~20cm Dolls 3D cat!

I started a little side project about a month ago, as I've been sort of stalled on some parts of my main doll in a frustrating I-need-to-work-on-something-else sort of way. And I've gotten to a point where it's not just blobby weirdness but presentable and maybe... 90% complete! So I thought I'd share some of my in-progress and current pics with you guys here. There's more on my Tumblr.

I started with some good reference photos of oriental shorthair and siamese cats, and roughed in the 3D shapes with primitives, just trying to get the proportions and stuff right and figure out where everything needed to go.





Started refining some of the shapes, and seeing what I needed to do to get it to pose the way I wanted: as close as possible to a real cat, which is a pretty big challenge, considering how springy and flexible cats are!





Started on the head only after most of the body was complete:





Went through several iterations once I started printing pieces - this one shows the old tail, that kinked up like mad as soon as I strung it. Also had to reprint the head several times to get the little anchoring spot for the elastic in the right place and not breaking off, and probably did at least half a dozen iterations of the back legs, till I got them so that (as long as they print well) they pose super solidly even without being strung!



Redid the tail, did some front legs, fiddled with several other bits and now... I have a complete cat!









Still need to cut out the eyewells (easier to print without them so I left them out till now), and get a couple spots to be less kicky, and maybe tweak some of the torso body forms or something - it works really well posing/anatomically but a couple pieces tend to pop out a little and aesthetically, I'm not really loving it. I'd also really like to see if I can make the mouth jointed, but I figured that could wait till I worked out all the other stuff.

Critique, comments, ideas, questions, etc. welcomed!

 

Thanks, guys!

thebeastnamedzafarri - I'm thinking I'll just have copies 3d printed for me through a service like Shapeways. They've got several new colours of their low-cost material, and the white version of it is apparently quite easy to dye with methods I'm already familiar with from dyeing yarn... And it would be a real pain to mold and cast some of these teeny tiny parts and then do all the finishing needed on them. Plus it saves me the trouble of resin casting, and I can do it in whatever size without having to make new molds. It's pretty expensive (especially compared to my home 3D printer - probably spent 5 euros total on materials for test printing, maaaaybe 1 euro's worth in the "complete" cat), but I can probably modify the parts a little to shave off some volume in non-visible spots, and thus lower the cost so it's reasonable.

 

Heeh, thanks Switchum. Nice to see you!

CrazyAlienCrafts - Some of the walls in some of the pieces are only a single line of filament wide, so 0.4mm - it's not ideal for strength but it works okay as I have my settings dialed in really tight and I print slow. I'll probably thicken up some of the parts that tend to be a bit thin, and I need to go through... basically all the parts and check that the edges are thick enough, as I often have issue with the walls being too thin for it to want to print there, so I have to drop the piece half a millimeter or so into the virtual print bed of my slicer, just so it actually is putting down material on the first layer and not the tenth (and then it just makes a lovely plastic lump, not a cat limb). I am super lazy about checking wall thickness in 3DS Max though... and usually just end up going back and fixing it once I see holes in my slice. I do up to 4 vertical walls otherwise and 10% infill - and 6 top and bottom walls as the slicer I'm using (Simplify3D) is not really great on giving nice solid top layers if you're not doing much infill.

 

Heeh, thanks so much!

wilga, I'm using a Robo3D printer. Low-end home FDM printer, super happy with it. The filament I'm using actually highlights the layer lines and makes them more obvious than they really are, because it's translucent so the light penetrates and makes it shine along the layer lines (I figured I was going to be printing a dozen or so copies of each part in prototypes and had a lot of pretty translucent blue filament laying around, so... pretty test kitty!). If I did it in fully opaque filament, the lines wouldn't really be visible much at all in photos. Except for a couple spots, they're really minimal in actual texture, and super easy to sand off. I hope the final Shapeways copies will be as finely detailed and non-layery!