3D Printing and At-Home Fabrication Tips

Those of you who follow my Patreon page know that I've been working on a Cave Bear model recently.  It's still a work-in-progress, but I'm really happy with the method that I used to make the teeth and so I wanted to write about it! In the past, I've made teeth the same way that I added spikes to the Living Bones model's pauldron .  I made a single tooth, then turned on Snap during transform  and moved it into place on the jaw, then I duplicated it and did it again.  It worked, but it took a lot of work to get everything in place and aligned well.  Not any more! This time, I decided to try something different.  Instead of manually copying and then placing all of the teeth, I decided that I'd be efficient (aka, lazy).  I decided that I'd use an array! When I made the Giant Viper model , I used a nested array of scales to make it really easy to model and pose.  Compared to that, an array of teeth is simple... why haven't I ever do that befor...

So, now that you've got your mini printed, how do you finish it?  The first step is to clean up the model, as 3D printing can leave little artifacts that you probably don't want on your finished piece.  The first step is to remove any supports from the print.  Next, I remove any strings or other bits of loose plastic.  As I wrote about before, I love to use my soldering iron for this step, as it zaps thinner strings pretty much instantly and allows me to really control the application of heat to the model so that it doesn't warp or deform.  After those two steps are completed, it's time to start thinking about how the model's going to need to look over all. My first decision point is, do I want to apply a polyurethane coat under my paint?  The answer to that question depends on how smooth I want this model to be.  If it's something like a slime or an ooze, I need it to be  very  smooth, but that's not necessarily right for a normal advent...

I really enjoyed watching the video that I linked last week and wanted to try the texturing technique that Zach used to make the smaller scales on the dragon.  I then saw a post on Reddit asking about a good model for the D&D spell, Earthen Grasp.  I haven't had the chance to play D&D for many years and wasn't familiar with the spell, but it seemed like a giant stone hand would be an excellent opportunity for me to try out that texturing technique, so I decided to give it a go! First, I had to make a hand model.  In the past, I've used some quick and dirty shortcuts to make hands .  In that case, the whole hand was only going to be a few mm tall, so it really didn't need a ton of detail.  In this case, the hand was going to be about 40 mm tall, so those tricks weren't going to fly.  I decided to start with the fingers, using a refined version of the technique that I used on the Wind Demon hand .  One of the challenges that I ran into with the...