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Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

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Sir Agot Dahl
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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by Sir Agot Dahl »

Having worked with Smooth-on products a lot and I mean a lot. My best advice is this....

If you are casting this piece in Silicon, using a silicon mold..... Make sure you take the time to get the RIGHT mold release inhibitor. Contact Smooth-on staff and tell them what your doing and they will walk you right through it.

I just ordered 'a mold release' and destroyed hours of time and hundreds of dollars in wasted supplies.... that is 'how' I learned this. Please dont be a 'Sir Agot Dahl' learn from his mistakes :-)


Oh and Don't use Ooomoo for this it breaks down way too fast so don't cheap it out even on your prototype because the process may change when you switch to the Mold Max and so on.

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by MannequinFan »

Hey nice job on the mold freezenator!
Looks like it came out great.
For some reason this pic makes me want some watermelon! :D

Image

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by Siliconeman »

Great project!

As mentioned casting silicone piece with silicone mold is very risky business. Worst case scenario is that after casting you end up having uniform block of silicone which consists of mold and piece welded together.

In this case you could cast the piece safely with polyurethane rubber. If you choose to cast in silicone I would recommend release agent that forms thin film to cover the mold. Whenever I have to cast silicone to silicone I use quick and dirty trick and paint the silicone mold with spray paint.

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by Jimjam »

This is a great project, and something i am looking into myself. However, i intend to use Daz Studio rather than Makehuman, as IMO they make much better figure meshes.

Also, a much simpler way to do it, would be to print a MOULD and cast the figure into it, rather than printing a figure and hand making the mould.

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by freezenator »

Jimjam wrote:This is a great project, and something i am looking into myself. However, i intend to use Daz Studio rather than Makehuman, as IMO they make much better figure meshes.

Also, a much simpler way to do it, would be to print a MOULD and cast the figure into it, rather than printing a figure and hand making the mould.
I also use Daz 3D and I have happened to print off an entire figure as well as my other one I am currently using. Can you give me some links as to making molds with a 3D Printer? I have looked into it a few times and it seems that it would be more cost effective and use less material to print off the model rather than a mold for casting. I don't know. It just seems that way. Please give me some pointers. Thanks.

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by MannequinFan »

DAZ is nice but if you ever have the intention of selling what you create, their license agreement restricts commercial use of 3d printed models just so you know.

From the DAZ EULA...
"The creation of three-dimensional physical representations (3D-print, molded copy, CNC-routed copy, and the like) of Content or any three-dimensional art derived from the Content is permitted only for personal, non-commercial use by the User. Additionally, the user may not grant other entities or individuals the right to produce such physical representations of the Content except for the sole purpose of providing the print to the User for their personal use. "

Both Makehuman and Manuel Bastioni have just released new versions of their software - you may want to check them out. They both now have posing and facial expressions built in and have much improved meshes and detail compared to the older versions.
http://www.makehuman.org/
http://www.manuelbastioni.com/manuellab.php

3d printing a mold is not as easy as it would seem.
The biggest issue you will run into is getting the mold surfaces finished as the layer lines will need to be filled/sanded. This can be quite a bit more difficult on a negative shape as compared to the positive, especially in more detailed areas.

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by Jimjam »

freezenator wrote:I also use Daz 3D and I have happened to print off an entire figure as well as my other one I am currently using. Can you give me some links as to making molds with a 3D Printer? I have looked into it a few times and it seems that it would be more cost effective and use less material to print off the model rather than a mold for casting. I don't know. It just seems that way. Please give me some pointers. Thanks.
freezenator: I don't have any links, i had to work out the process for myself: I created my figure in Daz, removed the eye lashes with Zbrush, imported her into Blender, built a box around her, then used the boolean tool to make a negative inside the box. Then i trimmed around the box to get rid of excess material. Then i deleted the original figure and cut the box in half, to make the two halves of the mould. Then i made locating pegs on one side and holes for the pegs on the other.

Also, depending on what volume your 3D printer is capable of, you might have to cut it into smaller sections and glue together afterwards. Netfabb free is also a good programme to check that all the parts are manifold.

