Adventures In The Third Dimension

I am not new to the 3D printing world.  The makerspace at work has several printers, and I have made many excellent things with them. My problem is that I am currently banished from the office due to COVID and social distancing and all that jazz. (Tho I prefer to think of it as being isolated for the good of the realm).   The way things are going I would not be surprised if I was not allowed back for another year.

This will not do.  So I have recently acquired for my shop a new tool: a Prusa Mini 3D printer.  Now I can make anything I want, smaller than 7 inches cubed, from the comfort of my own home.  I don't even have to put on pants!

 Now I just need to learn to make the most of it.

Using the work 3D printers I have made some interesting stuff over the last couple years.   However  I've made have all been models made by other people.  There is a large community of modelers, and there are a large number of models available for free, and many more available for sale.   

To maximize the potential of this new tool I wanted to learn how to make my own models.  To that end I spent the better part of this morning learning how to do exactly that.  That is what I set out to do when I got up this morning.

I started with the 3D model tool called Blender.  Why? Its free, its capable, and its installed already! I don't know it well... I've only done a couple tutorials, but it seemed a decent weapon with which to attack my goal.  I will note that 3D modelling is exponentially more complicated than Photoshop (which is 2D, and blissfully uncomplex in comparison).  My learning curve is steep, yo.

 My goal was to print *something*, not *the best thing*, so I went with putting a couple primitives together.   Primitives are simple shapes that can be used as starting blocks.  Things like cubes, cylinders, spheres, cones, and a monkey named Suzanne.

Not even kidding.. an actual cylinder!  I'm gonna use the heck out of that one!

I made a quick model by putting the monkey head (its there as a fun thing) on a plinth made out of two cylinders (told ya!).  The cool thing about 3D is that really low rez cylinders look like octagons, which is what I used. (put another way an octagon is an 8 sided cylinder).

This took a little bit of learning, but because I was just using pre-made shapes, it was really just complicated dragging and dropping.

So far so good.  My 3D printer software, PrusaSlicer, takes a file format called .STL, which stands for Ess Tee Ell (I leave the real answer as homework for my readers).  Blender exports that natively.  Easy Peasy.

Think of PrusaSlicer like a printer driver.  It translates a 3D object into instructions for a 3D printer.  3D objects are, basically, a whole lot of triangles stuck together to make a shape.  3D printers print by drawing a layer of plastic with a line of melted plastic, moving up a bit, and drawing the next layer  Slicers translate the 3D shape into the path the print head takes to make the object.

So I export the monkey as a .STL file, and import it in to PrusaSlicer.  All this goes well, except my model is 0.1mm tall. (For the Americans reading this, 0.1mm is "a really frickin small fraction of an inch".

What gives, says I.  I actually said "What the [censor] is this [excrement based censor]", but this is a fucking family blog so I can't use such salty language.

I did some digging and it turns out that Blender measurement units don't translate into units for any other things.  In Photoshop, depending on what your dots-per-inch value (normally 78-300) you can guess how big a thing would be when its printed by how many pixels across it is.  In Blender all of this is a lie.  It turns out I needed to set the units for the "screen", which is what blender calls the view of the object.  I also need to set the scale. 

It is entirely non-intuitive to me at this point, but thanks to some Googling I learned that I needed to pick a unit of measurement (I picked millimeters, cause my Slicer works in mm), and set the scale to 0.001 (why?  Dunno.  I mean a millimeter is 0.001 of a meter, but if I select millimeters, why isn't the scale 1?  This is one of the mysteries of the universe we have yet to uncover).

Once I got my units set right, I scaled up the model to an appropriate size for printing.

Then I did the export/import dance (Blender crashes if my slicer is running, so the dance is export, close Blender, open PrusaSlicer, import).

I finally got a view in PrusaSlicer that looks like this.

Now I am in standard 3D printing territory.  I scaled the monkey smaller to make the print time shorter.  I also used a coarser 0.15mm for the layers  (fine printing is 0.05mm) to speed up the print (remember my goal is to make *a* thing I designed, not a *pretty* thing, so sacrificing fidelity for time is a fair trade).

I also needed to add supports to the model.  Supports are bits of plastic that are printed in such a way that they break off easily, but are there to support printing parts that hang off in mid air, like the ears and the bottom of the nose.   This is all standard 3D printing stuff and done with a quick press of a button.  The upside is that this is the thing that will actually print:

I copied the final file to a USB key and moved it to the printer.

If you never seen a 3D printer work, its fascinating to watch.  I could watch if for hours.   It starts with a blank sheet, like this.

Then it lays down the first layers.  You can see here the sparse supports on the outside, and the solid plinth in the middle.

As it prints you can see the slices of the monkey mouth start to take shape.  It prints objects hollow, but adds a little bit of plastic, called infill, to the middle, to give everything some strength.

90 minutes later the print is finished.

Now its time to remove the supports, so I took the print to my work bench and selected a few implements of destruction.  Time to dig the monkey out of its shell.

