[applause] hello, everybody. i'm actually reallyexcited to do this. this is kind of coolto be in a space where everyoneloves 3d printing. so that's cool. so as you heardfor my actual job, i work in filmindustry and that. but what a lot of thestuff you see here
is actually forpersonal projects. so a lot of us in the filmindustry will take that stuff and will take those skills anduse them on our own projects. so let's get started. so one of thedifficult things that i heard when i got tocome here and talk was to say what is 3d printing. so half the people hereprobably been printing for a long time and the otherhalf are excited to learn.
so it's a pretty dauntingthing to try to describe in a very short period of time. but what i thoughtof was, what would i wish somebody had told me wheni first started out printing so i wouldn't get discouraged? so here's some--this isn't negative. this is words ofencouragement, in case you start struggling whenyou're first learning. so as you can see, someof the pictures here.
there's a cool dragonthat didn't quite finish and some other stuff. but it's basically what itsays, a potential distraction from what really matters. so you can sometimes becomeobsessed with the process and not so much what it's about. it's definitely a master classin expectation management. and it's somehow bothamazing and horrible. but in all seriousness,it actually
is kind of secretlyambitious because everybody wants you to think you just hitthe button and something comes out. but the reality is, isit's very difficult. and depending on theprocess, it could be very costly and time-consuming. so what 3d printing isnot is, like i said, it's not a household appliance. it's not impossible,but it's not easy.
it's not an alternativeto doing it by hand. so i think a lot of peoplethink that the prints come out like this. but as you can see, thisis the reality of it. and you can try toprint it like this, but it limits you a little bit. another thing it's not islinear in the design process. so this term rip-mod-fab,basically what that means-- and that's a term that they'vebeen coining, actually,
over at the pier 9facility-- is the process of kind ofround-tripping your work. so instead of justdesigning it in the computer and printing itand then that's it, you'd basically 3d print it. maybe you add some clayto it, change some things, add some rubber tubing, 3dscan that, and then just kind of round-tripthe whole thing. so that's what thatterm means if you see it
a couple times in the slides. and the last thing that it'snot is special or impressive in the near future. so basically,eventually no one will care that you 3d printed it. they'll just be looking at it. so some of thecommon types of 3d printers that youprobably heard of. one is an fdm machine.
that's like marketbot or cubify. those are accessible. and it really is just aglorified hot glue gun. i know that sounds bad, butit's basically how it functions. and then you guys sawthe idea ember outside. that's a dlp sla. and that's basicallya liquid resin. so instead of using apla or an abs plastic, like legos, it uses liquid.
and then you have a polyjet,which is a photo polymer. and that's actuallywhat these were made on, was an objet machine. so another thing tobe aware of, if you're kind of knew to 3d printing,is some of the materials that you can use-- thatyou have access to. some with these machines andsome with special machines just made formetal, for example. you could do metal.
porcelain is really cool. and you can actually do-- notjust like vases and stuff. but you can actually ordercoffee mugs and that. it's like food-safe. carbon fiber. there's a carbon fiberprinter out there. and that's actually a lotlike the fdm machines. and finally, there's wood. and you can actually print witha wood filament on the makerbot
style one. so those low-costprinters, you can actually get different filaments thatare made with like bronze powder inside of them and that. and when you buff them out,they look just like real bronze. so a question ioften get, and i used to ask this, which 3dprinter is best for art? and as corny as it sounds,it literally is the one you have access to.
so if you can only afforda makerbot or maybe just a $300 knock-off at maker faire,get that and learn with it and become comfortable withthe process in general. because even if yousaved all your pennies and you got the mostexpensive machine, sometimes you have a tendencyto kind of glorify that machine and youwill be afraid to use it. or you'll think,oh, i didn't make something that was worthyof printing on that machine.
