Rapid Prototyping Questions

CheeseOnToast

Hey guys,

I might be getting an interesting bit of freelance work from a tabletop games company who are looking at using computer modelling and rapid prototyping to help create miniatures. I'd like to know some of the dos and don'ts for modelling with this in mind. Anyone have any tips and tricks?

I don't know the scale, but I think it'll be just 35mm and eventually cast in metal. The prototype will be used to create the mold. Is this even possible, or is that size just too small?

Neox

turn smoothing off, everything thats not smooth will not be smooth printed out

work real scale, and think of material thickness

rhino has tools for mass measuring and checking if it will stand or not

Psyk0

I still havent printed anything but i picked up some info here:

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=57065&page=1&pp=15

PixelMasher

I used to work for Offload Studios back when they up and some general tips I can point out for general 3d printing stuff is:

No instanced geometry, it wont print.

all normals facing the correct direction

make sure all pieces have some amount of intersection otherwise it will fall apart/off , you can just simply go in and ram cylinders through geo to connect it in areas that wont be seen

like neox said, smoothing groups don't print at all so to get a smoother result you usually have to smooth the model a bit. unless you want a faceted lowpoly look which does look awesome in some cases.

try not to make things too thin or it will almost certainly snap off.

for larger models you can usually save some money if you hollow out the inside of the model by booleaning in a small hole somewhere and applying the shell modifier so all the excess material can be poured out.

these are just general tips most should apply to what you are doing.
cheers dude.

CheeseOnToast

Thanks guys. One other thing: Pixel, you mentioned intersecting geo? Does the RP machine only read the "outside" surface? I thought I was going to have to be uber careful about making a perfectly clean shell, but if you can just stick bits through each other it'll make life much easier.

nezach

There's some info about modeling starships models for table top miniatures gameing via prototyping here:

http://www.ninjamagic.com/cgi-bin/gt/tpl.h,content=25&