All posts by mayeli

Finn the Human: Printing, Documentation, and KeyShot… (FINN)ALLY

(Finn)ally, the time has come! 3D printing, at last!

I printed using the clear filament and let me tell you… It’s good perhaps for test prints but I would never want to use this to hand in any final model! The second print with white filament has much better resolution even though the file was exactly the same.

In order to print my second model quicker than the first I detached the head and changed the body orientation. In the future I wouldn’t rotate the body- having the belly down meant a rougher print. Moving forward I will always try to orientate my model to have the least amount of struture material BUT keeping the bottom at the bottom so that the rough print is not visible.

KEYSHOT:

A really simple rendering tool! I enjoyed the selection of colours and materials available AND the edibility of those (saving them too).

 

(One tip I’ll leave here about the Tinkerine 3D Printers that we have access to… We should make proper model files BUT when printing with these printers you don’t have to close the surfaces! The pink lines are not the end of you!! The resolution of these machines is not precise enough to require that last step.)

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Finn the Human: Surfaces, (Finn)ally!

Now that I’ve finally figured out the best way to go about tracing this little dude I have surfaces! I used a variety of surface commands- depending on what existing lines I had for the particular surface I wanted to make. We’re all familiar with the usual suspects, so I won’t bore you, but my favourite commands for a few details and which came in handy were “Pipe” combined with “BooleanDifference.” This combo was great for details of clothing or things like hands! Mostly at this stage the different commands I used were trial and error until I figured out what worked. I also watched a few different surface creation tutorials and followed along to get a handle of the different commands and when to use them. During this stage I:

-scaled the images and assigned a layer                                                                     -positioned the images to the correct view                                                             -traced the toy at it’s different views                                                                           -surface creation                                                                                                                      -“edit control points” ON and adjustments made where applicable

 

finn model snip

Finn the Human: Let’s Try This Again (Attempt #3)

After organizing all my layers so neatly and tracing all the slices (top and bottom) I still can’t quite get these surfaces to come together the way I want them to… I have decided to finally abandon these beautifully organized layers and follow the route most others have discovered – tracing images of the original toy.

During this step you have to be very careful to take pictures with the least amount of distortion as possible – impossible to take a photo without at least a small amount of perspectival distortion so try focus only on the nearest parts of the toy when tracing.

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**Later I moved these images with their tracing together to meet in the middle**

“Starting Over”! Finn the Human Slices 2.0

Things have not been going quite right so I decided that perhaps I should rescan our slices, this time with a ruler to make scaling easier and more accurate. I also rescanned the slices thinking that one of the issues I might be having is that the slices in most cases are very different on the top than the bottom- example pictures included. At this point I was still thinking that the best way to go about modelling this little guy was to trace all these pieces (top and bottom), space them out accordingly (1cm), and create surfaces from those curves.

See how different one side of the slice is from the other? (ex 1.0 vs 1.1)

Also, I’ve mirrored the “.1” images so that it would be accurate from its “top” view (“looking down,  through” the spray foam rather than looking directly at the slice).

Starting a completely new file to avoid any scaling mistakes from before!

1.0 vs 1.1Second Week Slices

**Look at all those layers :S**

 

Chopping Up Finn

My teammate and I started by gluing Finn to the bottom of the box to prevent him from moving around and we used spray foam directly in the box. In order to reduce misshaping the thin cardboard box we wrapped it in masking tape and marked the centre line for cutting on the exterior before spray foaming (ALSO we left the top open to allow for the inevitable  foam expansion).

We were fairly successful at cutting the toy down the centre and from there we decided on which side would be horizontally or vertically cut based on the arm angle (the one piece which is asymmetrical). Cutting our slices 1 cm each was a decision we made to get enough cuts to get detail but not too many cuts which would lead to too much material loss.

Now we have SCANNED them to reduce scale or angle variations that would come from using a camera (after the fact we are rescanning with a ruler to insure the correct scale).

Now to Rhino tracing!

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