20–39cm Dolls Muriel the Opossum

For my first 3D modeling project, I have started sculpting my opossum character, Muriel, who is styled after vintage cartoons. I'm unsure of the exact final size I'd like her to be, but I'm guessing somewhere around the 20 cm-plus range.

Pictures below, and if they don't work, here is a link.












The last photo is my most current progress in the 3D model: just the head so far. I hope to finish the teeth and mouth soon and then start on the rest of the body.

I have two questions if anyone would like to share their input:
1.) It looks like people usually sculpt the model "normally" first, unjointed, then cut it up and make the ball joints. Is this the best method?
2.) How should I make her cartoony eyes? I was thinking an oval-shaped dome, but am unsure how to cast this and wonder if I could print them glossy enough to look good (and paint the back? I don't know?). Would the eyewells be a problem with something that isn't a sphere?

 

Just wanted to post an update, as this was looking outdated. I have since given her a body and am going to work on the hands and feet next! I think she's coming along nicely for my first 3D project.

The fur texture will come later when I figure out how to make it look okay. I might wait till I divide her parts into joints, as that would affect the fur accent placement on the sculpt.


(here is a link if the photo doesn't work)

(edit: Imgur says it might contain adult imagery, and this is also why I suspect the image shows up broken. It doesn't contain explicit content; this is an opossum. Lol. Dunno if some auto-detect thing saw legs and got worried, but you can safely view this image and not be corrupted... Geez)

 

Hello! I'm still working on my Muriel sculpt. I forgot to link another update here. I have since adjusted the proportions a little more and also started working on the hands. They are mostly done now (and slightly revised from this), and I am working on the back feet. I wanted them curled up like this because it would look better if she were to hold her hands up to her face (it's kind of a signature pose of hers to do this). I might consider switchable hands in the future, idk.

 

So, I picked this up again after a bit of a break. I finished her back feet and added a tail (this character has a stumpy tail).



So, she has all her parts now. My next step, I think, is to slice them and create the ball joints. I really am not sure how to do this, but have been researching a bit. I might make another thread if I still have questions, as there isn't much interaction with this thread and it's more for progress pictures than questions.

I do still want to add some fur accents but I think will wait till I slice her, as that would influence how the fur looks.

 

It's been a while since I have updated on here, but I have been working on my sculpture! She has been "almost done" for like months... Things take much longer than I think, but that's okay.

I don't have good photos of the joint making process, but basically I sliced the body into segments by using the mask feature and then telling it to split the mesh based on the mask. I then put a sphere "inside" of an existing meeting point and kind of just erased the non-spherical part around the joint, if that makes sense. I then masked the insides of the joints and a bit of the outside (the darker colors in the pictures below) so I wouldn't accidentally move it and make the ball part not fit.

An important thing I read here in another thread was to shrink all of the ball pieces by 2%. Nomad Sculpt has a scale part in the Gizmo tool so this was pretty easy; if it said 1.00 I would change it to 0.98. After this point I had to nudge them a little to line them up properly again (although it really won't matter, as I will print pieces separately). Here is a picture of her with her joints but no fur texture. I don't have channels in the joints yet.



Another thing I did was change the eyes. I made them little flat disc things to be more in line with how I draw her. I want to make a couple different ones with the triangular bits so I can change what direction she appears to be looking. Should be easy to do, but I just haven't added that little notch into the eyeballs yet until I know if that will work for her.

Right now what I'm doing is adding fur texture, and it's taking... forever... I wasn't sure if I wanted another neck joint so I could allow her to lower or raise her head more. I like the idea of more mobility but the amount of fluff there is kind of integral to her design (to me, anyway), and I kind of lack the skill to make it both fluffy and functional, so... For now I'm just leaving it as a solid neck. Here are two pictures of me rotating the head piece to try to see her range of motion.





So, a bit about the fur texture: I tried a few things to see what I liked best. I might not use this method in the future, but for now, this one seems to fit her current "style" of the only other existing fur on her, which was the little hair tuft on her head. Initially, I started with a Small Robot Studios tutorial video, which told me to draw lines for the fur direction, and also told me how to make a triangular sort of fur brush, which you can more see in the below image:



But after messing with it a bit I wanted some more variety in the shapes and have been more dragging out pieces of it and smoothing it to create fur with more volume rather than just flat accented bits.






