3D Printing - Robot

For our next Creative Play task we were assigned to watch the videos Kevin and his video editor made which were tutorials on how we can make our own 3D printed models, as well as what to know about them if we ever wanted to print others out so we had that knowledge for the future.

Before I want to describe some of the information inside the videos, I want to say that the editing itself is really inspiring as each video keeps a good pixelated theme and the short and snappy videos didn't feel like a chore to watch so I'll try and keep that editing style in mind if I ever want to create videos for something.

Focusing on the videos, I'll try not to mention everything as there was a lot of information to be gathered from them and I think it took me a whole 2 hours just watching them all. The first thing I will mention though is how animation implements 3D printed characters and environments as it does seem to be something a lot of stop-motion studios are heading towards nowadays. These videos also talked about different types of filaments for stop-motion, and although I didn't found them too useful at the moment I think the knowledge about may be helpful for whenever I'll be working with one in the future.

The tutorials for 3D CAD were more useful for this project however as it talks about what you shouldn't be doing to 3D models, such as T-Overhangs and bridging which was something I wanted to consider avoiding in my model to give it the best results.

For my model, I wanted to go for a simple design, but also something that had some form of appeal. I didn't want to overcomplicate things as this was my first time using Tinkercad and although the application itself was incredibly easy to use I didn't want to build something that was going to take me ages to create so I came up with this design on paper, I also gave him the name "Enti" just to connect with the character a little more:

As much as I wanted to keep his original design when modelling, there were quite a lot of complex shapes I couldn't replicate in Tinkercad so I just stuck with simple cubes and cylinders, which in my opinion still ended up giving a really cool finish to the character.

I showed my progress to Kevin and he suggested to, instead of having scaffolding under his arms that you could print off each part separately and then glue it back together, which he recommended and I personally agreed with. I went back into Tinkercad and separated each part like so:

After around two weeks from finishing the model and sending the final work to Kevin, he messaged me back with the finish result of the 3D model which looked absolutely awesome!

I definitely think gluing them together was the right move in this instance as it didn't show off any scarring where it would've if it had scaffolding added onto it:

In conclusion, I think that this mini-project was a lot of fun and I would love to try this out again with different models and bring my own characters into the real world.