This seems like a monumental column for me because I’m celebrating the successful printing of two projects I designed! The first is my Oh No pink blob guy inspired by Alex Norris’ amazing WebComicName. Because I ultimately couldn’t figure out the best way to draw his face on, I asked Andrew for help on the final step. While I’m a little bummed I didn’t do this project all by myself, the amount of time it had been sitting in the “work in progress” folder was getting ridiculous. Andrew used ZBrush to add the body and base colors – and of course, the face. Finally, we printed it in full color sandstone. The final result? TA-DA!

(Oh, and the best part? The internet was into it, too.)

Not to brag, but, I’m bragging

Upon placing the order for Oh No, I immediately had the familiar panic of, “What the heck am I going to model next?” However, having given it some thought over the weekend, I remembered that I’d wanted to customize my new Traxxas TRX-4 with a license plate. I’ve been installing some James Knight custom parts onto the Defender to replace the stock body stickers with door handles, hood vents, and a fuel cap. The one remaining sticker on the body is a license plate which, all things considered, I figured couldn’t be TOO hard to model.

Using Knight Customs’ designs as inspiration, I decided to model the custom plate by stacking two squares (or cubes, since I’m supposed to be thinking in 3D) on top of each other. This would allow me to install the plate from the inside of the body and glue it on using a lip from the back. Because real-world measurements of the existing sticker seemed like a good place to start, I whipped out a little plastic caliper I’d been given here on my first day. Luckily my colleague Virginia quickly taught me to use a digital caliper for the sake of better accuracy.

Having drafted up a sketch of measurements on paper, I logged into Tinkercad to see if I could use it for something more productive than a rocket bird.

Besides having a bit of trouble centering the smaller square (I mean, cube) on top of the larger squ– …cube, the process was relatively painless. I added “CR4ANTS” using the custom text tool, uploaded it, ordered it in White Strong & Flexible, and hoped for the best.

Because I printed this in WSF, I think I’ll have to blog about the painting of the license plate and how that goes. I need some practice painting anyway (for some miniatures I have on hand from Historicon), and using painted WSF will help the license plate to stand up to collisions whereas using full color sandstone wouldn’t. Besides, if there’s anything modeling the Oh No blob taught me, it’s that I’m not quite ready to enter the world of color with my 3D models… yet.