Merun v2 - Now with 100% more polygons!

No, it's not a Makerbot, it's a Robo3D, which is new, and a fraction of the price (Makerbot starts at $2199, Robo3D starts at $599 - mine is a slightly more expensive model but I'm actually not using the additional features really). It's actually just as good as Makerbot in terms of resolution, pretty similar in build volume, and can also do more materials because of the optional heated bed. It really is quite wonderful, and was relatively easy to use right out of the box (printing within 24 hours, good prints within 48)

I have no idea if I'll offer 3D printing services - maybe down the line, once I'm really comfortable using my printer and have the settings nailed down to a point where I know I can just run something off easily, and that it won't interfere with my own printing. The material costs are really pretty negligible (I've been printing quite a lot with it and I'm still not even halfway through my 20 Euro spool of filament) but the time costs are pretty great - that leg took about 4 hours to print, and that's at 44 cm overall doll size, not the finished 58-ish size I want to do ultimately, so it will likely take several days to print a full SD-sized doll (not counting failed prints, calibration, and the fact that I will not leave it running overnight because of some of the horror stories I've heard about people doing that (fires, running out of filament and spending several days trying to un-clog it, print falling down and getting stuck to the hot end and melting all over the place and requiring everything to be disassembled, etc.)... You can see on the top of the foot there, a really yucky melted spot - that's because I foolishly tried to fiddle with the code and got it wrong... and the result was that it finished the print and then dropped the print head right onto the top of my otherwise -perfect- foot, melting a big nasty hole in it, gumming up the hot end, and generally making me howl and gnash my teeth in rage that the 3 hour print was "ruined."

And there's also sometimes issues with seemingly perfectly fine models just freezing the software entirely because of a small error that it can't handle, and it can take a long time to sort out what that is. So we'll see, if the printer isn't tied up doing my own stuff I might be willing to print stuff for people. I really need to get my studio set up and get some more practice with the printer because I'm still climbing the learning curve, which is pretty steep but not near as bad as I thought it'd be.

 

I don't think the learning curve is SUPER steep (certainly not NEAR as bad as some other printers!), it's just a matter of getting it to a point where I'm comfortable, and figuring out the sweet spot for speeds and whatnot. I've already got it to a point where I can just tell it to print something with my given settings and I don't have to babysit it and restart it five times before it sticks or anything, and... my husband actually convinced me to go to bed last night with it running (it had an hour and a half left printing the lower part of the thigh) and it was fine, so.... Yeah. I mean, we have a media center PC in our living room that gives us FAR more trouble connecting to wifi and not playing movies and getting confused about HD content and stuff, so I'm not too concerned with spending a couple weeks being really sure I know how to use the printer. And it gives me a lot of excuses to make random stuff like tiaras and a banjolele, under the guise of "practice" and "calibration."

The resolution is amazing, and I'm actually printing at double the smallest layer thickness for all those pieces, so it really can do even better! And those are not full size, either (full size will be about 1/3 bigger), so even more detail will be present in the full size versions - though even as-is, the toenail on the big toe is pretty clearly visible, and there's the suggestion of the other toenails as well (hard to see in the pics, but definitely there in person). The sanding should really be negligible - there's some rough spots on the undersides of things (which I'm learning how to minimize, but PLA is very rigid, incredibly strong, and should sand beautifully. Post-work should be pretty minimal - less than if I was doing it in paperclay, for example, and the better I get at adjusting settings for best results, the less sanding and whatnot I'll have to do.

I am holding back from printing the head right now, because I know if I get into that (and then tweak it, and reprint it, and tweak and reprint and and and...) I'll never be able to focus on anything else!

 

I know this is SO NOT IMPRESSIVE to anyone who is not me, but I am excited beyond words.





I finally got a head printed! It's only 2/3 size, and... really, is not a good print, as the belt that controls the X movement on my printer (the left-right motion) is a bit loose and I think that's causing some imperfection - can see it in the slight "banding" effect but also the bits left under her eyes... They're part of the waste plastic support (in this case, the stuff to support her eyelids) that's supposed to cut away cleanly, but didn't because of that imperfection in left-right motion. There's a bit more support that I only partially removed around her ears, too, once I realized I wasn't going to be able to get this print perfect. So she'll need to be reprinted once I remove and tighten those belts, but just having her sitting on my desk... oh my god, you guys, she's real!

AND.... there's not a damn thing supporting her but gravity! No stringing - the head's just sitting on there, perfectly balanced. I can even pose her head some without strings, tilting a good 15 degrees in any direction before gravity grabs the head and it tumbles off. This is EXACTLY what I was going for in making the joints - that they would want to fit together on their own, without strings, and (fingers crossed) that I can just assemble her head to toe (minus the arms of course) and have her stand unstrung. Only thing holding her together at all is a little bit of elastic holding the faceplate on (no magnets yet).

