Triangle

I started this blog post a good 7 months ago but sadly, lost the whole article before it was published. This time I shall try to be more careful!

The idea for this original pose started out when I was reviewing one of my previous 3D prints called 'Balance' which, as the name suggests, had to be balanced quite carefully or it would topple sideways. The right knee was much too close to the left foot and, as a result, any slight shaking in the room would cause the statue to fall.

I decided to create a pose where the model would be resting on her right knee and the full length of the left shin, but with a triangular shaped base that would be much more stable. I thought it could work well if the model was reaching down with her right hand, to grasp the right foot, and reaching up with her left hand to touch her hair.
This is the pose that I came up with.

Notice how most of the features are oriented vertically rather than horizontally, which greatly reduces the need for extra support material. In fact, the only place that needed support adding was between the legs to support the genital area.

Tilting the head upwards prevents the chin and tip of the nose from needing any support. The bobbed hair-style is just the right length to rest on the shoulders and clavicles. The left breast is pulled upwards by the raised left arm, but the right breast is also sized so that the underside projects out at 50-60 degrees, which most 3D printers can cope with without needing support.

The hair looks great in these beautiful NVIDIA Iray renders within Daz3D, but there is no way they can be 3D printed without significant modification. My standard process for making 3D-printable models now flows like this:

• Export the OBJ from Daz3D
• Import in Blender - the body and the hair come in as separate objects
• Clean up the body by deleting any unwanted mesh parts like the teeth and front layer of the corneas
• Cut loops out of the inner eyelids and bridge across to the eyeball so that they are cleanly connected 
• Completely remodel the hair by shrink-wrapping a fairly dense ico-sphere onto it so that it adopts the general shape of the hair, and then delete the original hair object
• Use Blender's sculpt tools to improve the look of the hair by smoothing out spiky areas first and then adding details to make it look more realistic
• Use a Boolean modifier to combine the new hair object and the body object into a single model
• Export from Blender as an STL file
• Perform any additional mesh clean-up as necessary using netFabb Basic, Windows 3D Builder (and, of course, the wonderful Project Miller if you can find a copy)

If all has gone well, you should now have a single, manifold mesh that will print with no errors.

The prints of this model worked really well in my twotrees Sapphire-S coreXY printer which now generates by far the cleanest set of prints of any that I own.

I liked the model so much that I decided to try printing a really large copy on my Creality CR-10S which has a build volume of 30x30x40 cm. The printer ran for 36 hours and used up half a kilo of metallic bronze coloured filament but the result was well worth the effort.

Reflections

I started working on this sculpture a few years ago but I wasn't happy with my first attempt so I put the project on hold. It all began when I saw online (I can't remember where) a picture of a small statuette called 'Reflections' by a 20th century sculptor called Harriet Whitney Frishmuth (she hated being called a sculptress!) 

She studied under Rodin before moving to America and doing most of her work there. Some of her larger works are on display in museums across the USA, including the Met in New York, but she also produced smaller pieces such as this one which regularly come up for sale in art auctions and can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think I would rather make my own copy! 

Most of the time, I have to work from a single photo when posing the model in Daz 3D, but in this case I managed to find another site with an auction catalogue that contained photos of a different copy of Reflections (sculptors often made iterative changes to their best-selling works). In this case, the statue had been photographed from every angle. 

Reflections looked like a great challenge because the pose can be made virtually support-free. I used the Victoria 6 HD female Genesis 2 base model in Daz Studio 4 and began the process of painstakingly moving each joint into the perfect position to capture the pose as accurately as possible. 

I had to position the fingers very carefully, ensuring that the tip of each finger pressed slightly into the skin it was resting upon. Details like this help the model to print successfully without needing to add support.

I have been experimenting with a new technique to get the eyes to print better. This involves carefully deleting the outer layer of the eyeball which represents the cornea. The layer underneath (the iris) has a central depression, but not a full hole, which acts as the pupil. This needs enlarging a little to make it show up in the model but the effect is well worth the effort.

I decided to model the hair myself in Blender’s Sculpt mode, which I am beginning to get the hang of using. I wanted a full-bodied style resting easily on the shoulders.

Having completed the sculpting and manipulation work in Blender, I used Project Miller to shrink-wrap a new high-definition mesh around the model to deal with all the self-intersections where the fingertips touch the thighs. A little more cleaning up to fix the normals and adding a base for her to stand on gave me a printable model.

