ZBrushCentral

My journey of 3D Printing

Hi everyone, extremely long time lurker, first time posting my work to ZBC. I wanted to share some of the 3D Prints and wip images of those prints I have done over the past 4 years, some of my work some of friends and collaborators. I started off originally printing with the Form 1, when I revived mine from Kickstarter several years back and now I am printing on my Form 2 exclusively. I have done quite a few prints for myself but also I have been doing a lot of printing for our workshop, online store and with collaboration with other ZBrush artists.

I guess I will kick off this thread with some of my newest pieces and go back in time from here. Enjoy!

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This is a character I did for the ZBrush Summit Sculpt Off. I had a chance to finish her sculpt soon after and printed her out. Total height is 9" and was printed at 50 micron. This is the largest print that I have done to date at home. She weighs 9oz (without base)

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This one is fresh off the printer sans the support structures. The layer lines are visible but consistent which is great for ez-cleanup. One pass with a wet foam sanding block and it turns to glass.

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She was printed in 2 passes. Her body up to the main junctions of her branches. She used almost the whole build volume vertically in the Form 2.
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Model by: Matt Throup, Character Designed by Brett Bean. (Figure will soon to be for sale at mold3d.com) Here are some images of the print coming together. She is 8" tall from the bottom of the base to the top. She weights about 1.5 lbs in total.
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Here is the original breakout that I did for the 3D Print.
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The base had to be printed in 2 parts, as it was too large for the build volume in my Form 2.

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Assembled and almost finished cleaning up the seam.

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The Shroomers vacuum. No post work yet.

Might be needless to say but ZBrush has been a crucial tool for me doing all of my prints. Also, if anyone is interested I am also teaching a new mentorship class at mold3dacademy next month. If you are interested in learning how to print your characters and get a similar print done of a character, be sure to check it out.

Thanks for looking and there is more to come!

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Here are some of my older 3D Printing works with some descriptions and credits under each picture.
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This is a Zombie Cowboy designed by Steven Silver and Modeled by Daniel Kho. 3D Print is about 7" if I remember correctly and printed in 6 Parts.

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He was printed in clear resin, mostly because I ran out of Gray material at the time.
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This is an old image, but a good one I guess. 3 characters I did about 6 years ago. These were my first 3 prints I did with the Form 1. They were all finished, cleaned and painted.

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This is a really cool model that came out of one of the workshops I taught at along side Gio Nakpil 3 years ago. The model was done by Adam McMahon and was printed on the Form 1 in 3 pieces.
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This is a character that was designed by Peter Konig, named the Boony. He is one of the models that we have for sale at mold3d.com as a digital download. This one was cleaned and painted gold (gold is best)
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This was a female bust I did to test out my new Form 1+ when I got it.
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This is a Kaiju model that Gio Nakpil did to promote a workshop that we did a few years ago. He was printed in 2 pieces (body and base).
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This is a 3D Print i did while working on How To Train Your Dragon 2 at DreamWorks. He was a gift to the director by the modeling team there. He was originally modeled in Maya, but prepped in ZBrush. I believe he was about 15 different pieces. He was a real struggle for the Form1 to print (no longer the case with the Form 2, yay). You can see a lot of layer lines in the model in some areas that were impossible to clean up. We eventually printed a second one and made it into the crew gift in full color.

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2 Likes

Great post! Nice to see how smoothly things are going with the form2, and that you are pushing the envelope. -S

Amazing stuff as always, thanks for sharing!

-Joseph

Awesome post!! I’ve been on the fence about getting a 3D Printer for some time now and have been leaning towards the Forum 2. Seeing the prints you are getting from the Forum is very encouraging. Can you explain your clean up process a bit please. Do you use any
other software to help with the processing (slicing and supports) before printing?
Thanks … and I look forward to seeing more of your work.

Awesome post, awesome art. I’m sure it makes many people including myself want to print a model.

