This is super cool! I just ordered a Form 2 and it’s going to be SO LONG before I can start playing with it (February!). But I cannot wait.
Awesome work. Have you noticed any brittleness with your form prints? Some internet person warned me about that, but upon asking for more info they didn’t even have a Form printer. What I saw at CES was amazing, so I didn’t believe them, but I thought I’d ask anyway.
Thanks guys.
@nuzzletops, I’m debating whether to get a Form 2 myself. The form 1 + has excellent quality prints. Resin keeps curing as long as its exposed to UV light so eventually after a year of being in the sun your prints will become brittle for sure, regardless of what printer.
If you prime your prints with a thin coat of Tamiya Fine Spray primer or something similar then you wont have any issues with brittleness.
thank you for sharing. Really great stuff.
Wow, very interesting topic and great work, keep it up!
Cool stuff!! definitely you need a better resolution printer 
Hey all, thought it about time to update you on my 3D printing Odyssey.
While writing the monthly column for 3D World magazine I started my own character development/3D print company 3D Smiths LLC, www.3dsmiths.com
End of 2015 I developed a bunch of collectibles in partnership with several awesome 2D artists and got my own table at the CTN animation expo to try and sell them as unpainted resin kits.
I’ll share the sculpts here, all made in ZBrush start to finish. All printed on a Form 1 + at 50 micron resolution about 5" tall.
First one’s a collaboration with Stephen Silver, The Boxer
Next up is a collaboration with Chris Ayers, The Crimson Trumpet
This one was challenging to translate from 2D to 3D but a good opportunity to learn about creating inset keys to hide the seams and hold the piece together.
Next I worked with Brian Ajhar on the Crusader.
Loved this design and was a lot of fun to create all the various surface detail.
Daniel Arriaga and I collaborated on this sculpt based on his illustration, Early Morning
This one was all printed in one go.
Last one I was able to get done in time for CTN expo and one of my favorites was the Wolfman, a collaboration with Randy Bishop
In addition to the character development sculpts for Pre-Order, I wanted to have a bunch of sculpts ready to sell at the expo and hopefully recuperate some of my investment. So I made these stylized detailed and simplified ecorche prints. Got a lot of feedback before printing these but there’s still inaccuracies which need to be addressed in V2.0 of these sculpts, Anatomy is hard…
Since the Boxer and Crimson Trumpet were making the rounds at an earlier expo, SDCC, I was commissioned for a sculpt by the team over at 6Point2, for the producers of the Nick Jr show Fresh Beat Band of Spies.
I worked with Ernie Gilbert on this one, which despite his excellent feedback, was quite challenging to pull off within the deadline of one month. Multiple stylized characters all posed and supposed to fit into one trophy. It took some creative thinking to figure out how to yin yang and fit them onto my Form 1 +'s build area. Pretty pleased with how it all came together.
so cool man. Love them all
Thanks Rakib, glad you like em.
So, now that you’ve seen everything I setup for CTN, I want to talk about what I learned from that experience.
Magnificent sculpting. You really caught the essence of the 2D artwork. Keep up the good work! 
Hi everyone, it’s been a while,
I figure I should pick up this 3D printing odyssey where I left off, at DesignerCon 2016.
At Dcon, In addition to promoting my 3D Smiths 2D to 3D development biz, my wife, Hwa, and I decided to unveil our own original toy IP, Fungisaurs, cute, baby dinosaur-mushroom hybrids.
The idea of Fungisaurs was born in 2015, when Hwa and I were driving back to LA from a camping trip near Yosemite National Park. We stopped at an In-N-Out Burger and were given some prehistoric adventure themed dinosaur stickers. Having these dinosaur stickers adjacent to a mushroom identification catalog I had picked up earlier at the park, led to some furious drawing in my sketchbook of what I imagined various dinosaur-mushroom hybrid species could look like.
Back at home I digitally sculpted 8 characters in ZBrush, rendered them out using the Keyshot Bridge and proceeded to prototype them on a Form 2 stereolithography 3D printer.
In Preparation for Dcon 2016, I hired a friend, Elvin Rodriguez, to paint one of each of our 8 Fungisaurs characters.
I then printed out and cleaned up a whole bunch of Fungisaurs to sell as unpainted resin kits since I couldn’t afford to get them all painted.
It was a lot of print cleanup…
Hwa, being a print/design art director, created the branding for Fungisaurs. She printed postcards of photos we’d taken of the Fungisaurs toys in the wild, as well as a banner and trading cards for each character, in which we described their “scientific name,” personality, mushroom identifying features, and which species of dinosaur was spliced with which species of Fungi.
