Christmas Pokemon!

Laeta Saturnalia!  As the holidays are approaching, I have bestowed upon myself the pretty stupid task of making all of my Christmas gifts this year.  Naturally, I put everything off as long as possible and now have about two weeks to finish and then hand out all my gifts.  I'm a genius, I know.  Note-- this post will be published well after the date it was started, as I don't have all the Pokemon done as of the time of its writing and want to have a group picture at the end.

To keep things relatively simple, adult relatives are getting a bottle of the mead I started back in August and friends are getting Pokemon!  I might decide to blog about the mead later, if anyone's curious, but this post is about them Pokeymans.  I'll do a quick run-down of how I'm making them and then a list of lessons I learned along the way, i.e. things I screwed up in the process.  Enjoy!

Prepping the Models

The only way it's even remotely possible for me to crank out 10 Pokemon figurines in 14 days is by borrowing the models off this cool website that pulled in-game models from Pokemon X/Y.  Normally the thought of ripping models out of a game would make the game developer inside me cringe, but modeling them by hand wouldn't have really eased my conscious-- either way, I'm dealing in unlicensed reproduction territory.  But anyway, the models from that site come with textures and rigs, so I've already saved about a billion hours of work by using them.

Although the rig is there, the models don't seem to be properly weight-painted when I load them into Maya, so I had to repaint them myself.  It's been an eternity since I last weight-painted anything at all, so there are still some weird bits of deformation going on.

Lol, no idea what I'm doing

Once weighted and posed, I scaled the models down to a size that could fit in my printer comfortably.  The first few print attempts were pretty bad-- I've never printed something this organic before and haven't really gotten my printer calibrated for it.  Since I'm in a hurry, I decided it'll be best to just print the Pokemon in pieces as needed and reassemble them by hand.  Not super graceful, but that's a problem for 2016.

Poke-pieces!

Post-Processing

After they come off the printer, the Pokemon figurines have been meeting one of my closest friends-- super glue!  All those little pieces need to be attached, meaning I'll probably be losing parts of my fingertips in the process.  Hopefully I'll remember to preserve enough of my right index to successfully use the weirdly high number of fingerprint scanners in my life.

Next up is sanding.  Lots of little jagged edges on these guys, as you can see from the pictures.  Some of it is support material that didn't pop off properly, but some of it is just from the models themselves not being optimized for printing at this size.  I'm using a 120 grit for the really rough bits and finishing it off with a 220 grit.  This should leave enough texture for the primer to hold onto.  It's not necessary to wet-sand, but I prefer it to getting all that plastic dust everywhere.  I swear I've found it in my eyes before-- probably not healthy.  Any holes and gaps in the print that I find get a dab of Bondo and another quick sanding with a 400 grit, then they're ready for a layer of XTC-3D.

After they're nice and smooth and have been given a good coating of primer, it's time for the arduous task of painting these tiny little bastards.  I've never really had a steady hand-- hence my love of Control-Z and all media digital-- so this is probably the hardest part for me.  Luckily I have a bunch of tiny paint brushes, masking tape, and cheap acrylic paints on hand.  That's all you really need, right?

My messy workspace after a night of painting

Once the paint dries, I hit them with a light coating of a spray matte sealant, as the paint I use is kinda shiny and also cheap enough to stay very slightly tacky.  This stuff reeks, so it's best to use it outside.  After a few hours of drying, they're done!

Finished set for far-away friends (not pictured-- another Charizard and a Feraligatr)

Finished set for work friends

Conclusion and Lessons Learned

Well, this has been fun!  Tiring and kinda stressful, but look at the cute little Pokemon!  They look derpy as fuck, I know.  Naturally, I've made a few notes and observations along the way, which I'll outline below for your amusement.

