Welcome at FreeTime Toys

Hello everybody and welcome here. This blog will be dedicated to the few toys projects I will do during my free time. You can expect some toys rehab, some design adaptation and some brand new design.

If you are here you probably know my taste for Jumbo Machinder, so most of my projects are related to those big guys. Hope you will enjoy it.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

To print or not to print

People who know the Lensari Jumbo Villains, know that his surface is not smooth. The body is actualy with some kind of grain texture on it and some parts of the head also.

To get the same kind of effect, I'm hesitating between two different techniques. The first one would be to print all the parts as smooth as possible, and then cover them with putty and sculpt the grainy surface on it. Maybe with some kind of rocks who have the same texture, by pressing smoothly on the putty.

The other option is to try to 3D print it directly with that grainy surface. Well, that kind of grain is probably too small for the level of detail of most of the printers out there. But I've decide to try it. Not on the whole surface of course, but to print a tiny part with that grain surface.

But before doing this, I had to figure out how to do this grain surface on my 3D model. After a few hours on another 3D modeling software, I was able to get a decent result. The downside of this is that you really need to have a super high level of detail in your mesh to get a clean result. So my model is now close to 20.000.000 polygons. That's probably the highest I've ever make for a single character. I think that the smooth version have 10 times less polys.

So here's an image of this quick modeling test. I'm planning to print the half of the upper body part for the test. Could be interesting to see how it manage to print the grain on the almost horizontal surface.


And of course depending on this test, I will see which option I choose. I'm really curious to see how it will come out.