We hadn’t really come up with a full backstory for the Fungisaurs at this point, just that they had been created in a lab and somehow “got out” and were popping up all over the world. So we decided to pitch the prints as “paint-it-yourself” scavenger-hunt toys, like Easter egg hunting in your backyard mixed with foraging for mushrooms.
More importantly we were inundated with requests for painted Fungisaurs. Kids gravitated to them because of their cute strangeness and parents loved the nostalgia of dinosaurs and scavenger hunts to take the kids outside. This cinched the deal, we’d have to find a way to mass produce Fungisaurs for everyone to enjoy…
(To be continued in another post)
Unfortunately can’t share most of the really cool sculpt/print projects I was a part of in 2017 due to NDA’s and release dates, but here’s a dump of a bunch of my professional 3D print projects that are now delivered.
I learned something from each of these projects, some I sculpted from scratch, some I helped slice/key/prep for print.
I got to print the small Demogorgon from one of my favorite shows, Stranger Things, when I setup a 3D print space at Aaron Sims Studio.
I advised sculptor Daniel Edery as he setup and print the large scale statue (as seen on right at Gnomon gallery) which was then painted by the legendary Tim Gore.
Some print collaborations, Left, Lumberjane sculpted by Dylan Ekren, sliced/keyed/printed by Robert Vignone and I assembled and post processed the print.
On the right, Skater Croc by Matt Thorup aka the Redbeard, I advised slicing and printed/post processed, photo by Matt.
Dog Trophy for a client, I sculpted a couple of versions, one going more realistic, trying to match the fluffiness of client’s Australian shepherd, on the right a more stylized, faceted award look.
Collectible figure prototype for 3BlackDot and their game Deadrealm. I was contracted to sculpt the game models and setup their vinyl toy workflow.
As you can see, this undead clown was printed in multiple pieces and assembled to create the 12" print.
Left, Hodor 12" Bookend, 3D printed in multiple pieces and assembled, I’ll paint it one day.
Right, Print for a client sculpted by Dez Einswell, I was responsible for slicing/keying/prepping/print, post processing and assembly.
New VR sculpting technique I tried out, this character was sculpted in Oculus Medium, touched up in ZBrush and printed. I go over a bit of the workflow in this video:
Evel Knievel statue commission and collaboration with Nick Benson at 3 Specialty Design Services, sculpted primarily by Daniel De Leon, I designed it and made finishing touches and prepped for print.
The statue stands today at Evel Pie Pizzeria owned by Evel Knievel’s son in Las Vegas Nevada.
So there you have it, my 3D printing Odyssey continues and the legend of an “expert” continues to build, mostly through hard work and consistently taking on new challenges.
If you’re interested in learning about 3D printing, my class is available on Mold3DAcademy, for now as a very affordable self-paced option
I’ll be updating the lessons and teaching an instructed class in Spring 2018 to include all new ZBrush 4r8 techniques.
Amazing work!
Thanks for the encouragement blackfangwolf
Now to catch you guys up on the latest with development on my Fungisaurs IP, since the earlier post on DesignerCon 2016.
My wife, Hwa, and I decided that since the demand for the painted toys was so large, we’d have to find a way to launch mass-production of the toys by Dcon 2017.
Our solution was Kickstarter, but it quickly became clear we wanted not only to create toys, but an entire kid’s brand including a mobile game and animation.
I first started with Trademarking and Copyrighting everything Fungisaurs for animation/game/toys with the US Patent Office.
I’ve never launched a toy line before but I figured it involves 3 things, marketing, production and distribution.
We put off distribution to worry about after we had product, so our task was two-fold marketing and production, which go hand in hand, but I’ll start with Production first.
Production:
Step one of production was in my control. Because I had a 3D printer, I could create and test my own toy prototypes.
I had to create several prototypes of each character to make sure the toys were the same relative-scale, didn’t have sharp pokey-edges, were well balanced, free-standing, and wouldn’t break easily if dropped.
This involved sculpting in ZBrush, exporting out to Preform using the 3D Print Hub plugin, testing the prints, and rinse and repeat.
Beyond prototypes, I spent most of 2017 trying to get in touch with toy factories and getting them to quote me for a 12 pack set of mystery box toys. This was done by old fashioned research on sites like Ali Baba and reaching out to factories directly. This didn’t work.
Most factories didn’t respond and if they did, couldn’t speak English or their prices for injection molding were outrageous or they could not accommodate smaller orders and my plan of 16,000 units was considered a small order. There was another dimension to consider which was IP theft and I couldn’t trust factories that someone hadn’t already worked with and recommended.
