Niko's Stuff

I started out modeling the astronaut in blender using the references I drew. The model is composed mostly of simple shapes - spheres and cylinders - scaled and combined together. The hands and feet required more editing, using Blenders vertex, edge, and face editing tools, as well as extrusions and loop cuts to make more complex shapes. I started out just making the shape of the body, then later worked on each piece individually hollowing it out and adding any internal structures. My first 3D model of the astronaut was very simple, I just wanted to start printing quickly so I could get an idea of how the physical object would be put together and make changes from there. My first printed prototype worked really well but had a few issues. The elastic cord I bought to string the doll was too big, so I bought some smaller stuff and made the doll bigger for the next prototype. I was able to partially put the doll together with wire for the time being. I had also left out the notches on the

 My test 3D print was medium successful. I was able to print the music box piece with no issues, but it doesn't play the song correctly. You can hear some of the song when you try to play it, but some of the notes don't quite work. I think the piece just required to much fin detail to be able to be 3D printed fully functional. Also because I modeled the piece based off of a digital music box similar that wasn't exactly the same as my music box I think the tune of the song is off. Printing this gave me a good idea of what the supports are like to use and remove from a model though, which gave me confidence to use them with my project. For the settings of my 3D print - Peter suggested I print with much a finer detail level (0.05mm) since the piece had a mechanical function.

For this project I would really like to try and make a simple custom ball jointed doll using resin 3D printing. I want to try to make something similar to Bucket, as he has a humanoid design, but is still fairy simple, composed mostly of geometric shapes. I would really like to try printing in resin as is appears to be the standard for BJDs and miniature figures due to it's higher quality when printing small detailed, sculptural shapes. I plan on using a local 3D printing service. I am also interested in trying to learn how to use Blender for this project, as it has more capability for organic sculpting, which would be really useful if I want to ever try making sculptures to 3D print in the future. One aspect of making a BJD that I think will be challenging will be making all of the joint functional. There is a lot of process reference for Bucket which shows how the joint are made, and I found this website explaining how to make BJD joints. The more I think about what concept I w

The object I would like to try to 3D print is the drum for my music box. It is a fairly simple shape that I hope will not be to hard to print, and if the print work it would be really cool to be able to switch out the drum in my music box to play different songs. The object is about 3 cm tall and 1 1/2 cm wide.

For rendering this project I started by trying to recreate a real image of the music box. I used a picture of my table and my wall to make the background. Finding the right materials to use for rending the object fairly hard. I found some nice materials online that had imperfections, but I wasn't able to edit them as much as the basic materials in rhino. The renders ended up being a bit to glossy. The hardest material to find was the matte metal of the housing. It has a really distinct texture that I really wanted to get across in my renders. I ended up fining a fairly good image of textured metal that i used for the material, but it had a lot of scratch lines across it that I didn't like. I edited the image in photoshop to get rid of the lines and am quite happy with how it turned out. As well as the realistic tabletop renders I made some with a simple dark background. I really liked all the render example from previous students that did something similar. For the exploded vie