So this is where I'm at! (sorry about the masking). I expect it to take a bit longer to finish up all the fur textures.

I'm unsure whether I should just test print her now without the fur finished, to make sure the joints work. I'm honestly dreading making the inside of the head and the face plate... I can barely fathom how to do this part, and have like no idea how to size it for magnets other than just make a hole and purchase a flat magnet that will fit in it, rather than trying to fit my sculpture to a magnet indent I somehow sized in the program. I don't even know for sure how big I am printing her, but I pictured kind of a 1/6 or 1/4 scale?

My brother has offered to test print her on his filament printer (would have to be mailed back to me, and he says it cannot print totally hollow? Would just be for testing joint fit). I'm getting an Elegoo Saturn S for my birthday next month, and wonder if I'll just get that before she's even ready to test print with his printer.

I don't seem to get much engagement on this thread but input from experienced people is welcome. I have no idea how to size the channels for stringing and like, whether I should make a hole across for a piece of stainless steel wire to hold the S-hooks (I'm assuming, yes). But, even if I can't find much help, I'm happy learning all this, and looking forward to (and feel overwhelmed) about learning about resin printing. I might get her casted just for myself but that's way down the line.

Thanks for looking!


EDIT:
Here is a link to the Imgur post in case any of the images stop working. It says it may contain 18+ imagery again lol, but please believe me that this is just an opossum. Really. It's an opossum.

 

A text-only update to say I am almost ready to test print this project! All of her sculpting, as well as stringing channels, are complete. I got my Elegoo Saturn S mid last month but have not yet set it up due to illness.

The last thing I have to do, which I'm working on right now, is the inside of the head. This has been challenging... I am splitting the face plate where the different colors of her fur meet, which means a kind of asymmetrical triangular shape on the top of the head. I could have just not done this, but I want my resin different colors rather than painting her, so, here we are. It is day two of me working on the head; yesterday I failed a lot but today I'm sculpting. There might be a better way, but because of the asymmetrical design of the face plate, I think this is the best way for me to do it in Nomad.

I have also chosen to make another face plate with the mouth closed, as well as three different eye options.

As a side note, Nomad is not happy about this project. Having all of the higher-voxel (if that's what you call it) parts in one file causes it to crash, so she has been split up into sections - a main reason why I cannot update with any pretty pictures at the moment (at least, not of the project as a whole). I have a regular iPad and not a Pro, and it also has like the smallest memory, so that could be why lol. But it's okay for my puposes for now; as long as I can sculpt it together, I can always move the divided pieces to another file.

 

Here are some photos of the head plate's asymmetrical division to match the color change in the hair. I'm hoping it will meet together okay once I print it.






The last things I have to do is holes for the ear articulation, as well as a hole for the neck articulation. I also have to do eye wells, although because of the eyeball design, they are kind of already there; I just need to expand the edges on the inside a little to accommodate the flat sort of eye discs I am using for her vintage cartoony eyes look.

Here is a more complete image of the sculpture before I added channels, so you can see the finished fur sculpting.







I'm unsure of what size to print this or if the resolution she currently has is enough to look good. I really don't know what I'm doing with 3d printing yet so I expect a lot of frustration with that once I start. I might end up making her bigger than I intended in order to be able to fit a hook inside her head plate; we'll see.

 

It's been a while since I've posted about my progress here. I have been test printing pieces for this! It took, I think, eight tries for the face plate and three for the back-of-head plate for it to work satisfactorily for me. I am a complete beginner at 3D printing but am having a big learning curve. All these people online talking about calibrating settings and stuff but the real thing I needed to figure out was proper support placement/amount/etc. My settings are almost entirely the default, and the ones I have changed likely don't matter (apart from the layer height; more on that below).

