Experiments in 3d printing video game characters

Posted on by Matt

Hi All.

I just wanted to share my progress in learning how to 3d print video game characters. The last time I blogged about this (see here), I was excited to show you some of the weapons I printed. Now it’s time to show my progress in printing the entire character. All of these models have been extracted from a game called “Guild Wars 2”.

Final results look like this, but see below for the journey to this point.

Character on Raptor

My First Attempt looked something like this:

First and second try side by side

The aspect ratio of the model looked terrible (she’s stretched out too tall, oops!). I also printed the model laying down flat (less support material needed), but the layer lines were quite noticeable.

For the second character I printed, I fixed the aspect ratio and the layer orientation, but I realized I had two more problems I needed to solve:

  • The hair was not printable. I skipped it for this iteration (it didn’t have any volume to it)
  • The mesh for the character is exceptionally coarse in areas, such as the legs, that are heavily faceted.

It took me a little while to figure out how to deal with the coarse mesh. I was stumped for a while when I noticed there was more than one way for the mesh to be rendered. When the mesh is part of a video game, it typically has a “smooth shader” applied to it, causing it to be visibly more rounded. A coarse mesh model used for 3d printing is going to look more like the left picture.

Shaded Flat vs Shaded Smooth

My fix for coarse mesh: “Blender”. The “Subdivision Surface” modifier is the primary tool I used for smoothing out the mesh. it can interpolate faceted areas of the mesh, and make them more rounded.

Subdivision Surface

I quickly applied this tool to some models i previously printed, with impressive results:

Two Bunnies

Unblended Model

The last thing i did to this character, was repair the model of the hair. Originally the hair had no thickness, and i used an extrude command to thicken these areas of the model that had no thickness.

Extruded Hair Shaded and smoothed hair and model

The results of these improvements can be seen below:

Improvements

Learning how to solve these issues allowed me to create this model.

Finally, I created a super-size version of it, laptop for scale. For this model, i had to use the “Cut” model feature in Orca slicer, to section the model into 2 pieces. This feature allows “connectors” to be added to the model, which are like dowel pins for alignment.

Character on Raptor

If you got this far, i hope you enjoyed reading about this topic. The tutorial I used for most of my inspiration was found here.

If you have any questions about this process you can email us at contact.cthackerspace@gmail.com I will likely also be at the space on the 2nd and 4th saturdays of the month. Please reach out if you want to learn more!