ZBrushCentral

3D printing fur

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi there,

I have a client who would like to look in to 3D printing some models I created for them. A couple of these models have fur. My first thought was that this could be tricky.

As I understand it, a model for 3D printing can be eported as an obj and printed. Therefore the fur needs to be converted to geometry. Am I right in thinking this wouldn’t be too tricky from ZBrush where fibremesh can give a polygonal mesh? Although I’m guessing the level of fur detail that the printer could print to may be another issue entirely.

Unfortunately, although I created my models in ZBrush, I created the fur in Maya and rendered in Mental Ray. As far as I am aware there is no way to convert fur to geometry in Maya? (although paint effects can be). My other thought was to some how export the fur as curves and import those curves to fibre mesh?

Just curious if anybody has thought about this kind of thing already or whether I should steer well clear! :confused:

Thanks for your time

James

#2

From the sounds of it you’re going to have to remake the hair.
Mesh fibers of that scale don’t print correctly so chances are you’re going to have to sculpt the fur.

#3

If this is thick, cartoonish fur with very solid clumps modeled in then you’d be good, but for finer geometry like you’d get more more realistic settings even from something like fibermesh (where every strand might be modeled in)… its going to complicate the entire print job and hurt the final result in several different ways. I’d suggest converting the hair to geometry as the first step like you were thinking, but then take it a step further from there and (manually) retopologize it by creating a simpler volumetric shell around it and projecting/shrink wrapping it to your fibermesh.

#4

Thanks for the replies,

In the end, when it was mentioned that the models would need to be re-worked and it might take some time. They decided not to bother.

I’m slightly relieved!

Cheers

James