• Don't get carried away with your raft settings if you're having issues with it detaching from your print.  It's entirely possible to have them so firmly attached that you can't actually detach them again, which kinda defeats the purpose in its own way.
• If using someone else's models feels a little cheaty to you, try putting them in your own poses.  It's a nice little way to add your own flair to the print.
• Don't be afraid to chop your models into pieces when you need to.  I'll admit that it's much more satisfying to pull a complete figurine off your print bed, but assembling pieces is worlds better than throwing out a dozen failed prints because you just can't get your printer to cooperate anymore.
• The most obvious, I'm sure-- don't wait until the last minute to make presents for your friends, especially if you know well ahead of time that you're gonna want to make everyone something!  You'd think by now I'd have figured this out for my personal projects, but it seems you'd be wrong.
• Don't use cheap paints.  My paints vary greatly in quality just from tube to tube, and it's super obnoxious to need 3+ coats of the reds and oranges when blue goes on silky smooth with no problem.  When I can justify blowing more money, I might get myself an airbrush and some nice paints.
• Painting on eyes is not trivial, if you couldn't tell by how I went for the lazy method and just went with Ditto-styled black dots.  I will be trying actual paint markers in the future.  Or stickers.  Stickers seem even better!

Ocarina of Time Coasters: Part Four

Click here for Part Three: Making the Molds

After an eternity of sanding, molding, and cursing, I finally finished all of my molds and could start the casting process!  The end of this project is finally in sight-- yay!

Part Four: Casting

Compared to all the other parts, casting was probably the most frustrating to figure out but the most relaxing to actually do.  Once I got in the groove, settling down to cast all six coasters in one go was kinda pleasant.  However, getting into that groove really tried my patience, and I nearly gave up on this project while trying to get a good cast.

The first issue I ran into was bubbling.  So much bubbling!  This was really discouraging-- after all, if you can't get rid of the bubbles, how on earth are you supposed to get a good cast?  The cause turned out to be three different issues that combined together to make a mess.  First, I was trying to use a clear-cast but fast-curing resin, which are very much prone to bubbles if you don't have a $200+ vacuum chamber sitting around.  Switching to an opaque resin helped a lot.  Second, I was trying to cast in 110-degree weather, meaning my pot life of 3 minutes was turning into a pot life of like 50 seconds.  Luckily, the fall came in while I was trying to solve my coloring problem that I'll cover later.  Third, I kept trying to use every sort of dye except for the expensive stuff meant specifically for use in resin.  This was adding moisture to the resin, which in turn made more bubbles.  I'd imagine a slow-cure resin or vacuum chamber could help with this, as well, but it was much more cost-effective to just buy actual resin pigments.

Some of my ill-fated early attempts

The second issue I had was deciding on how much of those fancy pigments to use, and then how to consistently measure that amount each time I mix up some resin.  Switching to opaque resin meant that I had to add enough dye to overcome its natural white cure color and not accidentally create pastel colors.  And since I have six different colors going on, mixing up a large batch for each color (as is frequently recommended) didn't seem very cost-effective.  So after many failed attempts and some bad advice off the resin casting forums I visit, my dear future brother-in-law recommended industrial syringes.  It feels a little creepy to have a bunch of syringes lying about, but I can get (mostly) exact measurements now, up to 0.01 mL accuracy.  After some trial and error, I decided on about 0.1 mL per cup of resin, which I'm using approximately 50 mL of total (25 mL of part A and of part B).  That's well under the recommended max of 3% dye per total volume that Smooth-On lists on their site, so it shouldn't be enough to interfere with curing.  Hopefully.

Fifth time's the charm, I guess?

The last major issue was simply that the molds ended up kinda crappy, partly because of the issues I listed in the previous section and partly because my originals just weren't that great.  Unfortunately, this isn't something I can just fix-- I'd have to completely start over again to get better casts.  Considering I still haven't finished version 1 and recently lost all my 3D models in a computer crash, this isn't exactly something I'm willing to do right now.  That being said, the pulls I'm getting could certainly look a lot worse, so I'm going to focus on doing the best I can with them until the molds fall apart and need to be remade.

Issues aside, I'm super excited to go demold my casts and see how they turned out.  It looks like I could revise the dye measurements slightly on some of the pieces-- especially the red of the Fire Medallion, since it turned into hot pink instead-- but otherwise this round of casts look like they just need to be finished off and then tested.  And by tested I mean scattered around my apartment as decorative coasters!

My phone isn't great with colors, but here they are in their molds

Hopefully this has been educational, if not kinda interesting.  My next post will cover finishing off the pieces to make them into actual coasters, as well as do a recap on what I did and maybe what tools I used.  May the super glue be with you, not on you!

