Can I print human portraits using Ultimaker S5 with just photos?

[saipradeep7 0]

Hi All,

 

I'm a newbie here. Planning to buy Ultimaker S5 and have a question before I can purchase. 

 

I'm mainly buying this to print human portraits/miniatures using just photos only and will not be able to perform any scanning physically. It will be just using digital photos. Is this possible at all? Please find attached a sample image of 3d printed miniature. I'm looking to produce a similar output.

 

Has anyone done this before and achieved success. Any suggestions or help will be really appreciated.

 

Thanks so much! 

 

Kind regards,

[gr5 2,235]

No.  Well maybe.

 

If you are a very good 3D artist, then yes.  If you have studied the human body as an artist for years and have practiced drawing different muscle groups and have sculpting experience, then yes.  You have to learn to use a 3d sculpting cad program like zbrush but yes.

 

If you are not a seriously amazing artist then you need a lot of photos.  Like 30 to 100 photos of the person.  And they can't move during this time.  There are scanners you can buy that connect to an ipad that will do this - scan a person while you walk around them and capture from up high, midway and down low as you walk around the person to be captured 3 to 6 times.  Or you can build a fancy thing that takes 30 pictures at once with 30 cameras all triggering at the same moment.  Then with those photos there is software that will create the 3d model.

 

But if all you have is less than 10 photos, or if the person moved while the 10 to 50 photos were taken, then back to my first answer.  No.

 

 

[gr5 2,235]

By the way, the S5 only does 2 filaments so getting more than 2 colors in your print would be quite difficult but I've seen people do some impressive painting.

 

Look here for example of what other people have done

 

[kmanstudios 1,120]

As @gr5 says, there are two parts to this:

1. Creation of model
2. Print of model

The printing of a model as you show, if I remember correctly, can only be done with a very expensive ink jet 3D printer.

Info on tech

 

There are machines that are coming out that will make it cheaper than before, but, to get the resolution you see in your example requires a not so affordable/very high resolution printer.

[saipradeep7 0]

Thanks for your responses.

 

@kmanstudios I was told that the example model I have attached was printed with an Ultimaker 3d printer. That made me curious to understand how it was made from an image. As per earlier comment about color, I guess after printing, they might have hand painted the miniature.

 

At the point, the main question I think is the way to get a 3D model out of an image. I believe once a 3D model is available, printing it in Ultimaker might not be a huge challenge.

 

I'll also review 3d inkjet printers and see if they work for me..

 

Thanks,

[NBull 14]

As also mentioned above if you only have one photo you will first need to 3d sculpture the model your self. And also colour the model.

 

If you have a camera and the model/person, but not a scanner you can use Photogrammetry Software to make a 3D model out of a lot (a lot) of still photos.

 

https://adamspring.co.uk/single-post/2017/08/30/Single-Camera-Head-Scanning-Photogrammetry

 

I have seen people make grate models in this way. But have never been able to make it work my selve.

 

[geert_2 558]

I believe most 3D-printed full color models are painted or plated afterwards, like the excellent art we see from kmanstudios and cloakfiend.

 

Full color models produced directly on a gypsum-powder based 3D-printer tend to have a quite rough structure, like sandstone. Like any gypsum model. After printing they are impregnated with a cyanoacrylate glue to make them stronger and smoother. But it is still gypsum, so if you drop it, it chips or breaks like gypsum.

 

But if you would be a good traditional sculptor (=in sculpting by hand), but have no experience with 3D-sculpting on the computer, there might be another solution.

 

Based on the photo, you could sculpt the model in clay or plasticine. I have seen a traditional artist making excellent clay models based on only a few photos.

 

And then have that plasticine model or clay model 3D-scanned and cleaned. Save it in various resolutions. After that, you can scale it down to make it fit in the printer.

 

I don't know how well this approach would work, but it might be worth trying?

 

[kmanstudios 1,120]

1 hour ago, saipradeep7 said:

@kmanstudios I was told that the example model I have attached was printed with an Ultimaker 3d printer.

UM printers can indeed print that clean. But I was looking at the detail in the print job that made me think of the inkjet 3D printers. That tattoo on the bicep is unbelievably clean. It can be done, but it takes a lot of work to get something like that done by hand.