~Abraham

Inspiring works. Really cool seeing some of the creation process in 3d prints. Keep it up the great work! :slight_smile:

Amazing prints. I’ll be in Boston next month. Hoping to tour formlabs while there.

Wow so humbled for the top row. Thank you Pixologic!

@Ls3D - Thanks. I am surprised myself. It has really made me enjoy printing again.

@Piggyson - Thanks brotha!

@zed_brush - Thank you! Yes, the Form2 is a night and day experience for me so far. And to answer your questions.
-My cleanup process is a lot easier now with the form 2. Basically I use 3 tools. An xacto knife, model clippers and a foam sanding block/sanding nail file. Removing the supports as close as possible then gentle sanding with a nail file where they made contact. Then I typically prime the whole thing with tamiya gray primer. Any visible layer lines will show up clearly at this stage. Simply sand the model lightly under some water, dry it off and then do a final coat of paint. The resin will be polished looking. All slicing, in terms of breaking out and doing keys are done in zbrush and then all the supports are generated in Preform software by Formlabs. I use a combination of the automatically generated ones and then doing custom ones. Slicing is not something that you need to care about when doing SLA, that is solely just for FDM printing.

@bonesmcgaw2004 - Thank you. Holding something that you designed on the computer is like nothing else.

@rodrigo.g - Thank you!!

@WilbertPierce - Awesome and enjoy it, I love those guys, they are a great team of people.

Congrats on Top Row!

It’s nice seeing really big, multi-part prints coming out of resin printers. But I have to ask, what’s the average material cost of printing some of these?

Keep up the amazing work!

Amazing

Really awesome works and print results!

Amazing as usual Robert! Thank you for sharing your work with us!!

great stuff thank you for posting.

very nice collection of prints.

-r

I’m over the moon with your work. I’m getting the form 2 in a couple of months and can’t wait to do some printing.
You printed the three busts were created by Robert Vignone? <claps> Great job! Love if you posted some WIP and some printing post process pics too!!!
Or ping me!

@Jaidek Thank you! Multi part prints are key when you want to do large SLA prints. It saves you a ton of post cleanup work when you can divide the model into ways so that it can be printed with minimal supports. All the prints that you see featured here were printed with the Formlabs Resin. Most prints cost about $10-$25 to print. My first image, Wisteria is about $30 in material. It really comes down to weight, not so much height. The Shroomer 3D Print for Matt and Brett is upwards of $80 in material. She weighs a ton and was printed solid. The idea with these recent Form 2 prints was not to save on material, but to print the thickest, heavies and hardest thing I could with it.

@wojciechmichalski Thank you :smiley:
@SolidSnakexxx Thank you!:smiley:
@Totyo Appreciate it!
@gabo1991 Thank you!:smiley:
@rasmusW Thank you!:smiley:

@theJetShow
Awesome, well enjoy the printer. It is serving me well and I am sure it will do the same for you. Actually I am Robert, I am glad you recognized them/me! Ill be sharing more wip images shortly. Thank you!

Here are some photos from 2013, and also the first print I did on the Form 1. This kind of highlights my cleanup process, which is usually concentrated on where the supports land. The old supports were extremely dense and were really hard to cleanup. I use to have these images on my blog, but I have taken that down, so i will share them here.
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Using white filler putty to patch up the back parts of the model where the supports landed.
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I build a small paint booth for priming my model.
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After priming, I would do a second pass of patching and sanding.
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Nearly final coat
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Doing a last bit of touch up on the cheek. It is important to prime, sand till smooth and then prime lightly. Over-painting the whole thing will cause the paint to build up and you will lose a lot of detail.

Cleanup from models on the Form 1 were much more tedious than the Form 2 prints. The prints now are very well optimized and you can customize where they land, making spot cleanup much easier.

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…work! :sunglasses:

I had always believed that imperial system was a legend, but seeing your yellow tape measure tool, seems not! :smiley:

excellent prints!:+1:
thanks for sharing