Tricks and Tools: Home-made Dremel sanding drums

Hello again!  I've gone a while without any updates, so I figured I'd pop in and share a cool new trick I found on Instructables on how to make your own sanding drums for your Dremel tool.  This was a great find for me, as I just bought a big pack of wet/dry sandpaper sheets and am already incredibly sick of trying to sand everything by hand.  My Dremel only came with very low grit sanders, which aren't exactly useful when your prints don't come out looking like hell, so I'm eager to try these out.  It's too late for my coasters, but I'm gonna put a few of these together for my Dragon Priest mask in the hopes that it'll speed up sanding significantly.  My little arms are tired!

Disclaimer: making your own sanding drums might be dangerous, as they could fall apart and get flung towards your face or otherwise injure you or your Dremel.  Please use this tip with caution.  I'll report back if something terrible comes from this experiment!

Skyrim Dragon Priest Mask: Part One

Hello!  I've decided to go ahead and share another project I've been working on, since I'm getting bored from the constant set-backs of my Ocarina of Time coasters.  As the title suggests, this one is a Dragon Priest mask from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.  I'm using a model I found on Thingiverse for this project rather than trying to model it myself.  I'm still new to modeling for 3D printing, so this saved me a ton of time and frustration.

Part One: Printing

The biggest challenge to printing this mask was the size.  This thing was way too big for my measly 100 x 100 x 130 mm print bed, so I ended up cutting it into fifteen different pieces, which I then had to struggle to glue together.  NetFabb is a nice tool for this sort of work, as even the free version will cut a model and repair the resulting holes for you.

Here you can see my cuts in NetFabb Basic

Once I got all the pieces down to a good size, I started printing them.  Obviously this took some time, and each piece had to be oriented just right to both stand up to printing and get a nice-looking print surface.  I also started encountering an extrusion issue with this print-- parts that needed a lot of retraction ended up with lots of little clogs that eventually started ruining my prints, as several layers would go by with my printer blissfully unaware that it wasn't actually extruding plastic.  I still haven't found a good solution to this, but I managed to work around it for now.

Trying to glue all these pieces together was a pain in the butt.  Since I had never tried cutting up a large print like this before, I didn't know that I'd end up with such thin pieces that simply did not provide enough surface area for super glue to bind to.  And since I couldn't fit them together all nice and neat, I ended up with a few uneven spots where the corners met and a number of gaps between seams.  It was an all-around mess, really, but it eventually pulled together.  I tried smoothing it out as best I could with my Dremel and a layer of XTC-3D, then used some cheap putty to fill in whatever I missed.

So far so good, eh?

It's still not quite ready for molding, as I've learned through my other projects.  I'll be going over it with several grits of sandpaper until its a smooth, uniform surface with no noticeable imperfections.  At that point, I'll look into how to get a mold going.  Until then, may the super glue be with you, not on you!


UPDATE 7 November:  Turns out "water putty" was a bad choice, as it kinda dissolves in water and doesn't really stick to a smooth plastic surface.  Go figure.  Instead of continuing this ill-fated attempt to be eco-friendly, I'm buying myself a tube of Bondo, which seems to be the go-to of this maker community, and will refill the gaps I uncovered.  Live and learn, I suppose!

Fallout Pip-Boy: Lessons Learned

Hi again!  As the title suggests, I've put together a custom Pip-Boy.  This was a gift for a special someone who was unable to get a pre-order for Fallout 4 before they stopped offering the edition that came with a wearable Pip-Boy.  Luckily for me, someone else had the same idea, so I'll be using this guy's models instead of trying to design the entire thing by myself.  It sure was nice of him to make this available for dorks like me to use-- I hope to do the same when I finally design something other people will want to print!

Considering the number of parts that come in this kit, as well as the fact that many needed to be cut into pieces to fit my printer, this was a very long project that consumed much time and filament.  I'm pretty sure this took me a good nine months of off-and-on work!  Instead of trying to do a chronological set of posts about it, I opted to be lazy and just use this one post as a general "what I've learned" style of summary that I updated over time.

