Here's my latest experiment with surface treatment for digital figure sculptures. I did an earlier attempt using a different method and thought I try something new. In particular I wanted to unify the size of the voids in the form.
This is the sculpt as it appears in ZBrush - 1.7 million polygons. Knowing I'd be 3D printing an altered version I didn't take the level of detail very high. As you can see there are lot of things that are still pretty rough, especially the hands and feet. But they will all but disappear in the printed form:
I tried out a free site I came upon called Voronator. You upload a 3D model and they generate a new hollow mesh with the holes cut out using the Voronoi algorithm. The site gives very minimal control over the density of the holes and the thickness of the mesh. You also have minimal control of the polygon count of the result. Here's a detail shot of the model I got back from the process, which took about 5 minutes of processing by their site. It has about 440,000 polygons:
It's generated acceptably, no naked or manifold edges... but I did not particularly like the surface. I wanted something which would appear more obviously geometric in the detail between the voids (printing the above would just look smooth). I used ZBrush's Decimation Master to reduce this to mesh to 20K polygons. This added an interesting geometric tessellation to the surface while maintaining the overall Voronoi effect:
Here's the overall resulting form.
Details showing the mesh edges:
Once again I had it printed at Shapeways in their Strong and Flexible Plastic. It took 6 days from order to arrival at my house. The bounding box was scaled for printing at 11" high, 6" wide and 4" deep.
This is the sculpt as it appears in ZBrush - 1.7 million polygons. Knowing I'd be 3D printing an altered version I didn't take the level of detail very high. As you can see there are lot of things that are still pretty rough, especially the hands and feet. But they will all but disappear in the printed form:
It's generated acceptably, no naked or manifold edges... but I did not particularly like the surface. I wanted something which would appear more obviously geometric in the detail between the voids (printing the above would just look smooth). I used ZBrush's Decimation Master to reduce this to mesh to 20K polygons. This added an interesting geometric tessellation to the surface while maintaining the overall Voronoi effect:
Here's the overall resulting form.
Details showing the mesh edges:
Once again I had it printed at Shapeways in their Strong and Flexible Plastic. It took 6 days from order to arrival at my house. The bounding box was scaled for printing at 11" high, 6" wide and 4" deep.
