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…
Attachments
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.
- Running a toy business is hard. Collectibles/resin kits/figurines all have a lot of front-end investment and it’s a risk every time, you just don’t know if they’ll do well. Also molding/casting is cheap but time consuming and that on top of legal and administrative work, taxes, permits, marketing, packaging, distribution, shipping… All that leaves an artist no time to sculpt which is all I wanted to do in the first place. I enjoyed relative success, Stephen Silver’s Boxer was actually picked up by a Chinese toy company and they are making 1500 of him! That’s pretty cool, but in these deals since the toy company is handling all manufacture and distribution the profit share for us the artists is minuscule and not really worth the effort. Bottom line, running a toy biz was too costly and I chose to scale my biz down from a full direct to public toy shop to focus just on development/print prototyping. Trial + error + effort + failure is the best way to improve and learn things.
- Doing the work is how you create opportunity. Want to change your career direction, gotta spend months showing people you can do the new job you are going for. For example if you want to get into toys, gotta show people you can make toys, noone is going to hire you in toys on an advertising portfolio. Also the industry, at least in LA is very specialized. Film VFX, advertising, animation, games, toys all pull you in different directions and even within those categories you gotta figure out what one or two things exactly you wanna do and only put that in your portfolio, remove everything else and commit. It’s terrifying but only through doing the work will opportunities present themselves. The industry is also very tiny, very friendly and very open to collaboration, just ask and you can work with amazing people. That said, don’t get stuck in the trap of doing free work for too long. After I built a new portfolio I got to work on some really cool paid 3D print projects this year with some awesome studios and hope to create more of those opportunities.
- 3D printing is not perfect yet. Lots of gear, lots of trial and error, lots of figuring out best practices/workflow, but totally worth it to see your stuff made real! After all that experience it made sense for me to teach what I learned and luckily I got the chance online at Mold3D Academy. So if you want to avoid several headaches and learn everything I know about 3D printing, come take my class - http://www.mold3dacademy.com/3d-printing-for-zbrush-artists.html
- You’ve gotta know your audience and pick the right expo. I’m really into animation and CTN was fun but it was not the right expo for me. Was far too expensive even to attend and the attendees were mostly broke students looking for work. This year I’ve booked a table at Designer con LA. More on what I’m doing for Dcon later…
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.
The results of that little Dcon experiment was that everyone that saw them, loved our Fungisaurs. We sold out of a couple of the favorites and made enough money to cover the Dcon booth expenses, which in my opinion was a win.
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)
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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.
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amazing little monsters!
Thanks VoroN-art!
So on to discussing marketing, which I suck at. I like content creation but not outreach and engagement and all those other PR buzzwords centered around gaining likes, fans and followers.
That said, it’s a necessity in building a new brand so here’s how Hwa and I wen’t about marketing our new Fungisaurs toy line.
Instagram
Hwa and I love traveling, and we figured as part of the Fungisaurs backstory that they escaped the lab and start their life cycle like mushrooms do, as spores. So, naturally, Fungisaurs spores would travel on the winds and end up everywhere!
Since starting the brand in 2015, we’ve literally taken our Fungisaurs 3D prints with us on all of our journeys, from remote national parks to bustling cities, all over the world.We like to photograph the toys as if they are the ones traveling.
There were many occasions when we were photographing the Fungisaurs that hikers came over to take a closer look and got a kick out of them. The idea with sharing these photos was to build an Instagram following before launching the Kickstarter.
Here’s a series of photos from our Fungisaurs world travels:
Gif of Fungisaurs travel photos around the world
Arches National Park and Antigua, Guatemala
Paris, Vegas and Paris, France
Channel Islands
Grand Tetons National Park
You can see a bunch more Fungisaurs travel photos on our Instagram or this Imgur megathread.
Pre-launch campaign:
One month before the launch we announced the campaign was coming on our social media channels and told all of our friends and family.
The thought was to build up as much anticipation as possible hoping to get most of the funding upon launch and this may help the project go a bit viral.
7 days before launch we made a post everyday, building up to the Kickstarter. This worked out well, we got 30% of our funding goal on launch day.
Expos:
We hit 3 expos during the course of the campaign, and I made videos at each one. Each gave us a slight boost but not as much as we were hoping. Hard to sell people on the idea of pre-orders in general.
Launch at DesignerCon:
[youtubehd]3UMHrDKKrRc[/youtubehd]
Animation reveal at CTN expo:
[youtubehd]L7HHe-p_3RU[/youtubehd]
Mycological Society of San Francisco Fungus Fair:
[youtubehd]KSsa2G4vaHg[/youtubehd]
We also made a new banner to highlight the Kickstarter at expos
Instead of making a regular flyer, since our target audience was kids, we made some coloring page flyers with the idea that maybe they’d color it after getting home and it would end up on people’s fridges, increasing awareness for our Kickstarter.
We tried to come up with interesting and engaging posts on social media everyday, Giveaways and such.
Cross promotions were an interesting thing to learn about. We did some instagram posts tagging other companies such as Sketch Wallet and they happily shared our campaign and I even did a podcast talking about the spirit of entrepreneurship with Stephen Silver.
Viral marketing was mostly a bust, we tried a few different strategies but nothing major worked. We did get to the front post of Reddit/mycology, but not to the frontpage where it could have snowballed attention.
We spent a while working on a press release, but by the time we had it the way we liked it was already the last week of the campaign so the chances of getting any coverage was slim.
We got covered by a few big toy blogs, but not the tech/viral blogs/or the mom blogs which we were hoping for.
This was something we should’ve done a lot earlier, but oh well, here’s the press release we drafted: goo.gl/SQA6aw
In the end we’ve made it to 95% of our funding goal with a few days left to go and I’m sure we’ll meet the target. http://kck.st/2jbL70U
The thing I’ve learned with marketing is that it’s something you need to do 3-6 months in advance and have a strategy going in, not one month in advance like we did and coming up with marketing ideas on the fly.
The toys would have netted a lot more had we been better able to get some press and get them in front of the target audience.
But I’m almost funded, I’m not complaining for all the support I’ve got from friends, family and other artists. Lot of it for just simply not being a dick and showing consistent hard work, and sometimes you get a little lucky.
The main takeaway from this process for me was that I’m not special and this month-long outreach to fund a first time Kickstarter is the norm.
Unless you get lucky by going viral or get some big press or have thousands of dollars to throw at marketing, your Kickstarter won’t get funded in a day and will likely only reach those networks you’ve invested time in.
Still, this was worth it just for the learning experience in and of itself and I look forward to fulfilling the Kickstarter pledges and seeing where I can take this IP in the future.
Wanted to share renders of the 8 Fungisaurs in series 1. A lot of details had to be simplified and may be simplified still further for mass production.
Bracko: Brachiosaurus spliced with Witches Hat mushroom
C-Rex: T-Rex spliced with a Chanterelle mushroom
Chick-Rap: Velociraptor spliced with Chicken of the Woods
Paradots: Parasaurolophus spliced with Fly Agaric
Sailmander: Dimetrodon spliced with Turkey Tail
Scaly-Anky: Ankylosaurus spliced with Scaly Hedgehog
Trishroomops: Triceratops spliced with Glistening Inky Cap
Pterocap: Pterodactyl spliced with Death Cap
Looking forward to beginning Fungisaurs series 2…