but if it's something thatyou know you don't really have that much invested intoand the material is cheap, you'll fail fast and kind ofbecome comfortable doing it. so quick examples of how 3dprinting is being used today. and outside of this room isactually a perfect facility for this that you couldsee all of these things, like the nike exhibit and that. but medical, consumerprototypes as you saw the shoes out there, architectural,visualization, toys-- mcfarland
uses a lot of different3d-printed action figures and that for their faces-- andproof of concept and fine art. and i kind of probablybalance with my buddies in that last two categories. so because working in thefilm industry, and then also kind of wanting to havea sculptural take on it, i kind of try to balancebetween those last two. so along those lines,how i use 3d printing. basically, the way thati got into this-- i
remember the firsttime that i learned 3d. the first questionthat i had was, can we get this stuffout of the computer? and at the time, i don'tremember how-- maybe it was like 15 years ago. someone chuckledand was like, yeah. you know, lockheed and thosebig companies, they have them, but it's super-expensive. and basically, no.
you can't afford touse a 3d printer. but in my head i thought,there is a chance. so someday, maybe it willbecome affordable to where we can make stuff. so put my head down, keptgoing, and here we are. we can all have 3dprinters, so that's cool. so my overall workflow. and it's kind ofa mobile workflow, but it's not necessarily--that wasn't my intent.
it's mostly because--as silly as it sounds, i sit at a desk all day. so when i go home, i don'twant to sit at a desk more. so i'll tend to like wantto just sit on the couch and sketch on myphone or on a tablet. so one of the quick thingsis i start out always by writing down ideas. and i might get ideas ifyou're stuck in the dmv, or in the line at the cafeteria.
or you could just sit thereand jot down ideas and work a lot of stuff outbefore you even start making any kindof drawings or anything. and then i'llusually use-- i like to use sketchbook, which isactually an autodesk thing. and they have thatfor android and mac, but it's really good becauseit uses pressure sensitivity if your phone has that. but it's a quick way of,again, getting ideas down.
once i got thatstuff blocked in, i'll typicallyjump over to maya. and then i kind of bouncebetween mudbox and zbrush, just to kind ofblock out the form that i'm actuallygoing to be printing. and this fourth one,it seems kind of silly but it's actually themost exciting time. once you get one ofthese designs done and you have it onyour computer screen,
the first thingi'll start doing, before i start to set it up forhow big i'm going to print up, is i'll scale itup on the screen. so i'm looking at themonitor in front of me and getting anidea like, oh, man. it's going to be aboutthat big on the desk. it's going to be amazing. so then i literally justtake a ruler and measure that on the screenand say, ok, cool.
it's going to be 12 inches. sweet. that's the scale. and then i set that up. that's what's cool aboutthe fine art stuff. if you're doing something morelike manufacturing or that, you've got to be alittle bit more specific. and there's certain specsand how much the plastic might swell when it prints.
but when you're doingthis kind of fun stuff, you have those liberties. once i got the scale done,i'll jump back to zbrush. i usually make ita watertight mesh, decimate it, and just reduceit so it's faster to prep. and then finally,whether you're using ember, any kind ofmakerbot or anything, they usually have a set oftools to create structures that will hold this stuff up.
because this thing can'tjust-- some of this stuff can't just float inmidair when it's printed. so it will createlittle structures. and i actually broughtsome stuff here. this is a print. you can pass this stuff around. that's some of the supportstructures i was talking about. the software automaticallygenerated those. and that one was actuallydone in form software,
but meshmixer has a reallyneat one that grows like roots. and finally, again withthat rib-mod-fab terminology i was telling you,once i usually will print something out,i'll find that, you know what? this thing might needto be snapped and moved down a little bit. or i accidentally snapped it. and i'll glue sometubes on there. maybe add some clay.
scan that. 3d print it again. and you just kind of dothis round-trip thing. so one example ofthis workflow is-- i don't know if youguys saw it out there. it was the littlestormtrooper helmet. so these things are thepersonal projects stuff. but what was reallycool was lucasfilm did this really nicecharity auction where
they would basicallypass out these-- they called them as blanks. and you've probablyseen them before, like they do them withmickey mouse and that. and then all the artiststhat worked for the company would decorate them, andthen they auction them off for charity. so i instantly knewbeing the 3d print guy that i wanted to incorporate3d printing somehow into it.