... her boobs look kind of enormous right now, probably due to the lack of shoulders, though I may size them down a little because they are.... quite big.

Tomorrow I'll do a reprint, and I think I'll try to do it 100% size, though I may need to start with a smaller piece to test the belt adjustments.

(Also she's BRIGHT YELLOW because it's what filament I had on-hand that's already open and printing well. The back of her head is printed in white filament but it's "gone bad" from exposure to air - soaks up moisture, and I don't have a good drying chamber set up yet.)

 

It really is lovely to have one at home that you can print test pieces with. Even if you're not 100% happy with the print quality, or don't want to spend the time/effort on twiddling with your printer to make it print perfectly, just being able to do rapid prototypes to test whether your pieces fit together, look correct proportionally, etc., is great. Would still be cheaper to buy a printer and get the doll 95% perfect that way, and then get the final print through somewhere like Shapeways than to have to print a single doll repeatedly through Shapeways, to fix errors.

I think I'm going to begin printing at 100% size! It will make it easier to tell whether my pieces truly fit together properly (since my tolerances are made for 100% size, not 66%), and if I get a good print, I can just have that be my final piece.

As an aside, I am -astounded- at how incredibly STRONG this PLA plastic is. I printed a piece the other day which was a few cms long, about 7mm thick with walls of about 0.6mm, barely any filling inside (just a few little diagonal lines of a sort of honeycomb), and I -could not break it-. I tried and tried to break it with my hands and.... nope! And I have very strong, big hands - but not so much as a creak or crack from the piece. Hell, I broke a carbon fiber/steel knitting needle trying to open a little bigger hole on one piece - while the PLA plastic was completely undamaged (and I'm lucky the end of the knitting needle went away from me - I was so dumb doing that, I could've lost an eye!) So it is GREAT for doll prototypes - I don't have any worries, even with tiny thin walls, that my pieces will break, bend, crack, or anything. I wish I could print faster, as it almost makes me want to do a finished doll out of it instead of resin.


ETA: Here's a 100% size print of her toe piece, at 0.08mm layer height (about 1.5 hours to print). With a standard-sized tea light for size reference. If I look VERY closely, I can see the layers, but they are -far- finer than even my fingerprints. Only problem is that the underside of the foot is fairly rough, but really nothing too bad that I couldn't fix if I had a nice rubber-lined clamp, safety goggles, and some uninterrupted time with a craft knife/dremel to smooth it out a little. No worse than the kind of thing I'd be looking at with paperclay/Apoxie, certainly.



And now I'm just waiting for slicing to finish on the reprint of the head at 100% size! I hope it'll be done printing around midnight - what a great way to start the new year.

 

Printed a hand!



I had to print it with support as the palm and upper parts of the fingers were not flat against the print bed, and it put support inside the wrist mechanism that attaches to the wrist ball, and I can't remove it. It's just... stuck right in there, and ain't gonna budge. So I'm having to reprint it in two parts - I've cut the model just above the thumb, and will print the fingers/thumb and wrist area by themselves and then glue them together. Not sure how well that's going to work but it should be interesting to see how accurate it is. I'm really excited to test the arm motion as I designed a really neat elbow joint that I'm excited to see how it works.

I ended up printing the upper part of the foot instead of the head last night, since that was going to take about 6 hours and I don't like to leave the print going overnight if I can help it.



I am delighted with how well the pieces fit together, the print quality, etc... though I am going to have to reprint both these pieces again, as I realized that the angle of the toe joint is wrong - it requires the ankle to roll outward for all the toes to still contact the floor. But that's an easy fix, and shouldn't take too long to reprint. I wish printing were faster at this fine detail height (I use the fastest print speed I can, but the tiny layers slows things down immensely) but at least the material cost is very low and it's not like I have any shortage of things to do while I wait for prints to finish.

When the hand reprint is done I think I'll get started on the face. Just need to "drill" the holes in the model to hold the magnets, as I want to limit the number of reprints I have to do as much as I can, so I am trying to get things as close to final/make as many tweaks/changes as I can each iteration.

 

Thanks! The motion is quite smooth - it's a little... "grainy" at the moment as there was support in the joint cup part that I didn't perfectly remove (no sense in getting it perfect when I need to reprint it with the changed angle), and the underside of the ball of the foot is a bit rough from removed support - top surfaces are a lot smoother and nicer to begin with than ones on bottom so I'll probably be splitting some items to print in two separate pieces and glue together (like with the hand). The range of motion is a bit further than actual human range of motion - can do fully on tiptoes as if wearing the most extreme high heels, or tuck the toes under - that goes a little further than a human can but won't really do so when she's strung tighter. Every joint is made to approximate human range of motion as close as I can - I spent a long time looking at sites for physical therapy and suchlike to get the numbers to apply to my doll.