A few technical things in case anyone is curious:
- I'm using a mix of Elegoo ABS-like and Siraya Tech Tenacious. It's about a 1:6 ratio? I divide the ratio of ABS-like by 5 and then add that much Tenacious.
- I got an assortment of cheap resin dyes off of Amazon (called MiracleKoo). I'm not sure I like them and might want to try a different dye brand in the future. Reasons being that, within the SAME BATCH of dyed resin, they still print different colors. I don't know if this has to do with curing (but I cure my things in the cure station for the same amount of time, and clean them all the same way). Color matching is basically out of my control. I think it should be fine once I do body blushing, though, so I'm not letting it stop me printing more things. I'm just going to match it as best I can.
- "Skyscraper method" is the way to go for orienting these kind of prints. My printer handles the "hollow" objects great without issues with suction. Skyscrapering it prevents having to do cleanup on the cosmetic parts of the doll ie, inside the mouth, on the face, on the outside of the fur, etc.
- I reduced layer height to 0.03 (I think that's what it was; default was something like 0.05). This helped tremendously with the anti-aliasing effect and the weird squeaky noise if you rub a fingernail on it. The little topographical map-looking lines are no longer visible (but I still do an allover sand because I think it makes it feel really nice).


Okay, so, here are some pictures! The Test Muriel is going to be a sort of side character named Cyan (her lore is that she has these print-based "misprints" based on CMYK color combinations, thus, Cyan). As you can see, I also sculpted an alternate head with a closed mouth. I have ordered magnets for the head plate, which should arrive next week.


In the above photo, you can see I had to color match the head part (with, kind of limited success). This is because I had a power outage 13 hours into the 15-hour closed-mouth print...


Rip


As of today, I have printed the chest piece. It still needs some sanding but I'm so happy it printed without issues, since it is quite heavy. I'm considering altering the sculpture in the future, to make it a little thinner inside, but will have to see how it feels once all her parts exist.




Here's her all assembled so far! (chest still needs cleanup in this photo)

 

Oh, I'm also working on a Mini Muriel (scaled to 50%). So far I only printed the head, ears, and eye pieces with the leftover lighter cyan resin. I have a file of supported body pieces to do later once I am done with the main bigger Muriel. They are so tiny! I have ordered small elastic to see how feasible it is with the little joints.





Oh, and as always, a link to the Imgur album for when photos decide to not work.

 

I have all the parts printed and the prototype is done! I plan to change the ball for the hands, as I want her wrist to be able to flex. Right now it just can go parallel to the forearm, like straight down. Back legs are single-jointed and not as flexible but I think they are okay. Sculpture is very stable but might be a little better if I make the walls of the torso and chest piece a little thinner. I wish she could look up a little more but there isn't anything I can do about that at this stage lol. Possibly might change some of the butt fluff so she can sit better (tail gets in the way a little) but I'll see how I feel about doing more editing like that. Anyway, here are a few photos.


She can stand on two feet surprisingly well and be pretty stable while doing it (but has to balance on her stumpy tail)







Not too kicky but I plan to hot glue suede the joints to prevent the scratching.

 

After three revisions to the forearm and hand pieces, and one elbow resize, I have the sculpt’s range of motion the way I want it! I even got her to stand up on her hind legs unassisted!

Initially, I had reduced all ball joints by 2% on advice I saw on another thread here. That was fine for all of the joints except for the double-jointed elbow, which I increased by one additional percent to minimize the kicking. This worked perfectly, so, in the future, I will reduce joints by only 1% rather than 2%.


Next step is I print a Magenta to test how much my build plate can handle at once. After that is all calibrated, I move onto using Siraya Tech Fast Mecha for the “official” real color Muriel.



I bought new cmyk dye to try in future prints. This is still the old dye (you can see the forearms are a little “sunburnt” but will even out in color tomorrow). Another clarification: this is a prototype so it is very roughly sanded, but these test pieces were for fit only (and they work! Yay!). You can see a layer line on one of the forearms, so I think I need a little more support on that part.



Other revisions not pictured:

I added a stamp to the inside of the head base; it is sort of my maker's mark that I use as an illustration watermark. I plan to do serial numbers for them but need to figure out a way to individualize the numbers inside the slicer.

I have a mini version who needs a little resizing of the magnet ports but is otherwise good.

I thinned out the three torso pieces a little more, for the big version only. The mini one feels more sturdy with the extra weight.

 

Quick update! I am onto my next prototype, of Magenta (although I think I'll be naming her Pink because her color doesn't look truly Magenta, as I added a little yellow to it). I am trying my new CMYK dyes and they look amazing, and are repeatable as long as I take good notes on what I did...

I'm printing a big and mini together to try to fit as much as possible on my build plate. The first big face prints ran out of resin (I am going to put an extra 100mL in from now on, because I did an extra 50 from what my slicer said and it wasn't enough). I think the printers with larger vats just need more extra resin to coat the bottom as it gets near the end.