You have to be careful how you pose and position the figure, so that the limbs are split centrally when you cut the box in half.

MannequinFan, i also thought about a possible solution to get rid of the layer lines, by putting tumbling grit inside and then mounting it on some sort of home made spit. Let it rotate and check periodically.

I thought i read on the Daz site "what you create is yours". Maybe thats only 2D creations.

Jimjam :mrgreen:

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by freezenator »

I am back. My first project with the Dremel 3D Printer didn't work as I had planned. For one, the model was rough and I could see all of the imperfections and cracks that I didn't cover up. Another was that I did not know how to use silicone. I did not know that you had to use thinner, which in the end, came out very incomplete with a lot of air pockets. So I am starting over with another project in making a full size doll around 5'5. I used Daz3D for the models, then exported into Meshmixer, and sliced the model into manageable pieces that will fit in my printer. As for the fasteners, I used pegs and did Boolean intersections on them for every individual peg. There is no magical program that will do it for you. You have to do that on your own. I have some rendered pictures of the model I am going to attempt to bring into the real world.
Pose1.png
Pose1.png (269.4 KiB) Viewed 2024 times
Pose2.png
Pose2.png (173.33 KiB) Viewed 2024 times
I will also bring up more pictures of the finished sections of the head, legs, arms, and so on one by one when they are individually complete.

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by freezenator »

I'm back. I just printed off the entire human figure from Daz 3d. She is 165 centimeters tall and it took a lot of practice and experimentation with Meshmixer. I used a peg in hole system so that all of the parts will be perfectly aligned with each other once they are all glued together. Now I am working on smoothing her down and making preparations for the final mold. Here is the picture of her:
IMG_03811.jpg
IMG_03811.jpg (729.03 KiB) Viewed 1722 times

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by SFembot »

Speaking from experience, that was a lot of time spent printing :)

Good job, quick question, what did you end up using as your infill percentage as well
as the wall thickness? I usually go from 20 to 40% grid and usually default 2 mm wall
thickness at 0.2 mm per layer.

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by freezenator »

SFembot wrote:Speaking from experience, that was a lot of time spent printing :)

Good job, quick question, what did you end up using as your infill percentage as well
as the wall thickness? I usually go from 20 to 40% grid and usually default 2 mm wall
thickness at 0.2 mm per layer.
I want to clarify on some things. I did not print each item as large blocks of PLA. That would be a waste of material. If you look on my earlier posts when I first started printing out the head, it's more like a thick shell, so the inside is hollow. The settings are just like any printer that uses 1.75mm PLA filament. I used meshmixer to make the shells, put in the pegs, and then print them all out. Both processes took a long time. I will eventually post some new pictures of my process.

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by MannequinFan »

Hey Freeze looks like she's coming along really nicely! Great job so far! :thumbs_up: :thumbs_up:

I did the same thing for my Abby's body.
I used a 5/16" thick wall which gave enough room for the 1/8" wood dowel pins...


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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by gearman »

freezenator wrote:I'm back. I just printed off the entire human figure from Daz 3d. She is 165 centimeters tall and it took a lot of practice and experimentation with Meshmixer. I used a peg in hole system so that all of the parts will be perfectly aligned with each other once they are all glued together. Now I am working on smoothing her down and making preparations for the final mold. Here is the picture of her:
IMG_03811.jpg
wait...did you build that from a small 3d printer? 8O

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by freezenator »

gearman wrote:
freezenator wrote:I'm back. I just printed off the entire human figure from Daz 3d. She is 165 centimeters tall and it took a lot of practice and experimentation with Meshmixer. I used a peg in hole system so that all of the parts will be perfectly aligned with each other once they are all glued together. Now I am working on smoothing her down and making preparations for the final mold. Here is the picture of her:
IMG_03811.jpg
wait...did you build that from a small 3d printer? 8O
Yep. It was all from my Dremel3d printer, and it took all summer to finish printing.

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Re: Making a Doll With Dremel 3D Printer

Post by maddmatter70 »

very cool!

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