so right out of the gate,i scanned in the helmet. and then, you can see i didthe little silhouette there on the phone. and then once i hadthat silhouette, i was like, it'd be kind ofcool to make it a vehicle. so i took thatscan of the helmet, chopped it up, andstarted placing it in ways where you couldrecognize those surfaces, like as if it wouldkind of fold up
and the action figurewould be in there. and because i wantedit to be something that looked like a toy, i wentand got an action figure down in the store at work and scannedthat little sand trooper in, and started makingsure that it was all going to fit in there nicely. so here you can see on the leftside we've got the maya model. and i didn't want to cheatby like scaling anything. i wanted it to be as ifthat thing could really
fold back up. and then just like you couldsee here, for efficiency and also just the ease of-- andalso being able to print big. you chop thesethings up sometimes and lay them out in a waywhere you can reassemble them. so that's kind of whatyou're seeing here. i could have triedto print it that way, but it would have filled it allup full of support material. and you might not have been ableto go as big from the volume
that the bill volume allows. so usually breaking itdown is a good thing. so before we kicked it offin the objet printer-- again, the nice thing aboutthe glue gun technology is it's really inexpensive. so before going and kickingit off on a really expensive printer, you can kick it offon one of these lower-end fdm machines. and test to make sure,like in this case,
that the stormtrooper would fitinto the little walker and all that. and then once wewere happy with it, we went ahead and kicked itoff in the objet machine. so on the left, you can seewhen it comes out on the objet machine, the photopolymer, that is actually like this wax-like materialthat's on it on the left. and that's that supportstructure i was talking about. and on the right is afterit's been all removed
and it's kind of beenrinsed off in a sink. so that's what that is there. on the left here,you see-- usually we use a proxy to kind ofglue this stuff together and it holds prettywell, but you're always scared that it'sgoing to collapse when everybody's looking atlike here in the gallery. so you wire that stuffup in case something like that does happen, you cankind of get through the night.
on the right here, youcan see-- the reason it's different materials, too. my wife asked thatquestion, was just that was what was in the printer. and we knew we weregoing to paint it. so instead of takingthat out and swapping the cartridges ofmaterial, we just went ahead and rolled with itand then sprayed it all black. and then finally, for the rust.
in this particularcase, the paint actually has like iron filings in it. and then you use thisvinegar-based paint that actually will activatethe-- it's real rust. it's not just like a paintjob that looks like rust. and then there itis at the gallery. so that was pretty cool. that was a fun, little thing. and they're actually auctioningthose off, i think, here soon.
there was a lot of really gooddesigns that came out of that. so the next example is-- i don'tknow if you saw that guy out there. he's the tall guy. he's got this staff. so i call him the neforak. he's just this alien creaturethat i wanted to make. and on this one, it was alittle bit different of a build. what i wanted todo was basically
kick it off on an fdmmachine and maybe do a small study on an emberor a form-1 kind of size. and then also, kick itoff on a big print-- on one of these guys. so this was a littlebit more ambitious, but it kind of allowed me todo all three at the same time. and i actually have somestuff to pass around while i'm pulling through these ones. so this one here, the gray one.
all three of those areactually a resin-based print. but they're all fromdifferent machines. the red one is from anewer machine coming out. and then the clear oneis from the ember right out here, the new autodesk one. and then that gray oneis from the form-1. so you can see, they allhave their strengths. and i don't like to saystrengths or weaknesses, but they're all alittle bit different.
the ember is very high detail. it's got a smaller buildvolume, but you start to use that stuff as a tool. you can make maybe a littleaction figure face for that, and then use a differentprinter for the vehicle part. but in this case, i kickedoff the neforak just in fdm. it's just an abs plastic. it's very similar to whatyou would use for legos. and then, here's the onethat's passing around now.
and what's reallycool, on the right i used these little inexpensivesolar-powered turntables to put it in the sun. and that finishesthe cure process. so it's kind of cool. because i used tokind of move it around and chase the sun at work. we had this like hallway whereall the old movie stuff is at. and now i just-- i gotslick and i went on amazon
and got something. and then, here'sthe objet printer. it's the same one weused here for dropship. and you see on the left,it looks a little soft but it's covered in thatwax support material. in the middle, we--and i like to say "we." by "we," i mean evan removedall the support material in the middle there,which is tedious. and on the right, it's beenremoved and it's rinsed again.