Faces have been reprinted fine (I don't have a photo here). The body pieces are still in progress and my printer says it's about 15 hours in, out of 21 hours lol. But it's better than doing three separate prints/three days!






Once I assemble miss Pink I will make the official Muriel with her "real" colors. This will present an extra challenge, as some of her is almost black, which will take a longer exposure time (and longer print time). But, my next print will be with Siraya Tech's Fast Mecha, which is supposed to prevent scratching between joints.

 

Just an update, since I haven't posted here in a while!

My second prototype came out very well, and I have two miniature versions that also printed well. The mini one might need to be scaled up just a tad so I can use a better elastic for the ears and tail, as I was currently using a jewelry/beading elastic and find it a bit flimsy and it loses its elasticity easily. The hooks also are very tight in the back legs even with editing the sculpture file to make larger channels, so scaling up by 5 or 10 percent might help.

I am planning a Kickstarter for this project. It is not ready yet but I hope to have it ready later this month or early next month. I do NOT plan to sell these online apart from the KS campaign, because of recasting. I plan to sell them at furry conventions and ball-jointed doll conventions if I can get myself to one (I live in Florida, though). There will likely be fewer than 100 of these but I haven't calculated all of that yet. I have a serial numbering system and a way to authenticate them that I'm excited to try in my next prototype!

After discussing casting with Haru, I think I will be 3D printing them myself, as the open mouth faceplate cannot be casted, and I don't want to deal with having to print that anyway and making it fit a casted one... If I regret that choice, I will learn for next time lol.

I was using Siraya Tech Fast Mecha for my next prototype, which was to be the Official Muriel in her natural colors. What happened was basically two things: 1) resin is expensive and 2) it got really really hot outside, which separates Fast Mecha from the Tenacious I mix it with. My next prototype is basically on hold until it stops being 100 degrees out, which it has been since May... Fast Mecha is a compounded resin and does separate. One of the Cora tails I printed had a transparent tip because the resin separated at the end of the print once it got hot out, so I'm not going to have that happen with a 20-hour print!

Anyway, I'm going to try a few different mixes of the good resin with some regular and Tenacious, as I like how those feel more than Fast Mecha on its own. Mecha is kind of like, powdery, or has a rougher sort of texture, seems to get dirty easier (or I am bad at cleaning it) and is not as transparent. I liked how you could see through the ears a little, like real ears, and Mecha robbed me of that lol, so I want to try cutting it to like a 50/50 ABS-like and Mecha mix, and then add 1/5 of Tenacious to that (math is not my thing but I always add my Tenacious at the end now; it gives me extra resin to not run out in the print and helps my brain calculate things). Also, the cleaning process for Mecha is like, they tell you to toothbrush the entire thing with alcohol, and I want to streamline my post processing, so a resin mix would be good, as long as it doesn't create the scratches in the joints. I want to get it down to a ratio where there is no powdery grinding residue on the joints. The only review I can find said they did 50/50 Mecha and Tenacious and it still did not powder itself at that ratio, so I'm hoping I can do that but with the ABS-like resin I like.

For now, I will link you all my Tumblr tag if you want to see more photos of this doll! There are a lot on there that I didn't realize I hadn't posted here. Please take a look and stay tuned if you're interested in supporting my project.

 

Another update! (maybe a final update?)

I have a pre-launch page for this project's Kickstarter here. I plan to run this for the month of September. If the project is funded, I'll be making these myself, 3D printing them. Because it is not casted in resin, I have been told I cannot make an official news post here to announce the doll. I would like it to be casted but unfortunately, the open-mouth design that is integral to the sculpt cannot be casted.

I've been hard at work photographing this doll and making a video for her. If the project fails to fund, I will slowly purchase the materials I need to make the final version of the doll, and she will be an edition of one, single doll. SirayaTech Mecha will be the main part of the resin mixture, but it has given me issues with the supports in the past and an undesirable texture, so I plan to experiment with combining it with my usual ABS-like and Tenacious mix.

I might pop back in before the end of September to update you all, but if you are interested in supporting this project at all, please take a look at the link above. This is going to be the only time I will ever sell this doll online, as I don't want anyone recasting the doll (even if they would have to cast only the closed-mouth version), or re-printing it, or whatever.

Thanks for following along with my progress thread thus far!