hello everyone, I am a toy designer working with another 3D artist to build a number of action figures that I wish to have printed through shapeways. I wish to get your feedback on what the resolution should be on the components that will make up the figure. the figure is 6" tall and made up of the following pieces: Head Torso Shoulder joint x 2 Upper arm x 2 Forearm x 2 Thigh x 2 Calf x 2 Foot x 2 Hand x 2 Should the file be uploaded in pieces? or one entire file? Thank you, I am not sure how to go about doing this.
The creature is being built in Zbrush currently in pieces and I am not sure what poly amount to set per piece. I have heard that each section has to be 500K or less, is this true?
No, not true. It's one million polygons per file. You don't usually want to break it up into multiple files cuz each material has a handling charge for each print job. Typically, what is done is to do as much as possible with the million polygon limit. For this design that you have depicted, you may want to break it up into two files or so, this will give you extra polygons for the hair texture that will cover the entire body. Keep in mind though that some of the materials like the metals do not allow multiple loose parts per file.
thanks for getting back to me, I will be breaking the image up in to two files that would look similar to this based on your feedback. 1 million will help keep some of the detail and I tried to move the most detailed sections to a tray of there own. Let me know what you think....
Yep! That's a good way to do it. That will give plenty of polygons to work with. You don't need sprues connecting everything together though, if you'll be printing in one of Shapeways' plastics that is. What material did you have in mind for this?
I was hoping to use the frosted high detail or white high detail plastics. They will be painted and photographed as proof of concept and then molds will be made from them. So they do not need to be strong, just detailed. And how should they be group in the file if a sprue is not needed? thank you again for all your help
Good question! I've never done it yet, so I cannot say for sure! Every single thing I have done thus far with 3D printing has been singular objects. I would speculate that you'd want to place them in such a way that the print lines will be commonly oriented and spaced somewhere just beyond minimum spacing. If I have it wrong one of the other forum goers will be sure to correct me on this. You're welcome, it's my pleasure! It'll be great to see how this evolves. I'd like to see how it came out! The moderators might move this thread to the work in progress forum at some point.
With ZBrush as it is today, the amount of polygons to a piece should be the least of your worries. Get the detail you want by minimum wall size for the material you're looking to print it in and increase polygon amount to match. If you're doing every piece as a separate ZTool, then you can average max polygon count around 5 million.. Not to say that you would ever even need that much detail. When you're finished with the sculpt, you can save your raw ZTool and then use Decimation Master to reduce the polygon count by roughly 90%.. My files average at around 10-15mb instead of the large 5 million polygon files that can be over 100mb. Some printers may have issues handling large files, I typically reduce the polygon count just as a courtesy. For object grouping, just do as you would a sprue but remove the connectors and border and keep everything at an average distance from each other.
Given that somebody has to pick up all the pieces, clean and package them, it might make sense to keep the sprues at least for the smaller parts (?).
thank you both, I will try to arrange all sections alongside each other at equal distance and be sure to use decimation master to bring it down to size. I will keep you informed as to my progress! thanks, todd
Not necessarily, if the connection is too thin, then it'll be prone to breaking anyways.. I can't speak for the cleaning process though. It's also significant added costs just to break them off once you get them.. Unless for some reason, you'd like a sprue template.
haha, no thanks and when they are cast the pieces are used to created aluminum molds for the final flexible pieces. I only thought to use the sprue for organizational purposes, but if that is unnecessary, that makes it even simpler...