 

There's one hand printed a few posts back - it's a little hard to tell the scale but it's at the same 0.08 layer height. That one wasn't posed at all, just to see how it would come out (kinda poorly, at least in the wrist area - gonna redesign the wrist attachment doodad, as I'd made it too complex for the scale). I've since done a still mostly outstretched but more natural pose... just need to get around to printing it.

 

sailor - The printed material is TOUGH STUFF. It's sandable and carveable but I wouldn't say it's -easy- to do so. I'm gonna need to pull out my dremel for sanding - doing it by hand doesn't work so well. I can slice off bits with a craft knife but it's not real easy. I didn't expect it to be THIS strong. Not a bad thing - definitely means I can string the prototype pieces quite tight without fear of breaking/stressing anything. And not freak out when my 2 year old gets ahold of the body piece, runs around shouting, "Boobies!" and then throws it at a concrete floor!

On the prints I'm doing the surface is -very- smooth though and the imperfections (easiest to see on the surface of the hand - the bits that look a little like a peeling sunburn), those are super thin (sort of a "ruffling" of the plastic as it's pushed out by the extruder as I'm doing such small layer heights) and those just come right off with the touch of a craft knife. Should just be a matter of filling some of the striation with primer or a rub with a tiny bit of freshly-mixed Apoxie Sculpt, maybe a touch of dremelling.

Devilfloss - The fingers can be re-posed on the 3D model to print in different configurations. The fingers themselves can actually be posed on the printed version as well, but it's a bit imprecise - can heat the joint area with a lighter and gently push the fingers into place when they're soft. But it's easy to deform them that way. Better to print them posed how I want them, and have switchable hands. Eventually, I'll make jointed hands, but... not yet.

 

FACE!



This is done at a slightly thicker layer height than the hands/feet I showed most recently - 0.1 mm rather than 0.08 mm. As it is, it took about 7.5 hours - I just left it going overnight. I may reprint it with a smaller layer height eventually, but I'm quite pleased with how it came out, in spite of the obvious weird spot on her forehead - that was the very top of the print (so the print head's moving relatively fast in that area as the layers are very small), and there wasn't enough internal support under there to hold up those parts well enough.

The striation that shows here is mostly just -shine-, not so much texture. Can feel them ever so slightly with my fingernail scraping along the surface but they are miniscule, much less obvious in-person than in the photo. The filament is translucent so it picks up the light along those little lines.

The underside is a little bit rough, and there's some dropped loops sort of at the throat/chin area because those areas weren't supported. It looks like there may have gotten a bit of a scorch/blob there as well:



Some of that is support I haven't removed entirely as well, some of it just dropped loops/scorch/roughness from being an underside. But all that is pretty easily fixable. Nothing that can't be fixed with a little Apoxie/craft knife.

But I am pleased as a peach with the detail and resolution I can achieve with this printer! The little inner corners of her eyes (the bit that would be painted pink and shiny) were retained in the printing, almost paper thin and translucent, but just utterly perfect.

 

Thanks firefly! My prints are just getting better and better as I learn the best way to do things. Sometimes I feel a little like The Printer Whisperer, sitting quietly with my chin in my hands just watching and listening and occasionally twiddling a setting or trying 5 degrees cooler or experimenting with ways of applying hair spray to the glass to get the filament to stick... But when everything works right together, I'm getting just marvelous prints. I'll take some photos tomorrow (I hope) of the two bonded-together halves of the upper torso, which I printed separately so there wouldn't be a "yucky underside" to clean up, only nice cleanly striated top/sides. More of a pain to do it that way as I have to bond them together (and one side warped a little so I'm going to have to boil it to bend it back straight) but oh man the print quality is beautiful, just a bit of sanding and it'll be lovely.

Most of the joints I've tested have thus far worked pretty well. Not perfectly but... pretty good. There's a couple things I want to change maybe (some "tracks" for the knee joints and shoulders, maybe to limit their rotation, and so they don't tend to pop out of joint and rotate around?) and things like the hollow for the shoulder cup, um... Well, the cup can fit in the joint in 3D just fine, but in reality, the opening of the joint is actually not enough - it goes past a half-sphere and thus I'm having to carve out around it a little bit so it's wide enough to accept the ball. Oops!

 

This thread is gonna be like 60 pages long by the time I'm done. DUNCURR.



Foot! Lightly sanded. This stuff is a LOT easier to sand than I thought. Maybe it's because I'm using a different colour (I'd tried sanding the white before) or if I was just too afraid to press hard, or what. It doesn't lend too well to sanding with the dremel - if I stay in one spot for more than a couple seconds it just melts the material due to friction, which can be useful, but is mostly just... a little frustrating. Can't sand one spot till it's done - I have to sand one spot, and then another spot nearby, and then another spot, then go back to the first one, etc., to give the material time to cool down. The foot was mostly sanded by hand though.

