Preparing sculpts for 3d printing

1. Intro 3dprint course: Hi, my name is Jasim Carmie and I've been a toy designer and sculptor for over eight years now. In this tutorial, I will be showing you the process of preparing my digital sculptures for three D printing. We'll go over splitting the figure into cable parts while keeping in mind two important aspects like clean print and ease of print. We will start by analyzing the figure and then we will be splitting it and preparing it for three D printing. I have broken this course into 21 easy to watch videos. I don't have any speed ups and all videos are recorded in real time. I try to be as transparent as possible with the tools and methods that I'm showing in this course. I'm using Z Berg, but the techniques can be applied to any digital sculpting software that you feel comfortable with. I'm teaching you a workflow and how to get your best parts for your figures and toys. By the end of this course, you have learned every aspect of the process of repairing your digital sculpts and exporting them to clean STL files ready for prototype and production. I really hope you find this course help. 2. LESSON 01 Figure Structure: This video, I'm going to show you the process on how I prepare my sculpts for three D printing. This is the character that we're going to be preparing for three D print. This is Rick O'connell from the Mummy. It's a stylized character that I designed and sculpted. This is usually the stage that I start preparing the model for the next stage, which is splitting and keying. You'll notice in my sub tools, these are all the pieces that make up the character. And I went ahead and named each one when I finish sculpting. When st, I rarely name my sub tools, but when I finish sculpting, I name each subtle just to make it easier to know, maybe leave on their own or which parts I'm going to be merging. Now, at this stage, I finished detailing and adding all the small details, so I'm not going to do any major sculpting anymore. Maybe like some fixes here and there just in case it helps the keying. Or sometimes just to hide some imperfections or stuff like that. All right, when I key my characters, the first two things that I keep in mind is how clean each piece is going to come out. When I key it, when I print it, how easy it's going to be for me to paint. Now, for example, you noticed that for these, I kept these as separate pieces because I want to put these on the figure once it's ready. This is going to make my life really easy when it comes to painting, because painting these, especially on a white T shirt, trust me, it's going to be a mess. Like if you mess up the paint, lot fixing, and a lot of tweaking. Now the second thing you might notice is these holes are really huge. I do have some straps here, some threads. But what I want to do is when I print this, I want to use like real leather straps don't fit because I don't know the size yet. If they don't fit, I'm just going to do brown threads into it. You might have seen that in my other videos when I did the telos mini one. All right, sculpting. While I'm sculpting, I'm keeping in mind which pieces they're going to be split. For example, if you look at the torso, you'll notice that this piece is almost ready for keying. I know that the arms will be separate. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and do each piece on its own. Let me see if it, just to make sure it fits. We'll solo this and we'll do shift this way. It's going to do like a screenshot of it. These are the eyebrows, these are the shirt folds. These are some straps in the back. Just doing this to show you the parts. These are the sleeves, this is the shirt, these are the buttons. These are the hook, the belt hooks. This is the belt area of the pants. These are the pants, the pockets, a buckle, the bottom part of the shoe, the other one. These are the parts that come with the boots because he has like long boots. When I sculpted these, I sculpt them separately. This is the body. For the body, you'll notice that we're not going to use a lot of it. You're going to se I'm just going to keep him here. Brater bracelet, this is the holster for the guns. These are the temporary threads, we're just going to keep them here. This is the holster from the back. The holsters that come on. This I found out that makes it easier for you if you keep parts separate. This is the gun, we're going to go into detail with each one. This is the gun that he's holding. This is the other revolver. Can't find the belt for the shotgun bullets and this one is going to be separate as well. The shotgun bullets belt the other belt. Just save the shotgun bullets because I forgot And this is the hair. For the hair. I have a couple. I'm just going to show you this and we'll go through the other ones. This is his head? Yeah. These are the parts that we are going to be working with. This is how I visualize the project in my head. At this stage, I'm looking to see, okay, which parts do I leave separate, which parts do I merge, and which part is going to cut out of the other part to be ready for key. 3. LESSON 02 Preparing the head: Now that we have all the parts laid out, it's time to jump in and start start the keying process. Now, I don't I don't have a specific, you know, way to start. Like usually you'll see me jump around pieces to see. So let's start with the tops. I'll do the head and go down. All right, so for the hair, I'm just going to go ahead and remove all the colors, so just make it easier for you to visualize it. This is how I initially sculpted the hair, so it's one piece. Now to have this as one part either have two options because I don't want to print on one part because I know it's going to come out really better if I have the hair separate from the head. Because it's easier to paint once and it just looks way, way better. Now for this, we have two options. Usually when I work, I'll select the pieces and I'll drop them down. Holding shift in this arrow just to drop both down. So you can either have this with live bullion on, so have this part cut out of that, right? But then you get into the problem that's not going to fit because the head has this oval shape, right? So you're not going to be able to fit that in without breaking the piece. The other solution is to split this into two parts. Now, I went ahead and did this before. What you'll see here is the back part, we see Frankin, we'll have the front part, the back part, and the head, right? Usually this part is going to key here and that part is going to be in the back. Now, you do have the option to have these