I started reaching out to anyone and everyone I knew in the toy industry and friends of friends. This worked better.
Eventually I found a factory recommended through a friend and after several rounds of emails we came to an agreement on the cost of 16,000 toys (8 toys in series one of Fungisaurs X 2000 units each) + packaging + 12-pack display packaging for around $25K USD. (I’d rather not recommend the factory or mention them here until I’ve gone through the entire process from start to finish and be confident in saying they did a good job, so don’t ask before summer 2018)
After pricing and timeline were negotiated, the next thing was to ensure the quality of their work was up to my standards. Toy production is an expensive up-front endeavor. In order for me to see their quality for just one toy I’d need to pay them to make the metal injection molding tool, which was far too expensive. I was mostly concerned with finished surface quality and paint, so I decided to ship them a 3D print, have it painted by their factory painters and see how close they could match my friend Elvin Rodriguez’ paintjob.
I was very happy with the results and with the toy company’s communication and availability, so I gave them the thumbs up and moved to the task of raising the funds to make the order.
Another big part of production was the branding. This was all handled by Hwa. Her design chops and experience wen’t a long way to creating a cohesive Fungisaurs look that evokes outdoor adventure and appreciation for nature.
I created some renders and traced those renders in Illustrator to create shapes for enamel pins, Hwa setup the new website, Kickstarter graphics, app UI, and all the merch.
Despite it being only her second go at toy package design, Hwa was able to nail the feel I was going for the Fungisaurs mystery-box individual and 12-pack display box.
After we had a series of products, we had to answer some basic questions to create a compelling backstory for people to care about our designs.
1. What’s a Fungisaur?
This was a chance to explain the concept but also declare a mission statement for the brand. This is what we came up with:
Fungisaurs is the name we’ve given our original dinosaur-mushroom hybrid species. We hope to inspire adventure, science education and appreciation for nature through toys, games and animation.
2. How many kinds of Fungisaurs exist?
We left this open ended so I could continue to make more Fungisaurs designs, just saying that 8 species had been “discovered” so far.
3. Where did Fungisaurs come from?
This was a toughie as it required the most storytelling and it became my main priority. I wrote up a big origin story script and several character descriptions of humans that inhabit the world of Fungisaurs.
I first contacted an illustrator/concept artist on Artstation, Ryan Winch, to come up with character designs based on my descriptions, in his own, animated style which I thought was a good fit for the brand.
After a few rounds of revisions I was absolutely stoked with his designs.
I then contacted a college friend and storyboard artist, Feras Khagani, to help board the first draft of my animated backstory.
I reached out to my friend Cat Arthur to help with the audio, composing a score and sound effects.
The primary voice acting was all done by another friend Megan Ring, who was the perfect voice for Kei, my young protagonist.
The remainder, illustrating and animating the story was all on me, and I’m not gonna lie, this was a challenge.
I had the experience being a generalist for several years in Chicago, and I preferred to do 3D animation, but there was no way I could animate a nearly 3 minute story in 3D, by myself.
I decided to go the Aftereffects route and animate the origin story in 2.5D.
I hoped the animation would be done by Dcon 2017 in time for the Kickstarter launch, but there was so much work to do that it took till the middle of the campaign till I was finished.
Here’s the finished animated origin story for Fungisaurs:
[youtubehd]0qJgtPy0few[/youtubehd]
As if an animation wasn’t intensive enough, because I’m insane, I also decided to build an augmented reality mobile game demo.
I only setup the one character, C-Rex, for the demo. I started by rebuilding the high-res model at a relaxed pose, then made a low poly version, UV mapped it and setup all the textures, then rigged it and animated 3 different cycles in Maya.
I contacted Zack Rock, an excellent game programmer friend I had worked with at a previous gig, to help me build the app.
We literally built an app in 3 days using Unity, Apple AR Kit and Xcode. Here’s a video of the working demo.
[youtubehd]mVfsw4Af2Vc[/youtubehd]
So for the fruits of our labor we got to launch a Kickstarter for our own toy line on the day of DesignerCon 2017 like we had planned.
As of this post we’re almost at the end of our 30 day campaign. You can check it out and support (if it’s still active) here: http://kck.st/2jbL70U
It was absolutely a team effort and also good to keep in mind, all of this production/development was done over the course of 2017, in our free time, when we were not freelancing and working around LA in a professional capacity. (which was most of the time)
In the next post I’ll talk more about our strategies in marketing the Kickstarter.
amazing little monsters!