Quick notes: I 3D printed the parts with PLA and a Printrbot Play printer.  A combination of XTC-3D and sand paper were used to smooth the prints.  The paper decals were printed from my normal paper printer, glued to a piece of cardboard for extra strength, and then wrapped in a cut of plastic baggie to give a shiny "behind plastic" kinda look.  Much of this was assembled using screws and toothpicks.  The black cable was salvaged from an old headset that no longer worked.  The "blank screen" and screen surround are the cheap craft foam you can pick up for like a dollar at a hobby store.  Bondo was my filler of choice, and I used Krylon spray products for the paint and sealant.  I did not include any LEDs this time around, but the guide mentioned at the top does show you how to set them up if you're so inclined.

For the complete Imgur album of the completed Pip-Boy, please look here!

Samsung Galaxy S5 not included

Things I've learned from trying to make a Pip-Boy:

• ModPodge sucks.  There, I said it.  I know all the other arts and crafts blogs have at least one entire post ranting about how awesome they think ModPodge is, but I've yet to have a good experience from using it.  As a sealant?  It never fully dried and left my figurine sticky.  As a glue?  It's pretty much the same junk we give kids, except I don't have to go to the hobby store for regular paste.  As a filler for 3D prints when you're attaching two pieces and have gaps?  Holy hell, no.  It doesn't exactly "harden" as much as dry into a rubbery substance.  I thought I could live with that at first... but then I tried to sand it, genius that I am.  It simply turned to gum that clogged up my sandpaper.  Never again.
• XTC-3D will pool if you apply too much and don't wipe it up.  Sure, trimming an edge with your Dremel isn't too bad, but the part where you get covered in a fine dust that the packaging marked as "do not inhale" is a bit of a pain.  And if it happens to pool on the model itself, you'll lose any surface detail that's under it.
• On a related note, XTC-3D dries clear when there are no bubbles.  This means a spot can look terrible but still be silky smooth.
• Spray paint and primer can be finicky, especially when you're in a hot, dry environment like I am.  Both too much and not enough humidity are things that can affect your results.
• Generic super glue seems to have a minimum surface area requirement.  If you don't meet this requirement, the two pieces won't stick together and the glue will take its sweet time to cure.  This will not keep it from instantly fusing with your finger, however.
• If your prints are warped or crooked, they'll result in a disfigured final piece.  Go figure.
• Painter's tape is the least elegant solution to filling large holes caused by said warped prints, and will not be covered completely with primer and paint alone.  Works well enough for parts you won't see, though.
• Dropping PLA prints can break them, especially if they're heavy but still manage to land on the most delicate part.
• Screws do indeed obey the same laws as every other physical object, in that they cannot exist in the same space that other matter currently exists in.  In other words, if you try to force a screw into a solid print that doesn't have room for a screw, you're likely to pop a couple layers of the print apart to make room.  Next time I'll use my drill to clear out a proper pilot hole.
• The level of craftsmanship a person puts into a prop does not necessarily correlate to how much effort they'll put into the tutorial explaining what they did.  The "tutorial" provided by the guy who made these models is pretty lack-luster, especially when it comes to assembling the crazy number of pieces that go into this build.  I was able to figure it out, but it certainly wasn't easy.
• If you're in the US, your local Ace Hardware is probably the best place to find screws and nuts.  For that alone I've started patronizing them more frequently as a thank-you for being so helpful!
• When cutting pieces to better fit your printer, straight down the middle isn't always the best idea, especially when the center has nooks and crannies you'll have trouble sanding later.

This thing took an eternity, but I'm so glad to have it done!  Hopefully my next project will be a little less complicated... until then, happy crafting!

Ocarina of Time Coasters: Part Three

Click here for Part Two: Sanding and Finishing

Welcome back!  In this post, I'll cover the process I'm using to create the molds for my coasters.  So far, creating the molds has been the easiest part of this entire process, as the issues I've had mostly stem from me doing a bad job of finishing the originals (see Part Two for details).

Part Three: Making the Molds

Since these coasters are flat and really don't have anything complicated going on, I'm making simple one-part molds.  I start by building a little cardboard box to contain the liquid silicone, trying to leave about a half-inch around the edge of my coaster to give the silicone some strength.  Some people use acrylic sheets to build their mold boxes, but I'm getting so many things shipped to my home lately that I'm just about swimming in cardboard, so it's the cheapest option I had.  If you follow in my footsteps, just keep in mind that cardboard is going to absorb moisture, which will make it a little tough to remove the box once the mold sets up.  To seal the box, I used a gratuitous amount of hot glue around the inner and outer edges.  I also used a ring of hot glue to attach the coaster to the bottom of the box, but I'm sloppy with hot glue, so I still had some silicone to trim off the bottom when I was done.

