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!