cloakfiend

It better be! lol. Well we'll find out soon! Its my last nightshift today so gonna finish this one off tomorrow or the day after. Printing Unicron v2 as we speak. That should be done by the time i'm home, yay! a tiny 18Hr print.

Ok, my nightshifts have been quite demanding lately, but I managed to squeeze in a quick spray primer just to see what the surface looks like after the intial clean up. my airbrush was a bit clogged as im a bit lazy and dont clean it out enough, but looks good to me! some phone pics......

I haven't used PVA that much, but if you want it to look a bit nicer, an easy thing to do is get a scalpel, or sharp blade and simply trim it off carefully, like shaving, obviously not cutting into the nozzle itself, should take you less than 10 seconds. I tend to hold the blade in my fingers rather than attaching it to the holder as it has less power that way. I tend to scrape any nozzle that looks like its building up an outer shell of pla, or whatever. Don't scrape the bottom though, just the sides. I've done that on my old UM2 for three years straight and had zero issues. Nozzle still looks like new.

Gonna try to finish this beasty off this week too....has some issues with his teeth (being a bit too small to print with a 0.4 nozzle), but whatever, ill just sand them down carefully before i plate him. Should look sweet regardless, Ill do another bigger one another time.

Lol, That certainly looks like a dark print, makes my evil prints look tame!

Oh dear, looks like I need to get a move on.... I think I have an old redux ready, and am working nights again! yay Gonna do me a new Unicron me thinks! its going to be waiting for that finished model when I get home feeling again soon! That second print looks like you just killed a swan!!!

That looks amazing, you should send it to mr puzzle! on you tube!

And some post photos......i took way too many here is just a few. Very happy with the results.

Ok enough plating is enough and I now know the problem with all the crap at the bottom of the beaker. The new copper I bought is not the same as the copper i had before. Its red? after sitting in the bath, the copper looks as if it flaking off? could be a polished surface, but I reckon its impurities in the copper, as it appears to be happening all over not just on one surface. theres defo some rubbish in there and its not pure as stated online, Ill be demanding a refund. Anyways you don't care about all that, you just want to see the finished model right?..... so not all parts plated but most of it did luckily.....Ill leave it for now and patina it tomorrow, I may make some parts shiny and leave other parts green. when you pull it out of the plating sol, you have dry it fast! or else it will immediately start tarnishing and then the plate can crack of and spread to parts which were ok. mainly the gaps need to be drained of liquid. The lizard sculpt is going to be a nightmare to dry, I may need to resort to the hair dryer method. I will not be adding the new copper this time round. Ill have to try to order some more from the last place. In my opinion dont buy offcuts, as you dont know what you are buying. I got lucky for a while but knew id get some dud stuff eventually. The sword is a lot less flexible than before so I know that a decent amount of copper has hit it. Other parts wont be so lucky, especially hard to reach areas. Damn fake coper didnt help though.

im so tempted to whip it out...again, but if you do that and let it dry, then dont put it back in without degreasing or removing any oil or impurities, I double coated this one with a cheap and expensive conductive surface, the expensive surface has done a bit and eroded away leaving the cheap surface which is more tricky to plate. I like doing this as it can save a complicated plate like this with many cavities and intersections. cavities are a pain as they often creates air pockets and no plating solution reaches them leaving them untouched but there are a few tricks to avoid this happening.....ok ive had enough im getting it out now.....any mistakes will be hidden by the patina!!!!! cos this is definitely getting one! trouble is it may destroy the plate as i feel it may be a bit thin due to the temp......

Well turns out I was right about the volts, I ramped it up to pretty much double what it was before and it appears to have covered areas that simply weren't covered before, even after 4 hours, so I was simply being over cautious, but when volumes change then other factors will obviously also have to be adjusted. The night has come and the cold has set in as well, so thats another factor. I still am not sure what temperature does, I think it improves the speed or something? There also seem to be loads of crap floating around at the bottom, even though I put nothing else in there, its as if small sheets of copper are forming on their own whilst going round. Ill give it two more hours and then I'll whip it out, I need to go to sleep soon I got night shifts coming up and need to get a few wins rest.

