ZBrushCentral

3D Printed Apocalypse Life Size Bust

So I started the process of 3d printing a model of Apocalypse that I created a couple of years ago on my Raise 3d N2+. I decided to create a bust of the character and print it life size.
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I first did some research on traditional busts to get a sense of possible direction for the print and how the torso would be split up. I wanted to find a right balance of removing the enough of the upper body that the piece is not overly massive but leaving enough to get a sense of what the character would be like as a whole. I found out that cropping too much of his body would also make the neck armor overly large, so I needed the right amount of torso to balance it out.

This was a good opportunity to put Zbrush’s 4R8 new boolean tools to the test. I started by creating basic shapes and just cutting into the body. The great thing about the booleans in Zbrush is that it’s a non destructive workflow. So once “bake in” your changes, a new subtool will be created, while still keeping your cut out shapes and original mesh intact. The other nice feature is that you can preview your booleans live and move around your geometry that is cutting away at your mesh and get an instant visual update.
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After starring at this for a while, I quickly realized something was off. I realized that the expression needed some work. It was perfectly symmetrical and the brows and nose had to be tweaked. I also had no pore details. I was able to put all the pores and wrinkle details and a separate layer. This also gave me the flexibility to push in those details further if they didn’t show enough on the print. In my initial design was the full character so this didn’t stick out as much nor was it my focal point.
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Now it came time to optimize this for print. Besides cutting up the torso, the booleans tool was a good option to unify your mesh. When using an FDM printer, overlapping areas in a model will waste more material, increase print times and most importantly can cause errors or weak areas in your print. The goal here is to create a clean “watertight” mesh without any overlapping parts
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I hid part of the mesh to illustrate my point. These eyeballs printed like this will cause some of the issues I stated above. I learned that the hard way!
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Here’s how a small test section I did came out. As you can see the eyeballs and ears are being printed inside the head, wasting material and making the print weaker as those shells are not merged.
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Here’s a breakdown of the merging all the pieces into one solid water-tight mesh. It’s a pretty straightforward process.
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  1. Enable “Live Boolean” display option.
  2. Ensure that “addition” is selected.
  3. Select “Make Boolean Mesh”. This will create a new Subtool.

This is how the same eye area looks after the additive boolean process. This lends itself much better for 3D printing.
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Mesh is ready to go! Added my supports, tweaked print settings and hit PRINT! 177 total hours, this is my longest/ biggest print to date.

This is what it looks like with 41 hrs left. So far so good!

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Here’s another update. Head is completely printed!

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Time to remove supports and hope not to damage the print. Then it’s off to print the ears and assemble the head and base of the neck.

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That’s fantastic. Great sculpt. The Raise 3D does a great job too. The layer lines are barely visible.

Making good some progress on my project. There’s another piece of the neck armor in the printer as we speak. Nothing is glued at this point, waiting to have all the parts printed out to see how they fit.






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Thanks! I’m pretty happy with my N2+ so far.

Update on the Neck Armor. Coming together piece by piece.
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Such massive print! Very good !! :slight_smile:

Yea this thing is only getting bigger piece by piece. Thanks!

Starting to sand and glue the torso.
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What a fantastic project. Thank you for sharing.

Wow…the project’s truly impressive!

All 7 pieces of the torso glued and attached. Finally onto the bondo & primer.
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Thanks for the feedback. Glad you guys like it.

In my new video, I break down the following:
► The initial concept and character design.
► 3d modeling and digital sculpting in Zbrush.
► The use of live booleans in Zbrush for designing and preparing the model for 3d printing.
► The 3d printing process along with showing time lapse footage on a Raise 3d N2+.

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Hello,
Here’s a long overdue update on my 3d Printed Apocalypse Bust printed on my Raise 3D N2+. I used Z-brush for the modeling and creation of the 3d Print files. Did quiet a bit of finishing work to the bust and I’m really happy how it turned out.
Next step is to finish printing the neck armor, all its small detailed bolts, glue and prep for painting.

Full narrated breakdown available including print settings, materials used and much more at the link below.
https://youtu.be/yKLXOv8C7Qo

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