This is the final result.   You can see that its a little rough, which is the trade off I made.  But dude, its a frickin thing that didn't exist 2 hours ago in any form whatsoever, and now I can hold it in my hand. Making it prettier is just a matter of picking a finer print resolution next time and waiting a bit longer for the result.

Some people are disappointed by the predictions of the future from days past because we don't have flying cars.  But in the space of two hours I used a computer that is more powerful than (I am guessing) the sum of the processing power of the planet when I was born, and used a globally connected network that brings the sum of all human knowledge to my fingertips, to design something from scratch and make it reality using, essentially, a robot.   And all it cost me was 10 cents in plastic and electricity, and 2 hours of my time.

The future is now.

The only downside is having to remove all the supports, which is only because we can't control gravity yet (which, really, is one of the reasons we don't have flying cars).

I don't know about you, but I am calling this project a success.   I mounted the monkey on my 3D printer as a memento of the first time I made a real thing of my very own out of  bits on a computer screen.

Making A Statement On Racism With Toy Photos

Go back in your mind to the early 19780s in Ontario Canada and imagine a little boy watching TV and stumbling across a show about two cousins who fight a comedically corrupt mayor and bumbling sheriff by driving fast around their county in an orange sports car with a fancy flag on the roof.

I bet you imagine that kid falling in love with that show.  As that kid I can tell you that the Dukes of Hazzard became one of my most favourite shows on TV. The car, known as the General Lee, was my favourite vehicle.  I also knew that the fancy flag that dominated the roof was a confederate flag, but at the time it didn't bother me so much.

Growing up in Canada I had no real concept of racism.  I knew slavery was a thing, but I thought it mostly died out during the Civil War.  I also knew about Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s.  However I wasn't exposed to racism on a daily basis, so I assumed, surely, the "greatest nation on earth" would have solved that problem by now.

Sometime along the way I picked up a model of the General Lee.  It was a memento of my favourite show from my childhood, and I thought nothing of it.  It sat in its see-thru box on a shelf in my office for years.

Fast forward to 2008 when I moved to North Carolina, USA, with my wife, and we started settling down and raising a family.  Living here,  it slowly dawned on me that the "greatest nation on earth", who I thought had solved its racism problem a long time ago, didn't. 

After Trump's campaign made it OK for people to be openly assholes again some folks in my area started driving around trucks with big confederate flags flying on the back.  Then in Virginia the Klan held an open rally and waved that flag, right along side the swastika, killing several people in the process.  I couldn't live with my assumptions that racism wasn't really a problem anymore.

Racism is alive and well in America, and the confederate flag was one of its biggest symbols*.  I was no longer proud to have that flag on a car on my shelf anymore.

This was extra unfortunate as, with the flag removed, the show and the car is actually quite fun, and as a toy photographer I really wanted to make images with it.  It is a sexy car, and would look great on camera.  However I could not reconcile the idea of taking a shot of a car with such a famously racist symbol on the roof. Even if I didn't actually show the roof in the frame, the flag was so iconic it would come to mind for anyone viewing my image. (I had actually considered Photoshopping a different flag onto it, but that still didn't feel right.)

So fast forward to January 2020 when I needed a car to shoot for the Photography Scavenger Hunt.  I wracked my brain for ideas, and as you can imagine, the General Lee model on my shelf kept creeping into my mind. 

Over the few months previous I have been watching some tutorials on tested.com about how to age and rust up cars using paint and other techniques.  Finally it clicked how I could shoot this car.  Make it old.  Make it rusted.,  Make it abandoned in the woods.

So that is what I did.

Now that car, with its racist symbology, isn't a shiny object of envious desire with a proud owner.  It is a relic.  A rusted, beat up, shell of a car that no one loves anymore, abandoned and forgotten. Waiting for the natural world to reclaim it.  Just as racism is an outdated pathetic, rusted out idea that that needs to be abandoned and forgotten. 

That is how I ended up shooting a car I've loved since childhood as an abandoned hunk of junk, and appeasing my conscience in the process.

Fuck racism.

*  There are so many reasons that the confederate flag is such a problem. Those that fly it have serious issues with understanding history, logic, reason, and what patriotism means. Being racist is just their biggest offense, and the only one that is unacceptable.

3D Busts

So lately I have been getting into painting models.  These are the results of my current projects, which are busts of science fiction characters.  These are the finished products:

 These busts start out as models printed on the 3D Printers in the Makerspace at work.  It takes about 20 to 24 hours to print a full bust, which are 6-8 inches tall.

 The colour of the plastic changes, as you can see, Thanos' plastic being being black, and Batman's being the odd (for him) shade of white.

Fortunately these models came out of the printer without needing much cleanup, so I was able to jump straight to the paint stage.

All of the busts are painted with spray paint.  I started with laying down a layer of primer, then the appropriate colours for the character.   I wanted to go with a metallic look, so I primarily used metallic paint.