I printed a full sized copy first on my E3D BigBox which has Independent Dual Extrusion on X carriage (IDEX) so that I could use PolySupport break-away material for the few remaining places that needed it, mainly under the nose and some folds of hair.

 

  

The print started out very well but the higher it got, the more the model started to wobble with each pass of the printhead. I resorted to using hot glue and chopsticks as described  in this video and managed to rescue the model albeit with some artifacts that you can see in the face and hair.

I decided to do some more printing to do this beautiful model justice and hit upon the idea of rotating her backwards 45 degrees and printing only the top half. The main benefit of doing this was to remove the need for any support material at all. This in turn meant that I could switch to using my new Creality CR-10S printer combined with some fabulous Fillamentum Vertigo Grey filament.

I'll let the results speak for themselves.

Not size zero

So, Daz 3D have finally seen the light and changed their EULA to allow 3D printing of their models, but only for non-commercial use. It is a relief to be able to use the software and models legally now, but I still can't share any of the meshes or sell the models that I create.

As you will know, if you have read any of my previous posts, I enjoy the challenge of trying to create beautiful sculptures by posing a 3D model to match either an existing photograph or an image that I have in mind. One of the aspects I have spent less time on is adjusting the shape of the woman's body. I received a comment from a reader asking whether I ever sculpted larger women and I had to admit that I hadn't tried yet, so this time I thought I would deviate from the default, skinny model body shape and try creating a woman who looks more typically average in body size.

I used the Victoria 6 body with the HD mesh add-on, which has more natural curves around the joints. I began with an idea for a pose in a fairly relaxed style and then played around with all the different character shape parameters , giving a modest 20% increase to the 'Heavy' setting and a 70% boost to the 'Weight' parameter. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is but it's quite an interactive process, so I just move the sliders slowly and stop when I see the effect I'm looking for.

Daz haven't just given permission for 3D printing of their models, they've simplified the whole process too. Upgrading to the latest version of the Genesis 2 models brings a new option to the Anatomy section.

This rather gruesome-looking add-on modifies the geometry of the eyes and mouth, turning them into closed meshes. It also replaces the front of the eye with a new, more sculptural representation of the iris and pupil.

I chose an elegant, raised hairstyle that still required my previously-described shrink-wrap technique to make a fully printable model.

The pose would clearly need support material turned on in several areas, as can be seen in the print below.

This is quite a small print, taking five and a half hours to print at 0.1 mm resolution. There are still some small blemishes left after removal of the support material, particularly on the underside of the model. There are also signs of irregularity in the Z-direction which need further investigation.

Overall, a very satisfying project.

Tyce

Well, I said I would start a new model when I hit the 50,000 views mark and it's happened. I was inspired by this photo of Eléa Joly by Antoine Tyce and so created a pose closely based on the original. 

The really big news this time is that HiveWire3D have released a new version of their Dawn model which has far better handling of extreme joint positions. And best of all, Dawn SR2 is fully licensed for 3D printing (non-commercial, personal use without an additional license). This means that I can now legally use my own 3D printers to print posed models.

The enjoyable part for me is working out how to pose the model in a realistic, but still printable, way, that looks both interesting and unusual but still natural and anatomically correct. I chose to move the left hand downwards to make printing easier and to allow me to scale the model up a bit larger inside the printable volume of my largest printer. Placing the left hand on the right thigh seemed natural and ensured a printable outcome. 

Making the resulting meshes printable is now just a minor chore that usually takes less than an hour to complete. Simplify 3D does a great job of generating just the right amount of support material so that the undersides of surfaces are printed as cleanly as possible. I still like to print at 0.1 mm resolution so that as much of the detail is preserved as possible. The print ran for 30 hours without a hitch and looks great.

Here are some photos and a video of the print before and after the support material was removed. I have lightly sanded the undersides in preparation for my first attempt at painting a model.

And now here is the model painted.

I used a matte black spray paint as an undercoat and then used a dry brushing technique to apply a metallic bronze acrylic paint.

Lush

This beautiful photo of Kayleigh Lush was one of the 100 photos taken by Ray Rapkerg and published on Twitter.

It's another interesting and challenging pose and also presents a great opportunity for me to practice sculpting hair.

The fingers of the right hand only make light fingertip contact with the ground which would present a problem during printing, so I have added a thin disc to anchor the hand firmly and take the weight of the right forearm.

Here is another angle which gives a better view of the hair.

The model printed well at the first attempt but needed plenty of support material under the face and breasts.

