit  mode.  This would become the building block for the rest of the hand.  I then pressed tab  to drop back to object  mode, then used shift-d  to duplicate it.  I rotated my duplicate 90 degrees along the vertical (z) axis by pressing r z 90  and then positioned it so that it coul...

I frequently mention that I'm not an artist, so I use a workflow where I model each body part individually and then basically shove them together to make a final model.  I'm writing this as I'm starting a new model, so I made the very rough shapes for the major body parts and set them into position. Once I saw what I'd done, I had to stop and laugh.  Wow, am I ever not an artist - I think that my 7 year old draws more proportionate people than this!  Each of those parts is a manipulated cube with a subdivision surface applied to it (the chest has a bit of extra extrusions to make the shoulders/neck).  This is basically how I start all of my models, and it's really easy to fix it so that it conforms to biological standards. In Blender, you can set a background image to use as a reference.  On the n  data panel, go down to Background Image  and press Add Image .  Then, hit Open  and browse to the image that you want on your background....

With the Vermling Scout built, the natural next step was obviously the Vermling Shaman !  I was able to reuse a lot of the parts of the Scout, which was really nice.  I decided to give the Shaman a more upright pose, so I moved his parts around and built a new torso (to be his ratty tunic, rather than the furry one that the Scout wears).  After that, I built a quick staff and then went to work on the feathered cape.  That's what I want to focus on, today. I tried a bunch of different methods for creating that cape, but in the end I settled on using Blender's Particle System.  That meant that I basically modelled two things: a single feather and a smooth cape.  Then, I told Blender to make an absurd number of feathers and to lay them out on that cape.  There we go, post finished, nice and easy! ;) After I made a quick feather and cape, I selected my cape object and then went to the Particles  tab.  On there, I pressed the + button  to...