Once I had the base coat down, I masked off the model using the appropriately named masking tape.  I wanted to give the impression of a coloured metal, not a painted figure. However there isn't a shade of metallic paint in the shade I wanted (at least in the store I was in) so I lightly dusted the figures with normal colour paint, which allows the metallic finishes to still shine through.

This shot is pre-painted.

This is how it looked with the paint applied.

 Finally the magical reveal when the masking tape is removed.

The finished product.

The following shots are the finished model of Batman.  I used fleckstone paint for the base.

 I wanted an aged weathered look for the Stormtrooper helmet.

 Thanos was trickier to do. The armour is simple gold paint.  However the face was trickier.  When picking out the spray paint in the store, I tried to match his skin colour with images on my phone.  I (and my wife, who was helping with the colour choice) thought grape would be the closest fit.

Turns out grape coloured paint makes him look like, not shockingly, a grape.  To lessen the effect I dusted on some peach colour, and finally a light dusting of metallic paint to get a skin tone that more closely matches the character.

3D Printed Skull

While I love toy photography, one of the frustrating things about it is finding props and other things that are at the proper scale for my action figures. Recently I have discovered that I, along with a maker space I have access to via my employer, have the ability to create some of my own props.

One of my recent projects is a skull.  I have often wanted a good looking scaled skull, so I decided to make one.

This is the finished result.

The skull started out life as a long filament of 1.75mm grey plastic.    I printed it off on the magical machine that is the 3D printer in the maker space.  Despite being pretty small (1/6 scale), it took 2.5 hours to print, so its handy I can do it at work between meetings, and while waiting for code to compile.

 3D printers, at least the ones I have access to, work by laying down a thin layer of hot plastic, then once its done the first layer it shifts up a smidge and starts on the next layer, slowly building up the model. It is your basic future tech in the present.  We never got our promised jet packs and flying cars, but we got machines that can print objects out of nothing.  I think we got the better end of the deal.

When a model has holes and overhangs, the 3D printer will automatically add brims and supports, and infills, to ensure the plastic doesn't distort while it cools.   This is why the print above looks so funny - it is full of supports.

So the next step is to remove those supports.  Took about 15 minutes to remove them all, and then sand down some rough spots.  The "cleaned up" model looked like this.

 At this point I had a mini human skull, but it was an unrealistic and unphotogenic grey plastic colour.  Its off to the paints!

I started by spray painting on some primer (which, ironically, made the model even more grey).  I then covered the entire skull in a bone-white-ish colour using acrylic paint and a brush.

The painted skill is at least the right colour, but its still lacks character, so I used a series of black and brown paint washes to age up the skull, until I got it to look the way envisioned.

Isn't it amazing what a bit of plastic and paint can produce?

My skull is complete.  Now I just need an idea for a photo to use it in.  If you have ideas, let me know in the comments below.

Father Son Model Building: AT-ST

This is Zeke and his finished AT-ST model.

Since my last foray into model building went so well I figured my 9 year old, Zeke, may enjoy building his own model.

So I let him pick out a model from Amazon, bought two, and over the past week or so we've been building them together.

It wasn't until we were 5 steps away from being completed that I realized the model was labelled as "15 years or older."   Didn't seem to matter tho as he managed to get everything together nicely.

This afternoon we finished the build.  Happiness ensued.

Foray into Model Building: Star Wars AT-AT

For a project over Labour Day I decided to try my hand at model building.  I haven't build a model since my childhood. It dovetails with my toy photography hobby, so it seemed like a thing to do.

I picked up a Bandai 1/144 scale Star Wars AT-AT kit. It looks like this:

When I was but a wee lad and engaged in model building, I always got stuck up on the glue(no pun intended) and I could never get it all attached correctly.  So I was happy to see this model didn't require any - win!  Also it doesn't have any decals, which is also a bonus.

So I spent a few hours putting together the model.  It ended up looking like this:

It turned out pretty good, but of course it has that flat grey plastic look to it.  I have become accustomed to a better looking model (standards increase when one gets into toy photography), so I knew I needed to do some painting.

Now an AT-AT is naturally grey, so what I really needed to do was to grunge it up a bit - something called "weathering".   Before I started I needed to decide the history of this machine.  Most of the time AT-ATs are thought of as being on the ice planet Hoth, and are shown in snowy weather.  However they went other places as well - there was an AT-AT guarding the force field generator on Endor for example.  I decided to make an AT-AT that has spent its lifetime trudging in a forrest environment.

So I spent a few hours putting on various washes of acrylic paint, and wiping off the excess.

After a few layers of build up, the finished product looks like this:

I tried to get the feet to look worn from mud and forrest detritus.

And I tried to make the vents look rusted from the moist forrest air.

I am pleased with how this turned out, for a first attempt at model making and aging.  In fact I liked it so much I have an X-Wing on order for next weekend.

I may have found a new dimension to my toy photography. I can't wait to get this in front of my lens.  Exciting!