Tam

I've been wanting to sculpt this pose for a long time. I love the intertwined limbs and the opportunity to rest the chin on the knee to avoid using support material. I think the photo is by Tam Nguyen but I haven’t been able to locate it online. 

This type of pose is sometimes called an ‘implied nude’ because the breasts and genitals are not visible in the photo. This doesn’t usually affect the 3D version, of course, since a sculpture can be viewed from any angle, but in this case the only way to pose the figure is with the breasts compressed by the limbs.

My first attempt worked out OK as a pose, but failed as a 3D print because I tried to make the hair out of individual strands and the retractions just ground up the filament - should have guessed!

So I reverted to my tried and trusted formula of selecting a nice hairstyle and then shrink-wrapping and resculpting it in Blender.

I chose a nice metallic grey Fillamentum PLA filament for this print and sliced the model with Simplify3D. The print was made on my new Sapphire-S coreXY printer from twotrees adapted with a Flex3Drive extruder system. This keeps the print-head as lightweight as possible, giving some of the smoothest prints I've ever achieved.

I'm particularly pleased with how well the sculpted hair has printed on this model. It can still be improved further, though, and I'm working on that. The second version, lower down this page, has more detail sculpted in the flatter areas.

I had to add automated support material in a couple of places - under the left breast and the left front part of the hair. Unfortunately, this did leave some nasty scarring visible on the thigh and abdomen, which I was unable to hide. This set me thinking about other ways to add support.

It occurred to me that one way to avoid the ugly scars left after removing support material would be to try and construct a sort of platform sitting over the left leg on which the support could then rest. I fired up Blender and came up with these pieces of scaffolding.

The larger piece supports the nose and the dangling strands of hair. The smaller piece supports the underside of the left breast.

The innovation here is that I realised I could combine manually created scaffolding that projects into difficult to reach areas, with auto-generated support provided by the slicer to fill in the last few millimetres.

By using this approach, I can scale the model up to any size without having to worry about the support gap - it will always be perfect for my printer because the final gap is still decided by the slicer software.

Both support pieces broke away cleanly from the model leaving no scarring anywhere on the thigh or abdomen - a much cleaner result!

Notice in the picture below how the small chunks of auto-generated support sit on top of the large manually created blocks.

You can also clearly see here how much better the hair looks now with the extra detail sculpted into it.

Shape and Form

A recent tweet from Rebecca Tun, who was the subject of one of my previous models, led me to the website of Max Operandi.   One of the Sensual photos I found there inspired me to create my next piece. It was this one called ‘Shape and Form’ (nice title!) which looked like an interesting challenge.

As always, the challenge was to use the pose controls in Daz Studio to copy the essence of this pose as accurately and artistically as possible and then create a printable 3D model.

Starting from Daz 3D Studio's Genesis 8 female as a base, I began by observing that model’s pelvis was rotated about the Y axis with the right hip flexed and internally rotated, whilst the left hip was extended sideways and backwards. I kept checking the position of the bent limbs in relation to the X-Y plane so that everything would end up making good contact with the floor.
Both arms had to be extended backwards, the left arm position being rather left to guesswork and imagination. I copied the extended fingers and bridging of the right hand and mirrored this position in the left hand.

With the exception of the horizontal area under the left inner thigh, the 3D model needed little or no support material. Keeping the breasts smaller and the head tipped upwards also removed the need for support material under the nose or chin. The hair was copied from the Katherine hair style and then sculpted in Blender as usual.

She printed beautifully, first time, in Fillamentum Vertigo Grey.

Many thanks to MaxO for giving me permission to share his photo here.