Thank you for following my blog this far. This post will mark the end of our journey to the 3D Sculpture world. Today, I would like to show the actual process of creating a 3D sculpture from a CG character. ( On a side note, this is actually the first business idea that I came up with, the toy industry)
Well, this picture is so deceiving that it might make you think the end product is created by one magic button, or one step away. Actually, this page title can be misleading to, it should be from virtual … to modeling to preparing the tools to molding to (actual) printing to adding details to … ( I will save you the details but you get it)
My focus today is the post production after the 3D printing. According to the creator of this figure, the printing is the third out of fifteen steps before this work is finished. At step 3, it looks something like this —>
After that, the creator did a lot of editting work like adding more details, polishing the sculpture, painting the sculpture. It is also seems to me that not everything can be printed as one whole piece. Maybe unless you hired an engineer who can design the 3D model so that all parts will fit and be functional. In the case of the creator, he printed separate parts of the figure and assembled them. Another important challenge he faced in transforming the virtual data to a real 3D sculpture is the gravity in reality. Some of the parts keep falling off, like the out-of-proportion feather/wing on the helmet, and cause the whole model to lose balance because of this worldly burden that is absent in a digital world.
My final takeaway point is that like many things in this world, things might seems easier and simpler that they actually are. It is not until you get your hand dirty and dive deeper into the matter before you realize it. And once you found it, there is always more to it. And the only way to discover more of it is to dive even deeper.
Reference: http://www.instructables.com/id/From-3D-to-Reality-Making-a-Resin-Sculpture-from/?ALLSTEPS