Derpy little cardboard box

The next part was super easy, despite my fear that I was going to completely screw it up.  I took my two-part silicone (Smooth-On Mold Star 15 Slow, as you can see from the picture), mixed equal parts A and B, and slowly poured it into a corner until it covered the model with about a half-inch thickness.  I kinda guesstimated the amount of silicone to use by measuring the box itself, getting its volume, and subtracting an approximate volume of the coaster to get 200 mL of silicone needed.  After pouring, I tapped on the sides of the box for a couple minutes in the hopes it'd help release any bubbles trapped on the surface of the coaster, and then let it cure until the instructions that came with the silicone said it was safe to touch.

Apparently I can't decide on a camera orientation when I take these pictures...

After it cures, you can just rip the cardboard box apart to free your mold.  I had to gently trim the edges of the mold away from the cardboard to loosen it, as it soaked into the cardboard along the top edge.  Once the mold was free, I gently pried the coaster out and admired my sloppy handiwork.

Yay!

So far I've had two main issues with my molds-- using a rough original, and not using a flat surface when I pour the mold.  The former is obvious, but the latter I didn't even think about.  Since my crafting table dips inwards in the center and my porch seems to be at a slight slant, both test molds have been very crooked.  The severity of this issue didn't become obvious until I had a cast spill over one edge but not fill the other side of the mold.  I'm not quite sure what to do about this at the moment, other than perhaps take note of the alignment of the mold relative to both surfaces and be sure to keep it in the exact same orientation when I cast, which sounds pretty error-prone.  Trying to get my table perfectly level might actually be easier.  I'll have to do some more tests to figure this issue out.  Until then, may the super glue be with you, not on you!


UPDATE 8 November:  Today I learned that I've been butchering my molds.  Trimming the edges around the original is a terribly dangerous thing to do, and can leave you with rips, dents, and other oddities that sure as hell will show up in your casts.  Since hot gluing the original to the bottom of my mold box has been the culprit, I'll be using some spare (sulphur-free) clay as an adhesive for my next mold.  Hopefully that will make it easier to get a nice clean edge.  Replacing my X-Acto knife blade ought to help, too, now that I think about it...

Ocarina of Time Coasters: Part Two

Click here for Part One: Modeling

Welcome back!  I'm slowly but surely making progress on these damn coasters, and am now at the stage where I need to give the originals a good finish so they'll actually make good-looking molds.  This should be a shorter post than the previous one, as the process isn't super exciting... except for maybe the parts of it I messed up, of course.

Part Two: Finishing My Originals

Due to the wonky ways I've been printing my parts, they don't exactly come off the printer looking fabulous.  In fact, the edges that touched the supports can get pretty jagged.  This is where my dear friends sandpaper and Dremel tool come into play.  Pardon the lack of pictures-- the sanding process makes an absolute mess, and I don't want to get plastic dust all over my shiny new phone.

To give a rough overview, I've been using a sanding drum of unknown/ very low grit on the Dremel to hack off the more jagged pieces.  After that, I had no problem scrubbing away with a sheet of 220 grit sandpaper attached to a foam sanding handle, which it came with in a small kit from the hardware store.  Once I can't feel any jagged pieces with my fingers, I've started giving it one more go-over with a wet/dry sanding block that I bought years ago to use on clay sculptures.  I have no idea what grit it is, but it's pretty fine even compared to the 220.  Iterations Three and Four have benefited the most from this mystery sanding block, as I can actually reach the inner surface of the coaster and sand it until it's nice and smooth.

Oh, something important I learned!  Don't rely on your eyes when trying to sand 3D prints, as the thin walls will let light through in some places but cast shadows in others.  This'll cause a lot of weird discrepancies between what the surface looks like and what the surface feels like.  I thought I had a big gouge in the middle of my Forest Medallion print, but it turned out to just be a thin part on the backside of the wall.