Toes range of motion down:



And up:



Lightly hand-sanded head:



... After that I gave it some primer which I don't have any closeups of, but really helped highlight the areas that still need sanding to remove the print lines. But I think I'm gonna not bother with that, as... well....

Late last night, I got an arm done!



I need to take pics of its motion but it is perfect - the elbow peanut thing I made fits perfectly, flexes perfectly, looks remarkably natural and even has a little point to the tip of the elbow when fully flexed... just marvelous. I also got the upper torso glued together, and got the shoulder cup fitting in. It's a -tight- fit, and requires quite a bit of muscle to get it to actually move. I may have to work a bit more on sanding the inside of the cup, and the outside of the ball, and I need to work a little on some stops for the top of the upper arm so she can hold her arm straight out (right now it works but gravity tends to pull it down), but the range of motion of the arm is GREAT, really very much like an actual human being.

But the more of her I get put together (especially the upper torso) the more it seems her head is a little bit too small. Especially with her having... quite large breasts, with one of them being about the size of her face, she looks a little pinheaded. It's a really different look somehow IRL proportionally than to the 3D view:



... Where she has some... big boobies but it's not like, "Wow, her boobs are GINORMOUS!" So I think sizing up her head about 20% will help. And I think I may size up her eyes a little too, as that will also allow her to use eyes more appropriate to her 60-ish cm size - I stuck eyes from my Minifee in her just temporarily and even though they're small-iris eyes, they pretty much fill up the visible part of her eye. Gonna have to order more filament!

I think the next week or so will be mostly spent doing some modifications and tweaks to the 3D model, to add the necessary locks and stops to the shoulder, a track for the knee to keep it from turning in the socket, and just generally finishing up some bits and bobs so I can get the middle of her body printed.

 

Hmmm, yeah, it's possible the head's not going to need quite so much enlarging. It's more obvious in person but that may just be because all I have are boobs and a head right now. I think perhaps I'll focus on just getting all the other bits and bobs done, try to get the main bulk of her body printed up (been holding off on that as there's some complications there due to adding the butt joint that I haven't yet resolved), and then I can always size the head up by 10% or so if it still looks small, once I've got the whole body to compare to. Thanks guys.

 

I am so intensely excited!! I finally got her body printed, to a point where I could string her up, uh, neck to toes:



She's taped together a bit as I ran out of superglue to glue the halves together for her torso so she's -very- lightly strung. She's also still missing one hip piece (where the blue pelvis comes together with the yellow hip, there should be one more cup there) but... YAY!

She can even sort of pose a little bit (though her thigh is slightly wonky because of the missing piece, and her armpit doesn't look as it should as the clavicle ball is too tight a fit in her upper torso so it won't rotate easily.



But, uh, she's not gonna have any problem touching her face. When her hand's put on, she'll be able to touch the back of her head.



The elbow joint moves REALLY nicely, and even at the furthest rotation, still looks relatively natural and not too angular. I still need to modify the top of the elbow ball, though, so that it has rotational limits, and some stops so the lower elbow joint will be the primary joint and the top one won't rotate as easily.



I can't put her head on yet as I was waiting to see if I wanted to enlarge her head a little. And it is -annoying- how it does not show in pics how small her head seems IRL. I don't know why it is - I think it's just because she's so large that, close up, she can't be looked at all at once, and focusing on her torso, her shoulders look wide so her head looks small. I don't want her to look like a bobblehead in photos, so I don't want to go -too- much larger, but maybe 10%.



There's a lot of work still to do, refining and testing of joints... gotta redesign the stops I did in her knee and elbow as they're not robust enough, and of course, print the other leg and arm, and get her hands working, but I am really really happy with how she's coming along - especially that my butt joint, which I was really hrmmmm about, works really really well! I also added stops in her toes, so she has four toe settings - pointed, flat, low heel, and high heel. It's more limited than the free rotation, but should make her more stable to stand.

I swear the biggest problem with all of this, by far, is GRAVITY! Stuff works fine in 3D but then things get pulled down by the weight of them. It's only gonna get worse in resin and these are DENSE pieces, with few hollows and small stringing holes. I am worried that I may need to modify some of the large, dense pieces (like the thighs, upper, and mid-torso) to make them have a large hollow to reduce their weight to allow her to stand without constantly toppling. Which would mean more reprinting, something I'm not looking forward to doing, but I'll see how she does once I get both legs printed and start testing her stability.

 

It's... not the easiest thing to sand. A bit harder than Apoxie sculpt. I've figured out how to do it with the Dremel pretty well though - there's a little wire brush bit that I found that polishes off the layer lines remarkably well. It can be done by hand but it takes a lot of muscle and I have problems with my hands so I have to save that for bits I can't get with the Dremel (even with the flex-shaft there's some spots that the angles are difficult). But it is STRONG stuff, can really be strung very tight without any problems so it's a decent trade-off.