Here is a selection of views after removing the support material and ending with a video showing the model from all sides.

The next picture and the video were taken in full sunlight which brings out the amazing sheen in the printed plastic. It's called Christmas Green PLA from 3D Filaprint.

The obligatory full rotation view video.

Shame

I'm going to try and create a sculpture based on this picture next. I like the off-balance lines, the hidden face and the twisted shape.

The photo is by Tomas Rucker and is called 3 in his White series of nudes.

Here's the model I have created so far, viewed in Blender. The pose is clearly not identical but you can see where it takes its inspiration from.

When I came back to work on this pose I wasn't happy with it. The sinuous nature of the original pose had almost completely gone and the new hand position somehow changed the story. I decided to do some more work on the posing.

Then I thought it might be interesting to document the steps needed to make a posed model printable.

Hide the hair
Remove the eyelashes

Circle select eyes and mouth in side view

Shift-H hides everything else. Trim out the eyes and mouth and close up the holes in the mesh.

Hair models in character posing software are almost always totally unprintable items. I have found that the quickest way to make them printable is to use the ShrinkWrap modifier on a dense Isosphere placed in a position surrounding the hair model. Then using the project option in a negative direction, you can send all the points of the sphere inwards until they meet some point on the hair, leaving you with a single water-tight mesh. Some fairly intense smoothing removes all the jagged edges and leaves a very passable, and printable, copy of your chosen hair design. 

This just needs Boolean merging with the head which usually works OK, as long as the eyes and mouth have been fixed first. 

Now we need to deal with overlapping limb parts. There are several ways of doing this.
1. The quick and dirty method.
Use Autodesk's Project Miller to re-skin the visible external surface which hides any internal overlaps.
2. Use sculpt mode to flatten overlaps from the inside.
3. Use Boolean union to eliminate the overlaps. This option is interesting but doesn't work on a single mesh with overlapping parts. So why not just chop up the parts into separate meshes? Worth exploring, I think.

I started at the feet and worked upwards, using option 2 to eliminate any of the areas where the mesh of one limb poked through another. There is a typical example where the thighs cross. I used Box select to highlight all the affected vertices and then Shift-H to hide everything else.

From the inside you can see the bulge of the left thigh poking through into the inside of the right thigh, and vice versa.

I started by changing from Edit mode to Sculpt mode and then using first the Flatten brush and then the Smooth brush on the bulge to make it disappear. 

By working from both sides I could keep the contact area flat.

This works well where there is a small bulge across a large area, but is less effective where a larger, more complex part needs removing. So for the intersection of the arms and the left breast I decided to try a different tack and used option 3.

I rotated the model by 35 degrees around the vertical so that a horizontal plane would neatly bisect the upper arms. I then loaded the model into NetFabb which has a very nice plane cut function which provides a kind of X-ray preview of the slice before making the cut.

My cunning plan was to slice the model into a number of separate parts, make each one into a separate water-tight mesh and then Boolean merge them back together thus dealing with a number of complex overlaps at a stroke.

After making the cut, each half needed to be saved separately. The forearms, in the lower half, could then be selected and split off into a separate model. Here is the main torso piece.

My plan worked almost perfectly, only failing when the last piece in the sequence refused to Merge with the rest. I suspected that this was because the Boolean engine was struggling to cope with the intersecting parts and closing the loop of a torus and recognising the relative inside- and outside-ness of both ends at the same time. I fixed that by making another thin cut that took a slice out of the arms in an area with no complex intersections. Using that slice as the final merge then worked successfully. 

I added a simple bevelled cylinder to the base to make a stand. Eventually, I had reached the point where the only crossed meshes remaining were in both armpits. I spent a fairly lengthy mesh-editing session trying to clean up the mess but finally decided to take the easy way out and used Project Miller to re-skin the model for me. Don't know what I'd do without that bit of kit!

The main reason for going to all this trouble with the model was so that I could use Simplify3D as my slicer. Cura is better at handling faulty meshes but Simplify generates better support material that breaks cleanly away after printing.

I had intended to print this model on my tall delta printer, but it isn't coping well with this hot weather and the motors seem to be prone to skipping steps. So I went back to the Mendel90 and printed a small test version.

3D printed version in coffee-brown PLA before and after removing the support material.

Just like Pensive, one of my earliest works, the fingers are only slight wider than the extruded filament at this scale. It really needs to be printed twice as big as this. As soon as the cooler weather returns I'll try again on the delta printer.