Results 11 to 17 of 17
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06-11-2014, 01:05 PM #11
Hi guys,
I conceived and built this electric motorbike in the past 2 years and used my current extrusion 3d printer for a couple of functional parts on the bike. But the surface finish is not good enough to print visible parts, just those "under the hood". SO the next step now is for nice and smooth finish parts on the outside of the bike, like lights, mirrors, LED enclosures, rear fender cover, air intakes,...
Then upgrade my Titan1 so i can print the whole bike in one go one day LOL
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06-11-2014, 01:55 PM #12
- Join Date
- May 2014
- Location
- Albany NY, USA
- Posts
- 14
Great variety of projects people are going to be using the Titan 1 for!!
My name is Kenzie and I am a 3D character artist in the video game industry. I am interested in printing out all of my Zbrush sculpts I have done over the years as well as making articulated toys in 1/6 scale. Both parts to modify existing 1/6 scale figures as well as making my own 100% self created figures. I'm including a few images of examples of 2 heads I want to use the Titan 1 for. The first has the details I hope the Titan 1 can capture in a print. It is roughly around 1" in height(a bit over 1"). I fluctuate between realism with lots of small details to cartoony smooth simplified shapes. I want a nice smooth surface for the second one. I will also need the best accuracy I can get so joints fit together properly. These 2 heads are also the heads I use to test print to see how good a potential 3d printer is. I can provide OBJs or STLs if you like. My main concern with the Titan 1 is the software being able to handle high polygon models. Zbrush models even decimated down to lower the count can still be well over 1 million polygons. STL files seem to bloat more as the number of polygons increases whereas OBJs seem to be more stable in size as they get higher in polys. I hope the software supports OBJs if not right from the start, at some point in the future with an update. 64 bit is also something I am hoping for.
HeadScreens.jpgTestPrintScreens.jpgHead.jpg
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06-15-2014, 03:22 PM #13
- Join Date
- Jun 2014
- Posts
- 2
HI-
I think it is the case that, even where printers support OBJ files, they are converted to STL for printing. You should find with your work that around 250 000 polys from ZBrush decimation is fine- anything larger and the faceting from the poly reduction is usually smaller than the resolution of the printer in any case. I've got very detailed smooth prints from files that looked quite faceted on screen. 1 million polys is very high- i've never done a model that high res and I've been doing this professionally for three years now- you may find differently.
Also, the STL file size to polys is pretty linear- a 150 000 point ZBrush file is around 15 meg, and a 350 000 file is 35 meg etc, assuming you use a decent STL writing tool. Zbrush's is not very good!
Russ
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06-15-2014, 04:07 PM #14
- Join Date
- May 2014
- Location
- Albany NY, USA
- Posts
- 14
@Russ- Yeah I think for many things you are right but this printer is starting to get to the level of detail where huge poly reductions will affect surface quality and details (I consider taking a 10 million polygon model made up of many parts and reducing it to 250k polys huge reduction). It depends on scale of print. The more realistic head in this thread I posted I had printed out on a B9 at 1/8th scale and everything but skin pores were captured. This printer is even better. I get very high poly models printed out from Ownage and they say not to decimate models. They said that if you can see facets on the screen at the scale you are printing you will see them on the print. Now I don't know what the XY and Z resolution of their 3D printer is but it's obviously really really good. I think for FFF/FDM and older desktop DLP/STL printers you are correct but this printer seems to be able to grab more detail than most people are used to. 37 microns is less than a human hair. It would be a shame if the software was the bottleneck that prevented all the details from showing up in a print. I'm not against reduction but I have a few models with many many pieces that even after each is decimated down won't go below 1 million without getting huge loss of details. This printer also prints large models that drastic reduction in polys will probably show up in the print even at 100 microns which is only slightly larger than a human hair. Either way I am excited to get this printer. I will be frustrated if the software gets in the way of the hardware but I'll get over it.
As far as STLs are concerned I don't have a good STL exporter that is reliable. Max/Maya/Softimage/Zbrush are all kind of bad. OBJ is a format that everything seems to be able to export. And the file sizes seem better in my experience linear or not. Not having to worry about exporting STL would be a great feature. For those of us that are non-CAD users this would be great. As far as I know when you import a model into a 3D printers software it has to convert it to slices that are more like black and white 2d images rather than converting to STL. STL is a very old out of date file format. OBJ is as well but it's universal. STL isn't so much anymore, not outside of CAD.
The largest file I have had printed was around 12 million polys done at Ownage. Came out amazing. I had a 500k poly model printed on a B9(head in my last post). Really I'm not too concerned. If I have to get final models printed from Ownage to get around low polygon counts that's fine. But really this printer is so good I don't think I will have to. Especially if the software is 64 bit and is clean and can handle good numbers of polys.
I work in video games and we prototype toys. Our 3D printer has great XY and Z resolution but for some stupid reason it came on a Windows 98 machine and can't be moved or upgraded(our IT department tried). Because of that it craps out at around 300k polygons. Talk about a horrible software/computer solution. It wasn't cheap either. $80k. Glad I didn't buy it. The polygon reduction kills many of our models but they are only prototypes so it's not a big deal. When you have highly detailed 3D models that have dozens of parts, it's really amazing how fast 300k polys happens.
Kenzie
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06-15-2014, 06:32 PM #15
- Join Date
- May 2014
- Location
- San Francisco
- Posts
- 31
Hi Kenzie - thanks for your post! Could you please email it to jonathancheung@Kudo3d.com? Thanks
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06-16-2014, 01:19 PM #16
- Join Date
- May 2014
- Location
- Albany NY, USA
- Posts
- 14
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06-16-2014, 02:06 PM #17
- Join Date
- May 2014
- Location
- San Francisco
- Posts
- 31
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