 

... I'm just using my phone camera at the moment. I have a shiny fancy camera, but then I have to ask my husband to get the pics of using his laptop as I don't have a card reader and I can't be arsed, but my phone has a web interface through the wireless and it's easy. I'll try to get some pics with the better camera soon, as those will show her off much better. I should just move the camera into my studio and figure out how to hook it up to the laptop that controls the printer.

In other news...

I've decided to remove a couple joints. I'm going to keep the butt joint as it works remarkably well for what it's meant to do, but playing with her fully-assembled leg (I got the missing hip piece printed), they're so fiddly! The thigh joint pops out constantly, and really doesn't add much to the mobility that isn't already there in the other joints. So her thigh's going back to one piece and..... I think her lower torso needs to be one piece too. The "panties joint" adds very little to her mobility and cannot be improved much without lengthening her torso more (and it's already a little long), and there's gapping and stuff there that I don't think is really resolvable with the other things in that area. And it really disrupts the shape of her hips, which bugs me. As much as I want to have a really good, human-like range of motion, I don't want to do it at the cost of her overall look, or ease of posing, and with the gaps the panties joint gets and the fiddlyness of the thigh cut... I think I've gone a little too far in places.

So. I'm gonna dial it back a bit, print at the 2/3 size so it doesn't take 6 hours to do one piece, and get things working right that way. I kinda want to cry looking at my to-do list but I know it's stuff that will, ultimately, improve her and make her what I want her to be.

 

Aw, thank you! It is a very good feeling indeed. It's also really, -really- weird, especially after having worked on it so long. I've turned these pieces over in virtual space thousands of time, shaped every surface and twiddled with every detail... and then suddenly I can do that with a thing in my hands and move the pieces and they have weight and they're solid and... it's just bizarre. Like having one's imaginary friend ring the doorbell and come in for a cup of tea.

I really appreciate all the encouraging comments. I'm feeling a little disheartened by all I still have left to do, but having some nice comments, feedback, ideas, etc., makes it a lot easier to keep on keeping on.

 

Thank you so much, guys! I took the night off last night to watch tv and knit a hat and clear my head. Helped a lot and now I'm getting back into 3DS Max today. I'm gonna keep at it, and I have learned so much from everything, it has gotten a lot easier to make the modifications that I want. And I've also sort of given myself permission to be imperfect in 3D, because I intend to do a lot of surface work on the body, layering up flesh and filling things out to make her really nice and womanly... so a little bump here or a bulge there in 3D is no big deal as long as it's not on a joint. I'm actually really looking forward to getting more hands-on with the modifications, so... need to order more Apoxie, and get to that point.

And... yes, I am that same HystericalParoxysm. It is... very weird to be recognized around the internet, lol. I feel like a really really crappy celebrity. But yeah, firefly, actually sims is what started me 3D modelling too.

 

I guess it's not -that- crazy that there'd be a lot of crossover between sims and dolls. Sims are often called pixel dollies, and give you the ability to customize this imaginary little person. Not too far off from what we do making dolls. I've always loved being able to capture a person's likeness, or what I see of a character in my mind's eye - whether that's on a sim, a doll, a drawing, a story...



Next round of pics will probably not be for at least another week. My printer's currently out of order - the hot end (the actual part that melts the filament, like the tip on a hot glue gun) got clogged (not sure with what... little bit of sanding dust or something maybe - it's a 0.4mm orifice so the slightest bit of grit in there and it clogs), and in trying to clear the clog, I broke a piece. This is less of an issue than it sounds though, as my printer is open source and very very moddable and except for certain parts, most of the bits are replaceable. So I've ordered a new hot end and now I just need to wait for it to arrive, and then put it together and wire it in. Requires a bit of soldering and stuff, but that shouldn't be too tough, and Mr. Paroxysm knows a lot about those things so he can help me if I need it. Need to also add some strips of LEDs for better lighting too, and maybe while I'm at it, see if I can change the way one of the limit sensors works (from mechanical to magnetic).

I love 3D printing, and I love my printer, but this stuff is so frustrating and I sorta want to clone my printer (once I have it up and running so I can print the necessary parts) just so I have a backup. I also really don't want to get into printer modding because that is a rabbit hole from which I will likely never escape... but it's also sort of addicting and fascinating, all the different ways of doing things. I'll just be happy when I'm back to printing again, though!

 

My new hot end arrived! Now I have to learn how to install it!

Also, I discovered kind of a cool thing that I wanted to share.

I've been working under sort of an assumption: that the key to making a really solid, easy to pose joint is to make it so the elastic is always the same length through all the points of rotation for the joint, so it doesn't want to snap into a particular position (i.e. "kicky"). I was doing this by using the imaginary pivot point for the joint, cutting the stringing channels around those.