Now, as to the matter of the prints I ruined...

Ugh, this again?

So while I was getting started in home printing, I came across a neat product by Smooth-On that's meant specifically for smoothing out 3D prints.  It's called XTC-3D and is a gooey resin that's supposed to self-level after you brush it onto your prints.  Although it's a really nifty product that can turn a crummy print into a smooth, shiny print, I've had mixed results in my attempt to use it.  Most of my applications have at best still been kinda bumpy, at worst... well, again, the lumpy mess you see above.  Smooth-On recommends working at room temperature, which I'm willing to bet is causing my issues-- I'm working outside in the Arizona desert, where it's still getting up to 100F during the day while most people are enjoying cool autumn weather right now.  Since exposing a heat-curing plastic to heat makes it cure faster, my working time decreases faster than I can work when I try to finish a large batch of prints.  I'm pretty sure that's where I slipped up with Iteration Two.  I went back to do a second application and smooth things out a bit more after coating all six coasters, and by then the resin was starting to set up.  If I had left them alone, they probably would have just been a little bumpy like the time before.

On a related note, if you decide to use this product on your own prints, resist the urge to use cheap chip brushes.  Seriously, they've caused me so much grief that I kick myself every time I use one instead of throwing them out and getting foam brushes instead.  XTC-3D is a little tacky, and gets increasingly more tacky as it starts to cure.  Tacky plus cheap brush equals so many bristles getting pulled out and stuck to the resin!  Ahem.  Naturally, this causes you to either end up with bristles stuck in your print, or take the time to pull each one out and redo the section of resin you just screwed up by digging it out.  In my case, you're likely to have both occur and get really mad at yourself for being dumb.

At this point, I'm hoping sanding alone will suffice for Iteration Four.  However, gluing the two pieces together has left a small gap around the inner edge of the Forest Medallion prototype, which showed up as a thin rim sticking out of my new test mold.  I trimmed it as best I could, but my X-Acto knife didn't exactly slice the rubber too well, so it ended up looking sloppy.  If it shows up in the final cast and can't just be filled in with some sealant spray, I'll have to give XTC-3D another shot.  I'll be sure to post an update if that happens.  Until then, may the super glue be with you, not on you!


UPDATE 10 October: After the above-mentioned mold was used, I've discovered that whatever grit my wet/dry sanding block just doesn't cut it for mold-making-- I was left with obvious layer lines in the mold and test cast even though my fingertip couldn't feel them.  After a bit of Googling, I've found people recommend getting up to 1500+ grit, so I bought a variety pack of wet/dry sandpaper sheets.  My current plan is to do a coat of XTC-3D and follow it up with a good sanding from each grit of sandpaper I got-- if I still can't get a good mold, I'll be sure to come back and update this page again.

Ocarina of Time Coasters: Part One

Hello!  Hey, listen!

So I seem to have an odd obsession with coasters.  I'm not quite sure where it stemmed from, as I've never really made my own coasters before despite thinking about it since I moved into my first roommate-free apartment.  I had actually forgotten about my plans until I was browsing Thingiverse for gift ideas and came across these bad boys.  Yes, 3D printed video game themed coasters.  The nerd in me felt like she had just seen the face of God when I beheld their 8-bit glory.  However, they were not quite good enough for me.  To be fair, nothing really is-- mayhaps that's why I feel inclined to make things.  But I digress.  After starting to play Ocarina of Time again, I could not resist the thought of turning the Sage Medallions into coasters.  After a quick Google search to ensure no one else had already made them how I planned to make them, I dove right in.

This project is special to me for more than just my coaster craze.  It's combining a few different processes I've been wanting to try for years-- 3D printing, molding, and casting.  I've never been able to afford trying the latter two, as getting started requires a lot of materials and gear, so I'm super excited and terrified at the same time.  On top of that, I credit Ocarina of Time as the game that got me into the world of video games, so this should be fun!

Part One: Modeling

The first step, naturally, was to create the models my Printrbot Play would turn into piles of plastic.  After trying to get back into Blender and failing for the billionth time, I bit the proverbial bullet and shelled out some cash for a license to Maya LT.  Some people feel you can't beat free, but those people obviously weren't forced to get intimate with Maya very quickly for a college modeling course and found themselves unable to learn any other program afterwards.  You could make a Stockholm Syndrome joke if you'd like-- I won't stop you.

