3D printed dolls

On a whole, the price of making a single doll is in the same range - the one time investment of a printer is somewhat more expensive than the one time investment of good sculpting tools, usually in the 300$ range unless you’re doing sintering (sintering printers are $$$$$$), but it evens out quickly. The big difference is the plastic vs the clay, but it’s not that different; each full draft of a 1/3 scale doll takes around 600-800g of plastic (about 12-16$ if you’re buying decent but cheap FDM filament), but you’ll probably need to print multiple to work out the joints. You might want to print the head in resin (higher resolution), which will take a second printer and more expensive material (about 4-6x more money for resin than filament), but it’s just one head.

The big advantage of 3D printing, though, is the ease of altering a file. You can load your head and make changes to create a new face, and with many tools it’s easy to stretch and change proportions - you’ll probably need to recut and redevelop joints, though. You can even take a BJD from Thingiverse (some of which are free even for commerical use) and alter it to your preference. And it’s easy to collaborate with a friend, even across the globe, since you can share the file.

Personally, I’ve sculpted one doll by hand when I was younger and had better hands (although she’s not very good), and I’m in the process of sculpting my first full BJD on my own. I’ve also sculpted and printed two heads for the 1/6 scale size (although I can scale them up for anything), and printed one 1/6 scale BJD whose model I got online.

 

Personally, I wish I had the freedom to do both; that said, I love what I’ve been able to do 3D modeling. I’ve always had some motor skill impairment, even before traditional work became untenable for me, so all my clay stuff looks sloppy, despite so much hard work - I literally couldn’t cut a straight line. In digital work, I’m on more even footing with everyone else.

But there’s also something really fun about physical media - it definitely feels more like “work” staring at a computer screen than at a pile of clay! There’s a kind of really basic joy that playing around making stuff inspires. And I think it’s easy to get a sense of organic vibrancy in organic media. (It’s also marginally harder to cut your joints so weirdly they’re uncastable, since you’re limited to what can physically be done with a knife and clay.)

I think both ways have merit, and hybrid forms are also worth considering - I’ve seen some artists sculpt clay to form a body over a printed BJD “skeleton” that has all the joints and thin walls over hollow parts, or sculpting a head and using a printed body. VR based sculpting is gaining popularity now and also promises to help blend the mediums; I’m saving money to buy in myself. (But there are limitations to that, too - with Pixologic’s pixol tech under copy protection and other real-time vertix recalculation being a bit behind what’s needed for a sculpting tool, most options for serious object modeling stick to voxel modeling, which has performance problems.)

There are definitely companies that use either; I know Granado’s heads are initially 3D modeled, based on progress photos. I suspect that’s part of why they’re able to offer the Vindoll line, since they could alter the original head models to fit the medium and then re-print them. Personally, I hope to see both traditional and digital sculpting continue to advance as art forms!