And that does work, sort of, or at least it's a very good start. But elastic doesn't actually care about imaginary points in space, because why should it? What really matters more than that is the length of the hard surfaces that guide the elastic... Picture is more illustrative than text:



This is the ball of the elbow, which allows rotation. The orange and blue lines represent the edge the elastic must follow at its minimum and maximum flex, from the spot where the elastic can take some other path than directly straight through the stringing channel, to the outer edge of the joint surface. Obviously they appear different lengths because of perspective, but I can measure them in 3D and see that the orange line is 9.5mm, while the blue line is 7.5mm. Though the surface of the ball is perfectly spherical and the cup that fits this joint is just as perfect, this joint will tend to snap into one position: so that the elastic more closely follows the blue line. So I'll need to adjust things so those two lines (and all the other points along the range of motion) are the same length. This will remove the "kicky" and make this joint much more stable.

This can also be tested in meatspace by stringing just that one joint using wire, and then seeing at what points in the rotation the wire tightens and where it slackens, and then adjust the slits/stringing channels/joint surfaces to compensate.

 

The 40ish cm test size, put together enough to test sitting and proportion, intentionally printed at low quality, about 0.2mm layer height for most of these pieces (hence the visible striation and my lack of effort fusing the two halves of various pieces very neatly) so I can do iterations quickly. 12 hour prints at the 60 cm size and high quality were just killing my momentum to get the mechanics working. No surface sanding done as these are not my final pieces, so everything’s left real rough.

I had to hold her to stand as she’s missing a foot, and because the hip and butt cups fit together too closely and are completely stuck on one side so she can’t straighten her right hip fully (oops, will have to freeze those pieces to unstick them and sand them more). Her knees also need stronger locks as she tends to want to collapse at the knee. Stupid gravity…

Last pic shows the butt joint motion, which works beautifully in motion though I will need to adjust the stringing channels to allow this to work easier).

Her hand’s stiff because it’s the default hand pose - will do lots of various hands (they attach with magnets) in much more relaxed poses.

I know there’s some things I probably should twiddle with - her arms are too short or her torso is too long or both, and she has some weird “creases” on her lower torso from me being lazy with joining pieces in 3D that I will fix… The upper part of the elbow joint also needs a lock so the elbow flex looks more natural and uses the lower joint to bend until it can’t anymore… And I may want to enlarge her head slightly and thin her neck a little.

Would welcome feedback on her overall proportions and aesthetics, though, as I have been looking at her way too long to be able to see errors.

 

Thanks guys! I spent about an hour yesterday just playing with her and now I have (*sob*) two pages worth of notes on things that need changing/tweaking/improving. I'm going to have to reprint basically every part, aughhh. LOTS to do!


aneemal - Thank you! I will definitely slim the neck slightly and maybe elongate it just a tad. Not much, but just enough to give her more of that graceful doll proportion that people seem to like.


Guro - lol I am delighted to show you my buttflaps!

They are actually quite simple - they're a sphere that is flattened slightly side-to-side, so that they work like a hinge joint and can only go back and forth, with a corresponding slit stringing channel that helps limit the motion to the angles I want. They just sit up inside the hip cups:



(I am so sorry for that angle, lol, so undignified for my poor dollie).

Because there wasn't room to fit a full flattened sphere, I had to cut off the sides of the two where they intersected each other, and there I put some little guides/track:



This helps the two pieces stay aligned as they rotate together, and again, limits the rotation. The ends of the track are such that each buttflap can rotate independently.

And then they just... rotate normally, to a limit of 70 degrees per buttflap.



I need to do some modifications to a few things though. The track/guides are too shallow and so they don't lock together as firmly as they should... And the torso needs a little modification, because right now the buttflaps themselves are visible at the butt crack, but they're a little wobbly due to lack of support in that area... so I'm going to have to close up the lower torso buttcrack so it will look like she's wearing thong panties, but provide the stability her butt needs.

And I also need to do a subtle lock to her butt, so that it will not rotate very easily to start with, as the hip cup and upper thigh ball should be the main things that want to move when her upper legs are moved. BUT(T)...

It does mean she can do this:





... quite easily and with great stability! Pleased as pie, me.

She can also do this:





... which doesn't even use the butt cups at all, only the hip cup and upper thigh ball.



As for the elbow... Yes, you're right, it is looking too peanut shaped. I think this is mostly due to the lack of locks in the upper part... I want the lower part (which is just a hinge) to be the primary joint there. But because it's so closely fitted and tight in the socket, the ball on top tends to want to move first. So I'll add a little lock/track to the ball, maybe twiddle with the pointy bit of the elbow as well, and hopefully that should make it look a lot more natural for most poses. Thank you!

 

Your dolls are incredible, Silverbeam! I love the stuff you do - your stuff is so fanciful. I hope one day to have such a distinctive and interesting style.

