Tiny (1/700 and 1/1000 scale) 3D printed figures

[frank2056]

I posted these on a couple of boards, but it may be of interest to some of you doing 3D work.

Last year, as part of a project to test 3D printing, I made a series of  1/350, 1/700, 1/1000 and 1/2500 scale figures:



I learned a few lessons from that one:

- no need to have a high polygon count on figures below 1/350
- 1/2500 figures was at the limit of the printing technology used by Printapart, but the 1/350 to 1/1000 scale figures came out well
- The material used by Printapart is very, very fragile
- the design I had was next to impossible to mold effectively

So this time I used much lower polygon count figures, and attached them to the "casting block" by a thin fin on their backs, much like L'Arsenal does with their 1/350 scale figures.
I have plenty of 3D 1/350 and 1/400 figures, so I made a set of 1/700 and 1/1000 scale figures, which printed nicely:



I still don't know if they'll cast. I'm thinking of using a two part mold using a really soft mold material, like the excellent Dow silicone rubber that's sold with Alumilite resin kits. The lower half would come up to the waists (except for the sideways figure with the arms extended) and the upper half would be from the waist up.

I used three programs to produce these figures. The first was AC3D, which is far more intuitive and easy to use than Rhino. The edited figures were exported as .obj files and opened in Rhino, where I scaled them and ran mesh checks.
Rhino's STL file generation is not very good and will declare unprintable objects as printable, so I checked the STL files with miniMagics and used AC3D and Rhino to fix the inevitable problems until I had a file that MiniMagics was happy with. Then I uploaded the file to Printapart and was rewarded with a quick, error free print. The main project is bigger and smoother, but these small figures were a pretty good way to learn how to make error free, printable files.

Frank

[sotoolslinger]

HOLY CRAP What tech do you have access to cause I can promise I can't do that in my one bedroom apartment.

[The Rat]

Dude on the right end, is he pulling up his fly? Might explain the guy third from the right...

[philp]

Fun stuff, the wave of the future perhaps?

I would love some 1/350 figures to put in the USS Enterprise I am working on (NCC 1701A).

[frank2056]

HOLY CRAP What tech do you have access to cause I can promise I can't do that in my one bedroom apartment.

I just uploaded them to a company with a 3D printer. They're not the best nor cheapest, but they're convenient and really helpful.

Dude on the right end, is he pulling up his fly? Might explain the guy third from the right...

Looks like it - might be an artifact from the printing. This is what they looked like on the computer:

[frank2056]

Fun stuff, the wave of the future perhaps?

I would love some 1/350 figures to put in the USS Enterprise I am working on (NCC 1701A).

You have a few options: L'Arsenal makes two very nice inexpensive resin figure sets. Also, Preiser has a 1/400 figure set that doesn't look out of scale next to 1/350 figures, and they're slightly better proportioned and more realistic than the L'Arsenal set:Preiser 89400. Tamiya also has a 1/350 figure set, but they're flat (even though they're plastic) Fujimi also has a 1/350 figure set that's slightly better. The poses are stiff, the proportions are off and the details look very soft. I'd go with the L'Arsenal or the Preiser sets.

[GTX]

Fun stuff, the wave of the future perhaps?

Definitely - imagine the whiffing possibilities: want a one of model kit that no-one produces, well just print one up. 

Regards,

Greg