so you can kind ofsee this process. and here's an exampleof that rip-mod-fab that i was talking about. so it all keyed togetherwhen it was printed out. but when i saw iti thought, it'd be kind of cool if his arm'sdown a little bit more. and as you becomemore comfortable, you'll get in therewith tools and kind of make it to where it can fit.
so i changed his pose,basically, a little bit. and then the middle, gluingthat arm back in after i dremeled out that piece. and then on the right,just painting it, masking off the base. so this comes back into thatrip-mod-fab process as well. basically, i wantedto add a staff to him, have some kind of thing. so if i hadn'tchanged the print,
i could have just wentback to the digital file, made the cool staff,and printed it out. but now i know that i'vechanged the way he is posed and it wouldn't line up. so what i did was i just tooka piece of armature wire, put some clay on it,really quick and dirty, and just posed it sothat it was like, yeah. that's quick. i can do that fast.
i don't have to get inthe computer or anything. once i got that to where iknew it would fit in his hand, 3d scanned that in, trickedit out in the computer, printed it out, and thatwas the final version. and then as you become morecomfortable doing this stuff, too, and doing thingsto them, you'll start adding stuff like hoses. like my first print,i feel so bad. evan printed outthat sleepwalker guy
with all the legs. and all thosecables were printed. i mean, i couldn't believe thathe didn't snap any of them. he probably did and i justdon't even recognize it. a cool techniquethat you can do-- and this is actually from someof the awesome original model makers at ilm,goodson and howie. they helped me out so much. but basically, youcan take tubing
and then you can put a pieceof wire inside that tubing and it allows you to sculptthe tube into a specific way. and you might think, well, idon't really care about that. but if you're doinga ship like this that's supposedto be really big. if you just take apiece of rubber tubing and let it do it'sthing, it's going to be kind of sticking out. it will look like a toy.
so what that wireallows you to do is sculpt in like a fake gravitythat would be at that size. and in that case,i had it all kind of winding behind his head. so for the sleepwalkerand the dropship-- this is the dropship here. this one i started outa little bit different. i started out banging out alot of basic shapes in maya. got the bulk of itworking really well,
and then i basicallydid a tune line render, and then painted on top of that. so this is kind of a combinationbetween like a concept sketch and a tune render. and then once i kindof was happy with that, i started both of them in tandemso that the design language would all fit together,so it felt like it was from the same culture. and at one point, iveered off and did--
once i was happy with thedirection it was going, i did the characterfirst-- the pilot-- and then worked theship around him. because then that way,like the ergonomics and all that fit him insidethe cockpit and stuff. but initially, i wanted tostart them in tandem so they'd both work well together. and here is-- and iactually brought these guys so you can check them out.
so here is the sleepwalker head. and this was a resin print. this is in the software. this specific one was formthat generates the supports that you guys saw earlier. and here it is when it came out. so this is that print. and i don't know if some ofyou probably already passed it around.
but if you lookon the bottom, you can feel these little burrsthat i've cut off the supports, basically. and you can feel onthe bottom of that guy. and that's the thing. this 3d printing stuff, there'sdefinitely an art to it. you could just sayauto orient my print. well, then it facesthe character down and it sticks like a milliontoothpicks on his face.
and then you go cutthose off and it looks like he had chicken pox. so you learn reallyfast, oh, i'm going to lean himback and put all those burrs underneathwhere no one would see it after i clip those off. and then there's littletricks to that stuff that you learn over time. and that ship, thislittle guy here,
i knew from putting a bigship together recently with my buddy,pete, that you start hooking all these fins on. and you can actuallygo crazy trying to orient these things exactlyhow you did on the computer. so this time, i rana small resin ship. and that's this guy right here. and that was like a littlestudy that i would use while i was posing the fins.
and that was huge. i'm always going todo that from now on. that saved a lot of time. and then moving onto the sleepwalker, jumped back over to him. started running out printsof him on the makerbot. because again, it's cheap. i mean, that littlehead of that sleepwalker that i passed around,that's probably,
i'd say, $40 in materialwe'll say, roughly. maybe a little less. and this was probably like $5. and it's bigger. so it doesn't havethe same quality, but you can prototype it reallyfast and say, you know what? i don't even like hisears being that long. run out another one. and once you startgetting happy with it,
then you start going at themore expensive material. so you can see on thebottom there on the left, i add clay to them, too, andsketch a little bit of stuff, just to kind of get a feelfor how the details might be in the computer. and then i brokeit all down just like i did with the dropship. so you can see all of hislegs down there on the left. and then in the middleis all of these fins.