The seam is due to the way I print stuff. I have a 3D printer at home (you can see it in the background of some of the last shots - the big white thing labeled Robo 3D) and it's an extruded filament printer rather than the laser-type ones that produce the parts you're used to with your lovely dolls. Because of this, there's a lot more noticeable effect of gravity when pieces print - the little lines of filament can sag slightly if they're on an overhang, and the orientation of the item when you print it matters quite a lot. Pieces that are undersides but not flat on the print bed tend to end up a little bit rough. This isn't much of an issue for, say, a shin or whatever that can just be sanded/filled with Apoxie, but it does become a problem when that rough, imprecise surface is on a joint ball or cup.

So instead of printing certain pieces as a whole piece, I split them and print them in two parts so that all the surfaces are top or sides rather than bottoms (and thus as smooth as possible - or at least, they are when I print them at finer layer height - the last pics are a bit rough as I printed them with a relatively thick layer height and fast print speed so it wouldn't take 16 hours to print one piece), and then superglue them together. The body pieces I split down the middle but you can also see small seams on the legs, arms, and butt as well. Sometimes this splitting doesn't work perfectly though... If the pieces warp slightly when cooling (especially problematic on very large pieces), then there'll be a gap (as you can see at the top of the lower torso in the last pictures of the side splits). I can usually close this up fairly well by dipping the parts in boiling water to soften them slightly and pressing them together, but the pieces I'm doing now are just test parts in 2/3 size to get the mechanics right, so I'm not overly concerned with surface smoothing or making the seams perfect.

 

Hi ya'll. I'm still here, still working! Just slow but I've done a few little dollie side projects like my cat while giving this project a little time to stew in my subconscious. I've started back in on it in the past couple weeks with fresh eyes and I am so very happy I let it sit a while cos I'm suddenly making progress rather than just banging my head against a brick wall!

Mr. Paroxysm was also wonderful enough to purchase me a fantastic new program for my 3D printing efforts - Simplify3D. It's pricey, but it is soooooo worth it for the difference it makes in my prints. Being able to define where the support goes and even use different settings for different parts of a single model is incredible. I was getting great print quality before, but now I can print almost everything in one piece rather than halves.



I know it doesn't look a whole lot different, but there's a lot changed on the insides of pieces that mean the motion is a lot better. The butt cups, for example, now have stops and locks and move really naturally without sliding around. The shoulder joint has been modified, so that the shoulder itself (where the arm contacts the extra ball piece) is no longer round, so it works like a hinge, and the rotation for the joint is done via the ball piece. There's also locks in there, so the arm can go straight out, or up, or whatever without sagging or kicking at all.

Of course, my next job is fixing the knees - they need to be modified around the sides so they don't skew when weight is placed upon them, and I HATE modifying knees. But it must be done, and best to do it now while I've still got momentum.

 

Hmm, quiet around here, isn't it?





Done some redesigning of the knee joint. Instead of a knee peanut, it's sort of, ummm... a knee helmet? I'm pretty happy with it as a proof of concept, that these shapes work well together and (with some changes I made recently), don't tend to skew sideways or twist when standing. However, the locks are too strong, and somewhere in the process of editing, something's gone wonky, so the pieces don't fit together as perfectly as they should. There's gaps where there shouldn't be any.

So I think I'm going to have to use these pieces as a guide for the overall shapes and placements, and redo the 3D pieces so I have a much cleaner 3D model to work with and can get everything to fit together correctly again. It's a giant pain in the ass and I have no idea when the hell I'm going to be able to do it... I keep telling myself that I have company dolls that do not work half this well, but I am doing something really different with these knees than I've ever seen done before, and I want it to be perfect. So perfect, I will make it, even if it kills me (which it very well might).

 

Ah, yeah, I think I'd seen the Ringdoll Grown body in researching what different types of knee joints there are out there - they've got knees similar to the Minifee ones, with a little extra cap sorta similar to the way I've done mine, but thinner, right?

I think most of the locking is just a matter of finding the right balance between locking well and moving well. I definitely got it on the feet - the jointed toes move easily and click into place perfectly. It's just a little fiddly when I'm mostly working at 2/3 size for testing but then I scale up and I'm like, "THIS DOLL IS HUGE, THESE LOCKS ARE HUGE, GOOD GOD" cos the same proportion locks that work on a 40cm doll are a bit too big on a 60cm, at least on the knees.

3D to meatspace is... difficult, yeah. Cos there's things that work fine in 3D that just... don't... IRL. Pieces can intersect each other in 3D just fine, whereas that doesn't work once they're real things. Which I think is my current problem - and the virtual points in space I use to rotate the joints, if I move one of those even an eensy weensy bit and don't realize it (which is all too possible - blink when selecting it and I might not realize it's moved) or select the wrong rotation type (rotating a joint around the universal XYZ axes, rather than its own orientation which may be slightly tilted a little bit), I can screw up SO MUCH STUFF. Luckily I never ever "save" only "save as" so if I notice something is wrong, I can go back through versions from a week or month ago until I find one that's not messed up, copy coordinates and rotations, and maaaaybe fix things, as long I've only moved the virtual point of rotation, rather than adjusted the actual 3D doll pieces.... The latter is what I did on my cat doll's hips and I'm going to have to completely redo them again cos I was making my parts based on a flawed pivot point. Boooooo. Still, my progress is much faster this way, even with my fuckups, than if I was working in clay, especially with a toddler around who keeps stealing my parts and running around going, "I gotcher butt mommy!!!"