Dammit I think I really need to crank the voltage for 3 litre, especially as its cold outside now......finally. even though the heat did help plating somewhat. im gonna leave it in for a few more hours...

Ill be pulling this out of the plating solution soon... i wonder how its done? I hope its ok, i noticed a few issues as it was going in. There were holes in joins i missed and this means the plaster of paris inside will most likely contaminate my solution which is a shame. I was planning on using the same solution to do way more...... we shall see. 3ltr plates are posing problematic and amnoying. 2ltrs is fine. I may need to change the voltage a touch.

Yes, each to there own, ipad pro maybe more high tech and faster, but with no buttons and a closed operating system, whats the point? Get what works best for you, and this is a dream come true for me. I couldn't care less who makes it! the fact i can do anything on it makes it best for my needs. it lags on photoshop a bit and isnt the most comfortable for 3d apps, but in all honesty I ONLY bought it for learning zbrush. Had I bought it for photoshop, I would have returned it the next day. As far as im concerned, and as stupid as it sounds, it is simply my zbrush tablet. Anything else it does, is simpy a bonus. But the fact that it has usb 3, sd card and micro sd card readers in it is great if i want to get something onto a card or phone stick quickly. I don't see that happening on a ipad pro anytime soon. I have a friend who used an ipad pro and photoshop with his laptop, but had resolution issues as unless they match perfecly things were either doubled up or something as his mac was running at a lower resolution than his ipad. But thats besides the point, i want to carry only one tablet, not two! BTW Nothing wrong with driving a ford in my books! lol.

Its a wacom cintique tablet. Not a laptop. But seeing as you are a mac person......sorry. i just get whats best, and Apple just dont have anything to tempt me. Likr i said. I need buttons. I dont see apple adding any buttons and allowing me to install zbrush on an ipad pro any time soon.

I must say i really enjoyed teaching, even though i wanted to do some work, but id like to add that i dont work much on desktops anymore since i bought a cintique companion. Is old now but runs zbrush easily and without lag. There is a newer version available but im still happy with mine. I now sculpt while chilling on my sofa and serioulsy doubt i would have learnt how had i not got it. I work on desktops computers so much i simply dont want to sit in front of a monitor when i get home. Again i do this for pleasure and buy my own equipment. It was a little expensive but by far the best buy i have ever made. It has buttons. I need buttons. Sorry ipad pro and surface pro. Untill you have real buttons....ill stay away. Real buttons greatly increase productivity. Touchscreen buttons reduce productivity because you cant feel where they are and waste time looking and readjusting and cant rest your fingers on them. This is where wacom dominates. Along with left and right click functions on the pen.

I hear you, so in my opinion, your best route would be to get/purhase the cheapest scanning software you can, buy zbrush, and practice. Or else buy a laser scanner and use it in conjunction with zbruse. Zbrush is great in the fact that once you bought it all upgrades to new version are free, unlike the adobe and autodesk subscription leeches. Downloading anything is an addiction that iI also had, but no more, I had everything but used nothing. Now I use what I have and only upgrade when better tools come out. which isnt that often. I used cura 15.02 till like last year. now i finally upgraded to 3.4 because i needed to. Ive often had arguments (even here on this site) with people over new software/firmware being buggy and unstable, some people think just because its newer it must be better. That is often not the case. But these people will never understand and talk nonsense about supporting the developers or some crap. Adobe routinely releases products with major bugs. For instance the latest version of after effects wont even let you change the font when you have selected the text, when it did before, they even acknowledge this on their own website. They said they were aware of it but released it anyways......? as you do. because....shareholders expect two releases a year don't you know! And this is legit subscription software btw.... My advice would be to get zbrush and practice. you won't regret it. then you can just sculpt what you want quicker than scanning! As weird as it sounds I met a 9yr old girl with her gran on a train to a wedding and gave her my wacom tablet for the journey so she could sculpt because I noticed she seemed unhappy and I was in a good mood. Of course she didnt know what zbrush was but after 5 hours she was sculpting away on her own asking me the occasional question of how do i do this or that. So.... if a 9yr old can do it.....well. So can you!