on the right is thesleepwalker himself printed, support materialremoved, ready to go. so once it came out of theprinter, the sleepwalker you can see on the left. again, he's covered inthat wax-like material. in the middle, i amgluing him all together. and you can see a close-up. it's kind of hard to see thedetails when these guys first come out.
they're very translucent. so it's hard tohandle, but you also know that once youspray it-- like there's some things on herethat you can't really see. but once you spray it blackand you hit the high points, you start to see allthose little details. but it helps early onto just kind of keep it-- don't put anypaint on it or anything because that can interferewith the epoxies and that.
so at first, it's kind of trickyonce you get it all going. but then once you've got itall glued on and ready to go, it's really fun whenyou get to that point where you get to spray it andsee all those details pop. stuff that you didn't evenknow had made it through. there's a turntable of it. and then finally--and i'll be honest, one of the things aboutthat little walker guy, was i actually hadhis helmet closed up
when i first designed him. and then i split it open and didthat open version of his suit, was the first time myfriends and everybody saw it. so i don't think a lotof people understood that that was a suit. i think they thought it waslike some kind of neck thing or something. so then when i closed upthe suit and ran it out, it was really neat for me tohave my friends see it the way
that i wanted them to see it. because at first i waslike, this is cool, right? and everybody's like, idon't know about that one. i like the ships, but idon't like that thing. but once i closed himup, everybody got it. oh, i see. it closes. and that's what socool about printing, is you can actually setkey frames on that stuff,
have the suit kind oftransition, and you can pick, like maybe three posesand run those out. so they don't have toplay a video or anything. you can just look at it and seehow that is going to behave. and then finally, the dropship. this is the biggest one. and the reason that i wanted toshow it in this state and not just in the pictures is so youcan see how-- it's actually really fun, but it looks kindof intimidating when you first
get into printing, maybe. i mean, it was for me seeingall this wire and stuff. but once you become morecomfortable with it, you can do things that youwould never be able to print. you can add wires to them, andlittle antennas, and stuff. if you tried to print it-- imean, this little mesh here. you wouldn't want to printthat, even if you could. but you could buy thatat the hardware store and then glue it on the backof where the exhaust would be.
and once you s that thing black,no one's going to know what was printed and what wasn't. so the scariest thing withthese prints that you'll become comfortablewith eventually is you can see on that bottomleft, drilling the stuff, it literally sounds like you'restepping on a bag of doritos. it gives you an upsetstomach because this thing is like this expensive thing. and it took you forever to make.
and you literally justhave to close your eyes and just go for it. but once you becomecomfortable with that, it actually is kindof exhilarating. because then someonewill look at it. oh, i'm so sorry i snapped it. that happens like once a day. and you're like, oh, it's ok. you just glue it back on it.
but at first when that happens,you're like, oh, i'm ruined. i got to print itagain, throw it away. but once you becomecomfortable with that stuff, it feels a littlebit more freeing. and that's what i wouldtake from all of this. if you're firststarting out, don't get intimidated bythe machine itself. get in there and fail. you're going toforget some things.
especially if you'reusing-- like meshmixer is a nice piece of softwarethat finds the overhangs and supports all that stuff. but if you'refirst starting out, you're inevitably goingto run into a situation where something iskind of hovering. and that's ok. it might fall offwhen you've finally removed the materialout of the build volume,
but you can gluethat back on into not get discouragedby the limitations of that specific hardwarethat you're using. you can always find a way. put clay on top of that makerbotprint, or whatever fdm machine you're using. and sculpt in littledetails that you never could get on a higher-end one. but the biggestthing to take away
is just get whatyou could afford and start learning on it. just do something thatyou are comfortable with
designing parts for 3d printing,and you can affordthe material on. and just have fun. so that's it. thank you.
