Aiman's 3D Printing Odyssey

[aiman3D]

Well nothing was going to top the dress for a while so in the latest issue of the magazine I went back to the basics, sculpting and 3D printing a skull model for desktop anatomy reference. Printed on my Form 1+.

I’ve taken on a new 3D printed project every month for the last year now, each surpassing its predecessor in complexity with all sorts of applications, product, toys, jewelry, wearables, even a full 3d printed costume as the climax of that journey! If I have to make one point, it would be that I never saw these kinds of projects as a possibility for me until I decided to start down the path of 3D printing, and the same can be true for any of you a year from now. Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin empire was once asked the secret to his success to which he replied, “I start things before I’m ready to.” So just start, you’ll learn along the way.

Shout out to the creators of ZBrush for making this excellent software which I use everyday!

Thanks for reading.

[nebular]

Cool and inspiring. From the protetic hand gets better and better.

[nuzzletops]

This is super cool! I just ordered a Form 2 and it’s going to be SO LONG before I can start playing with it (February!). But I cannot wait.

Awesome work. Have you noticed any brittleness with your form prints? Some internet person warned me about that, but upon asking for more info they didn’t even have a Form printer. What I saw at CES was amazing, so I didn’t believe them, but I thought I’d ask anyway.

[aiman3D]

Thanks guys.

@nuzzletops, I’m debating whether to get a Form 2 myself. The form 1 + has excellent quality prints. Resin keeps curing as long as its exposed to UV light so eventually after a year of being in the sun your prints will become brittle for sure, regardless of what printer.
If you prime your prints with a thin coat of Tamiya Fine Spray primer or something similar then you wont have any issues with brittleness.

[gabo1991]

thank you for sharing. Really great stuff.

[MetinSeven]

Wow, very interesting topic and great work, keep it up!

[nacho_riesco]

Cool stuff!! definitely you need a better resolution printer

[aiman3D]

Hey all, thought it about time to update you on my 3D printing Odyssey.

While writing the monthly column for 3D World magazine I started my own character development/3D print company 3D Smiths LLC, www.3dsmiths.com
End of 2015 I developed a bunch of collectibles in partnership with several awesome 2D artists and got my own table at the CTN animation expo to try and sell them as unpainted resin kits.
I’ll share the sculpts here, all made in ZBrush start to finish. All printed on a Form 1 + at 50 micron resolution about 5" tall.

First one’s a collaboration with Stephen Silver, The Boxer

[aiman3D]

Next up is a collaboration with Chris Ayers, The Crimson Trumpet
This one was challenging to translate from 2D to 3D but a good opportunity to learn about creating inset keys to hide the seams and hold the piece together.

[aiman3D]

Next I worked with Brian Ajhar on the Crusader.

Loved this design and was a lot of fun to create all the various surface detail.

[aiman3D]

Daniel Arriaga and I collaborated on this sculpt based on his illustration, Early Morning
This one was all printed in one go.

[aiman3D]

Last one I was able to get done in time for CTN expo and one of my favorites was the Wolfman, a collaboration with Randy Bishop

[aiman3D]

In addition to the character development sculpts for Pre-Order, I wanted to have a bunch of sculpts ready to sell at the expo and hopefully recuperate some of my investment. So I made these stylized detailed and simplified ecorche prints. Got a lot of feedback before printing these but there’s still inaccuracies which need to be addressed in V2.0 of these sculpts, Anatomy is hard…

Attachments

[aiman3D]

Since the Boxer and Crimson Trumpet were making the rounds at an earlier expo, SDCC, I was commissioned for a sculpt by the team over at 6Point2, for the producers of the Nick Jr show Fresh Beat Band of Spies.

I worked with Ernie Gilbert on this one, which despite his excellent feedback, was quite challenging to pull off within the deadline of one month. Multiple stylized characters all posed and supposed to fit into one trophy. It took some creative thinking to figure out how to yin yang and fit them onto my Form 1 +'s build area. Pretty pleased with how it all came together.

[Rakib]

so cool man. Love them all

[aiman3D]

Thanks Rakib, glad you like em.

So, now that you’ve seen everything I setup for CTN, I want to talk about what I learned from that experience.

1. Running a toy business is hard. Collectibles/resin kits/figurines all have a lot of front-end investment and it’s a risk every time, you just don’t know if they’ll do well. Also molding/casting is cheap but time consuming and that on top of legal and administrative work, taxes, permits, marketing, packaging, distribution, shipping… All that leaves an artist no time to sculpt which is all I wanted to do in the first place. I enjoyed relative success, Stephen Silver’s Boxer was actually picked up by a Chinese toy company and they are making 1500 of him! That’s pretty cool, but in these deals since the toy company is handling all manufacture and distribution the profit share for us the artists is minuscule and not really worth the effort. Bottom line, running a toy biz was too costly and I chose to scale my biz down from a full direct to public toy shop to focus just on development/print prototyping. Trial + error + effort + failure is the best way to improve and learn things.

2. Doing the work is how you create opportunity. Want to change your career direction, gotta spend months showing people you can do the new job you are going for. For example if you want to get into toys, gotta show people you can make toys, noone is going to hire you in toys on an advertising portfolio. Also the industry, at least in LA is very specialized. Film VFX, advertising, animation, games, toys all pull you in different directions and even within those categories you gotta figure out what one or two things exactly you wanna do and only put that in your portfolio, remove everything else and commit. It’s terrifying but only through doing the work will opportunities present themselves. The industry is also very tiny, very friendly and very open to collaboration, just ask and you can work with amazing people. That said, don’t get stuck in the trap of doing free work for too long. After I built a new portfolio I got to work on some really cool paid 3D print projects this year with some awesome studios and hope to create more of those opportunities.