I have seen many places where you can get it free if you know what i mean, but again if you are using it commercially then you should really purchase it. And no, I didn't sell my soul to Putin if you know what I mean. The alternative route is to use the kinect. the first one i think ,the kinect 2 didnt work for me. The scan software is free now i think or at least very cheap.

Once you've done this a few times, it doesn't take very long.

And more to scanning faces, here is a start to finish job. First pic is a raw recap scan from about 15-20 photos which i think is plenty they are good quality, sometimes more photos actually makes it worse with live subjects as they tend to move more the longer you take photos which of course ruins the scans. next one is a roughly cleaned up version to make the head complete and the last one is the final version I've cleaned up from looking at photos. I chopped the neck off as I was making bobble heads.

No I don't generally make money from my models, i do sell a few here and there, and do some private work, but I only learned Zbrush about 3 years ago for fun because Maya just was not up to the job of cleaning up sculpts well enough to my standards. If you scan faces like me, then you HAVE TO clean up hair. Cheap 3d scanners can't scan hair well yet. Also (once you become comfortable modelling) you want to separate objects that you scan to make the prints cleaner afterwards, as often anywhere the objects meet, the scanner will not produce clean or even areas. if I scan a statue of two people holding each other I will generally split them apart and clean them up and then put them together again. If something is intersecting stuff a lot there is no avoiding this as unless the scan is perfect it never really gets into the tiny gaps. Sounds crazy, but will produce superior results to simply carving I details in as it will be cleaner on a geometry level as cura sees and treats it as two objects intersecting rather than one making the intersection cleaner. Think of it as filling in what you can't see.....I really like it because you have to use your imagination and think how it should look, as what it really looks like is irrelevant. The bonus is that you have cleaner models and separated as well! I'm plating this sculpt as we speak, but here is a little picture showing my separated model parts from one scan off some dude called geoffrey on scetchfab. was an ok scan but needed cleaning up before printing. The sword was practically not there in the original scan. I also attached the beginning stages of my forest of doom, just to show you that things look rubbish i the beginning but keep at it until you are happy and you end up with a smile. EVERYONE looks at detailed sculpts and thinks that they will never be able to do that.....until they try. I don't use any special tools, just a few default brushes thats all, seems to be fairly common. You just need a bit of imagination and a few hours here and there. Do a few tuts here and there and get used to using a wacom or pen to draw with, because you are not gonna be sculpting quickly with a mouse! I couldn't find my early Forest of Doom Sculpt, perhaps i deleted it i have tons of crap on my laptop, but i put my 'The Thing' sculpt instead to show an early version. Took about 5 hours to finish. then another 2 or 3 procrastinting.

I forgot to say that photoscan is a programme rather than an app, but when you 3d scan to print, you will NEED to retouch your scans to make them watertight and fix any obvious errors. if you want a cheesy 3d scanning app, i think you may require a phone with a depth sensor like the kinect, I think a few phones have them now but I've not seen any apps that use them. There must be a few out there....

123D catch was discontinued ages ago, and a few other variants followed until the pay model they have now which straight up sucks. Bye bye autodesk. you now have to subscribe to use the photogrammetry app and pay more to get credits to use it after. For you and me just scanning fun stuff, Its a total nono. as there is no guarantee you will get anything and you will just waste tons of money. Id just get photoscan pro and use that. That was my main issue, I was forced to use recap to finish off some work, but It cost me way too much. Its a one click solution true, but once you have agisoft photoscan you can scan as much as you want, it may not be one click, but it gives good results I'm told and have seen online. I haven't tried it so can't tell you how user friendly it is, but am installing it now. There are some good tutorials on youtube how to use it. Il keep you posted and post my scans and prints related to any new method i use, as I used to scan a LOT!!! and have tons of things ready to materialise.

Looks good kman!. What layer height is this btw?

Nice work as usual kman, my fellow insomniac!