3D Printing brings characters to life

Pixologic have recently launched 3D Print exporter and Decimation Master plugins for their amazing ZBrush 3D sculpting software.

Within a couple of days of this we got an enquiry from Matthew Long at the West Wales School of the Arts to 3D print his model “Flake the Dust mite” which he had sculpted using ZBrush. The STL file came to us with only a few errors which were easily fixed with our specialist software so we were able to give a quick quote for a 3” high printout in our White Detailed material.

This was 3D Creation Lab's first ZBrush 3D print so we were intrigued by the process that the designer goes through and how the detail of the model would come out from the 3D printing. Coming from an engineering background where primitives and Boolean operations are the order of the day I could only imagine being able to produce a model like this, the photo below shows the workflow for the subdivision modeling process from the initial idea sketch to the final rendering.

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As for the 3D printing it was a straight forward print apart from the removal of the support material which had to be carried out by hand rather than the waterjet because of some of the features being so thin. As you can see from the photo and video below the model came out really well and to quote Matthew “Just had the model delivered, looks fantastic! Better than I imagined”. I can’t say more than that apart from I can’t wait to see what character model comes through next……

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Photos & Video courtesy of West Wales School of the Arts

More information on the ZBrush plugins:

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With 3DPrint Exporter you will be able to export your favorite ZTool in STL and VRML file formats, opening you to the world of 3D Printing.

Who has never dreamed about having your virtual sculpting in "real" 3D, standing on your desk? Now it's possible for you to print your ZBrush models:

Sculpt your art with ZBrush
Optimize if needed your model with the Decimation Master plugin
Export it with 3D Print Exporter

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With Decimation Master you will be able to easily reduce the polygon count of your models in a very efficient way while keeping all their sculpted details. This solution is one of the fastest available and is able to optimize your high polycount models from ZBrush, allowing you to export them to your other 3D software packages.

Sculpt your model with ZBrush, add all your small details and push your artistic skills, then optimize your ZTool. Export it to your favorite 3D package which will now be able to open your sculpting to create specific textures like Normal Maps or Ambient Occlusion maps by baking the high resolution mesh information on a low resolution mesh.

Another use is to export your model for a Rapid Prototyping process (3D printing) and bring your virtual art to a real object but also displaying your model in a real-time viewer such as PDF 3D. The possibilities are infinite!

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