If you've got pics of the locks on how that doll works, I'd love to see - I don't ever want to copy any other artist's work but I figure it's fine for an artist to look at another's brush strokes and then go off and do their own thing.

 

Been working away over the holiday break trying to get some things resolved. I redid the knees using the existing ones as a guide, but with tidier 3D bits so it's a lot easier to adjust where needed. And it actually works beautifully and all fits together right now! I might add a small lock for standing but it's otherwise quite a nice fit and doesn't even need elastic to hold together.







Also completely redesigned the ankle joint, to separate the rotational movement from the hinge-like movement. Which seemed like a great idea at the time, and is a cool sort of joint but it's not -quite- natural enough for posing - the ankle can't turn inward or twist so the kind of ankle motion you need to, say, sit crosslegged is impossible. A pity because it was such a fun idea. Still, is really cool to be able to experiment with different types of jointing in a day or two of work and not lose anything - I can still chop back in the old ankle (or more likely, just do a third design) and nothing's lost.

 

That's so nice to hear! I worked ever so hard on it to try to make it as neat and tidy and non-disruptive to the shape of the knee as possible. It's lovely to hear that I've been successful in exactly what I was going for.

 

Printed up most of the body so I could play with posing and get an overall idea of proportion and stuff. Still need to adjust some things - printed up an arm and then immediately reprinted a new one after stringing because it needed to be a couple centimeters longer (and now that it's longer, I also need to make it thicker as it's looking too weak and spindly, especially compared with the width of the hips and thighs - she's meant to be gracefully proportioned, not skinny). Also threw together a basic quick and dirty head and headback, held on with tape for the moment, just to have that on her. Still need to print up her ears as they're done separately (so I can do different ones like elf ears, and offer extra ears for modding/piercings/etc.) but I'm loving having her most of the way together and looking at her on my desk while I work. There are some parts of her that are just perfect, like the posing of her arms and knees, and others that still need work (like her ankles, which still refuse to hold any weight at all). Still more work to do, but I'm enjoying every minute!

 

Thanks y'all! I'm trying ankles now with a slightly larger ball (don't want to go too big but a little bigger), cup covering more of the ball especially in the sides where it needs minimal flex anyway, and with an anchor inside the ankle itself for the elastic.... so there will be one piece that holds the toes to the foot which terminates at the ankle, and another which goes from ankle through the leg and body and into the head. Something armleia said on Tumblr got me thinking, elastic wanting to be straight and I've been forcing it to go at an angle at the ankle joint. Perhaps anchoring straight down into the foot will help that joint stop collapsing without making the ball too much larger. Have a bit more printing to do before I can test this theory but should be able to see later today.

ETA: YAYYYY!





Armleia, you're right about the ribcage/torso! I knew there was something slightly wrong with that area but I've been staring at her do long I couldn't see what it was. I've twiddled slightly with the 3d for that area to give bit more of a bulge on the top of the lower torso to look like there's ribcage (no visible ribs though, she's got more padding than that). Will post a render pic as soon as the Internet is back up at my house and I can stop typing with my thumbs on my phone.

ETA:


I think I still need to round the area of the back right underneath the shoulderblades a bit more above the seam, but I think I've mostly fixed it, ish. Will have to hold off a few days on printing a new version of it as the holidays are over and I'm back to being a mom taxi all day and going to class in the evenings. Sigh.

 

I don't need to send her out to get a finer print, just change my settings. I'm printing rough and fast for prototyping but my printer can do marvelously fine detail to get quite a good finish that will require minimal sanding. Most of the prototype pieces are anywhere from 0.3 to 0.1mm layer height but I can print at 0.08 or 0.05mm layer height and slow the speed down some which will greatly improve the quality. It looks a bit rougher than it actually is simply because of the filament being translucent, which highlights the layer lines more than if it were opaque.

Example bits of stuff printed at super fine detail and slow speed with opaque filament:

http://imgur.com/q6YvTMs.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd....69_10152106487416244_266653736991460066_o.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/VpPJZp9.jpg
https://38.media.tumblr.com/a67f412549faa638a1d7f73c37169f51/tumblr_n6y1l9VHV51tpfj7wo1_1280.jpg

ETA: I may have played a little more with posing the leg and discovered it can do this quite easily, which I was not expecting! Yay for happy accidents. No idea if it'll be able to do this with the whole rest of the doll's weight on it but I am still pleased as pie.