Even more Rapid prototyping questions

CheeseOnToast

My struggle to get a bunch of miniatures printed continues :

The main problem is that by necessity the meshes are made of multiple intersecting (watertight) pieces. The printers use Magics software and an Objet Polyjet RP machine I believe. I was under the impression that they would be able to deal with the mesh as exported from Zbrush, but they claim that they can't make it into a single printable mesh at their end. They're definitely not used to dealing with this type of asset, so I'm wondering if it's just lack of knowledge or incompetence on their part? I'm pretty sure the guy is just running the "fix wizard" on my exported STL file.

To make the miniatures printable takes a ton of work, mostly retopology and reprojection followed by a load of cleanup work. This was supposed to be a free time project, but it's rapidly becoming a second job. To clarify, I've got around 60 of these to do, so anything that streamlines the process would be great. Any help?

Hazardous

Hey Cheese I've gone through the process for maybe half dozen miniatures now and I can vouch for some of the printers being pretty bad knowledge wise when it comes to printing this kind of stuff. It might be equal parts lack of knowledge to incompetency but at the end of the day they know whats best for their machine. I was fortunate enough to be in a position to SEE what was happening to the prints when I was providing bad meshes.. it was very much an eye opener.

And I know you wont like my answer but I ended up needing to conform - water tight pieces, no intersections anywhere, and your absolutely right, preparation is EVERYTHING once you get the sculpt done, ( the fun part ) you still have equal or more time required to break them down, separate into pieces, create socket joins etc etc etc.

What I found after I got into the flow of things, was that I needed to start my sculpts from scratch knowing the rules, knowing where I need to split my mini's, knowing what pieces will be removed for ease of printing ( usually the printers can help here ) as they will be able to say nope that cape is going to have to come off unless you want some crap under there etc etc, and then you start building from that point onwards.

My pain started with the fact that I didnt know anything, sculpted away arrived at what i thought was a decent sculpt and then spent ages reworking and reworking it backward to get it print ready.

feel free to PM me with more specifics man - Ill do my best to help where i can.

CheeseOnToast

Thanks for the encouragement. I've been through a very similar process as you, with 16 minis pretty much ready to go. I have the added bonus of having to make them castable as well, so no undercuts, preserving mold lines etc. etc.

I was really hoping for a service that has a printer with the same kind of uber resolution as the polyjet printer, but run by some guys that know what they're doing with non-CAD stuff. I know there's a few companies (mostly in the US I think) that can deal with Zbrush work, but their printers don't have the resolution.

Cheers for the offer of help...I'll be sure to hit you up if I hit any more brick walls.