I decided my coasters should be approximately 3.5 inches wide and 0.5 inches tall, with the inner surface closer to 0.25 inches tall.  Maya, like almost all other civilized creatures, prefers metric units, so I worked on a scale of 25.4 mm equals 1 inch.  I essentially modeled it pretending the unit grid was in inches and then scaled the whole thing by 25.4 before exporting it to an .obj file for printing.  I included a picture of the actual medallion from the game as an Image Plane as a reference while working, and decided to keep it all low-poly to better suit the spirit of the N64 era.  (I might at some point make a video outlining the process I used for modeling these coasters, as it isn't trivial if you've never done something like this before-- if you'd like to see that, please let me know)

The first model took me ages-- I'm still pretty rusty!

Unfortunately, I only saved a couple work-in-progress shots, one of which is of the first iteration of the Forest Medallion.  After printing the above model out, I realized the inside was way too small to hold a normal-sized cup because I didn't bother measuring the inside.  I guess I'm really getting into the "rapid prototyping" spirit with this project, eh?  Iteration one also taught me the value of positioning your models properly to better suit the capabilities of your printer.  For example, my Play is great at Z-resolution, but is kinda sloppy on surfaces at a small angle from the print bed.  Since I printed this one laying flat, the precision of the Z-axis was wasted on the outer edge, leaving the inner detail rough and ugly due to imprecise surface printing.

So many splotches... why are they splotchy?

Iteration Two-- where I had actually printed out all six coasters-- had an unfortunate mishap that I will go into more detail about in the next post.  Well, it had several unfortunate mishaps in my ill-fated attempt to sand and smooth, but one of them was enough to actually ruin the coasters.  Hopefully you can see the issue in the above picture-- splotchy bits across every surface of every coaster!  Before I ruined them, these had a thinner outer ring than Iteration One, making them much better at actually holding cups.  Printing them standing up improved the details, but left a few of the edges a little rough.  Sanding helped with the outside, but it was pretty much impossible for me to reach any part of the inside.  This leads us to...

The inner part of the Water Medallion in center, back-up pieces to the side

Iteration Three, which is currently in the process of getting a much more thorough quality assurance pass than the previous two attempts.  For this round, I've decided to print each coaster in two parts-- one for the inner detail, another for the outer ring.  This means I can orient both to utilize the superior Z-resolution of my printer.  Above you can see the inner piece of the Water Medallion-- this piece will be stuffed into, and glued to, the outer ring.  I have again used the Forest Medallion as a test.  This time around I'm actually able to properly sand the inner piece.  Yay!  Combine that with a smaller print resolution, and I've already got a silky-smooth tester going.  There are a few small gaps between the two pieces, but I'm hoping a little super glue will fill them in instead of just sticking to my finger.  If not, I'm assuming it'll just turn into a small blemish in the mold that I can just trim out.  Hopefully.


Hopefully Iteration Three will be the last iteration, as I'm still trying to figure out what to do with all these failed attempts that are watching me with judgmental, non-existent eyes.  For the next post, I'll go over some of the post-processing techniques I've been trying out and how exactly I've messed up each one.  May the super glue be with you, not on you!

UPDATE 3 October: Iteration Three was not the final iteration, naturally.  I'm now up to Four, which is essentially the same method as Three except I've added a little "foot" to the back of the inner models so they won't topple over while printing if the supports start coming loose.  After the printing is done, I'm simply hacking off the little foot with a saw/ Dremel tool so I'll still have a flat surface for molding.  Yes, I came up with this after I checked on a print and found it getting dragged around  with the raft and supports still firmly attached to the print bed.  Live and learn, I guess.  I'm going to run out of filament soon!

UPDATE 10 October: Iteration Four was almost there.  The way I modeled the two pieces left a noticeable gap between them when attached, so Iteration Five added a little ledge to the underside of the outer ring on which the inner piece can rest, that way I can actually push the pieces together firmly when gluing to prevent gaps.  I'm going to try printing them lying down so I don't have to hack off that little foot anymore, which means it'll need more intensive finishing. We'll see how that goes.