3. 3D printing is not perfect yet. Lots of gear, lots of trial and error, lots of figuring out best practices/workflow, but totally worth it to see your stuff made real! After all that experience it made sense for me to teach what I learned and luckily I got the chance online at Mold3D Academy. So if you want to avoid several headaches and learn everything I know about 3D printing, come take my class - http://www.mold3dacademy.com/3d-printing-for-zbrush-artists.html

4. You’ve gotta know your audience and pick the right expo. I’m really into animation and CTN was fun but it was not the right expo for me. Was far too expensive even to attend and the attendees were mostly broke students looking for work. This year I’ve booked a table at Designer con LA. More on what I’m doing for Dcon later…

[MetinSeven]

Magnificent sculpting. You really caught the essence of the 2D artwork. Keep up the good work!

[aiman3D]

Hi everyone, it’s been a while,

I figure I should pick up this 3D printing odyssey where I left off, at DesignerCon 2016.
At Dcon, In addition to promoting my 3D Smiths 2D to 3D development biz, my wife, Hwa, and I decided to unveil our own original toy IP, Fungisaurs, cute, baby dinosaur-mushroom hybrids.

The idea of Fungisaurs was born in 2015, when Hwa and I were driving back to LA from a camping trip near Yosemite National Park. We stopped at an In-N-Out Burger and were given some prehistoric adventure themed dinosaur stickers. Having these dinosaur stickers adjacent to a mushroom identification catalog I had picked up earlier at the park, led to some furious drawing in my sketchbook of what I imagined various dinosaur-mushroom hybrid species could look like.

Back at home I digitally sculpted 8 characters in ZBrush, rendered them out using the Keyshot Bridge and proceeded to prototype them on a Form 2 stereolithography 3D printer.

In Preparation for Dcon 2016, I hired a friend, Elvin Rodriguez, to paint one of each of our 8 Fungisaurs characters.

I then printed out and cleaned up a whole bunch of Fungisaurs to sell as unpainted resin kits since I couldn’t afford to get them all painted.

It was a lot of print cleanup…

Hwa, being a print/design art director, created the branding for Fungisaurs. She printed postcards of photos we’d taken of the Fungisaurs toys in the wild, as well as a banner and trading cards for each character, in which we described their “scientific name,” personality, mushroom identifying features, and which species of dinosaur was spliced with which species of Fungi.

We hadn’t really come up with a full backstory for the Fungisaurs at this point, just that they had been created in a lab and somehow “got out” and were popping up all over the world. So we decided to pitch the prints as “paint-it-yourself” scavenger-hunt toys, like Easter egg hunting in your backyard mixed with foraging for mushrooms.

The results of that little Dcon experiment was that everyone that saw them, loved our Fungisaurs. We sold out of a couple of the favorites and made enough money to cover the Dcon booth expenses, which in my opinion was a win.

More importantly we were inundated with requests for painted Fungisaurs. Kids gravitated to them because of their cute strangeness and parents loved the nostalgia of dinosaurs and scavenger hunts to take the kids outside. This cinched the deal, we’d have to find a way to mass produce Fungisaurs for everyone to enjoy…

(To be continued in another post)

[aiman3D]

Unfortunately can’t share most of the really cool sculpt/print projects I was a part of in 2017 due to NDA’s and release dates, but here’s a dump of a bunch of my professional 3D print projects that are now delivered.

I learned something from each of these projects, some I sculpted from scratch, some I helped slice/key/prep for print.

I got to print the small Demogorgon from one of my favorite shows, Stranger Things, when I setup a 3D print space at Aaron Sims Studio.
I advised sculptor Daniel Edery as he setup and print the large scale statue (as seen on right at Gnomon gallery) which was then painted by the legendary Tim Gore.

Some print collaborations, Left, Lumberjane sculpted by Dylan Ekren, sliced/keyed/printed by Robert Vignone and I assembled and post processed the print.
On the right, Skater Croc by Matt Thorup aka the Redbeard, I advised slicing and printed/post processed, photo by Matt.

Dog Trophy for a client, I sculpted a couple of versions, one going more realistic, trying to match the fluffiness of client’s Australian shepherd, on the right a more stylized, faceted award look.

Collectible figure prototype for 3BlackDot and their game Deadrealm. I was contracted to sculpt the game models and setup their vinyl toy workflow.
As you can see, this undead clown was printed in multiple pieces and assembled to create the 12" print.

Left, Hodor 12" Bookend, 3D printed in multiple pieces and assembled, I’ll paint it one day.
Right, Print for a client sculpted by Dez Einswell, I was responsible for slicing/keying/prepping/print, post processing and assembly.

New VR sculpting technique I tried out, this character was sculpted in Oculus Medium, touched up in ZBrush and printed. I go over a bit of the workflow in this video:

Evel Knievel statue commission and collaboration with Nick Benson at 3 Specialty Design Services, sculpted primarily by Daniel De Leon, I designed it and made finishing touches and prepped for print.
The statue stands today at Evel Pie Pizzeria owned by Evel Knievel’s son in Las Vegas Nevada.

So there you have it, my 3D printing Odyssey continues and the legend of an “expert” continues to build, mostly through hard work and consistently taking on new challenges.

If you’re interested in learning about 3D printing, my class is available on Mold3DAcademy, for now as a very affordable self-paced option
I’ll be updating the lessons and teaching an instructed class in Spring 2018 to include all new ZBrush 4r8 techniques.

[blackfangwolf]

Amazing work!