in three parts, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to merge these two. I'm going to hide that looks funny, even if I mess up a bit of the paint here, it's not going to be a huge problem because it's not going to affect his face, right? It's going to be easier to fix this way. I don't need to worry if I cut the head out of the hair. We're going to run in the same problem of having this fit in. The second problem we're going to run into, you'll notice these are really thin. Then your option is to either cut them out or make them thicker. So you're sure you can notice this here, you'll notice that part. It's definitely going to break the easiest way and the safest way for me it's to have these as one part. I'm going to go ahead and merge these. Now you'll notice that the head still has subdivisions. It has three subdivisions. Have the lower one and the high one. Now it doesn't have to look perfect. Now if you zoom in, you're still going to see. But think of it, this is going to be like a 20 centimeters, like an 8 " figure. Those details you're not going to see. This is usually 1.5 million polygons is more than enough for this figure. I'm going to go ahead and delete lower. I'm going to go ahead and merge these two. I'm going to merge down. Now we have this piece for this one you can keep polish on polish. Just cleans up. And I'm not going to go into details for that one because that's more sculpting. If you want to see my other sculpting tutorials, I do have how to sculpt an old man's bust. I'll leave a link in the comments, or you might see a card on the screen. Now if I go in for the resolution I'm going to do, it might be different for you when you're working on your own character. Three depends on the size and so on. So when I merge stuff, I'll just usually go around the piece to see if we have any gaps or is there anything wrong when merging? All right, now this is our first piece. Now for the second piece we have this guy, right? So this is going to be a separate to make sure these two, so I'm going to control control S. I'm going to make sure these two work together when we print them because if we keep this here, this has to snap there to make sure that works. You make live bullion on, put the head or the part that's going to cut out of the other parts. And we select this, you'll notice that everything that's brighter color, this means it's cutting out of that. Right? If I go ahead and hide this, you see that's our part and this is what it's going to cut out of it. Right now, there is one thing I usually do just to make sure I have enough gaps. Because if I cut the head out of this part, it's just going to cut it exactly to the piece. I'll duplicate that head head. Duplicated the new one. I'm going to hide for this one. I'm going to go into Inflate and I'm going to do five. And I'm going to hit Enter. Just made it a bit larger. It doesn't have to be a huge difference, just a bit. So what this is going to do is going to give me a gap that I can work with. And you'll see that in a second once I'm happy with this and I go over it to make sure it doesn't create any super thin areas. All right. That should be good. We go into bullion sub, make bullion mesh. That will create a bullion mesh. Then we need to append to this. We're going to go ahead and do a pend. Usually adds a U mesh on top of it and this is like that is a bullion piece. All right, that's the U mesh. If you go into hide the fill, you'll see how that cuts out of it. All right. Now what I like to do, I z dynamesh, once I have that done, you don't have to do that. It's just a workflow that I work on. Because I noticed if I go in and smooth this now it's just going to leave a hard edge of the mesh union and dynam bit higher. If I dynam this and I go in, soften it, now you see I get a softer edge and this is why I usually dyname my pieces. Now sometimes you'll see edges like these appear. Now you can leave them because if I go ahead and show these two, this is why I added that inflate just to give me that tiny gap. You see, because if I would have cut this exactly from the shape, it's going to be like a really straight fit. From my experience for three D printing, you always need to leave a bit of a gap just to make sure. Because you do have wrapping, you do have the material changing its shape. You do have heat affects depending on you're using PLA or you're using ABS or you're using resin, it really changes. Okay. For that one you see it's a really tiny gap from this distance, you're not going to notice it. But for D printing, that's really helpful just to make sure. Now, sometimes I like to go in and clean those edges just because I'm used to having my pieces, especially most of the work that I do goes into production. And I want to make sure we don't have any surprises when we go into production. And no matter how careful you are, always going to have a piece that needs a bit of tweaking. I like to not leave, uh, you know, the bullion, I'm going to go in and clean these parts. I'm not going to bore you with that, I'm just going to show you a couple of parts and then we can move on to the next one. So now we have two pieces. This piece ready. Two, if I print them now, they're going to snap together perfectly. Okay. Now that I'm ready with that, I can go ahead and shift click on the eye and we're going to show everything. Now, we said we're going to start with the head. I'm going to take the eyebrows, move those, I'm going to take the eyes, move those down. And I'm just going to hide everything and just keep, I don't need the hair. Usually if a character is big, if I have a huge character, the head is really a big size. I'll even go ahead and split the eyebrows because just again, for painting reasons, it just makes it a huge difference. So I can pick these all black with the airbrush and I don't have to worry about, but this figure is going to be a tiny head. I mean, because it's going to be 8 " figure, the head is going to be like 1 " or 2 ". I don't see why we should split that. I'm going to go ahead and move this to the bottom. Do the same with the head and then I'm and merge down. So now we have, this is one piece and I'm going to do the same for the eyes. Now when I work on the pieces, I usually like to have a piece for like a sub tool for each, or a mesh for each of the parts for the eyeball. The iris, the pupil, and even the shine, right? And you can notice that if you've viewed any of my sculpting tutorials, you'll see that's how I like to work. Now you'll notice that this one is a bit low because we have these facets. So if I go and do dynamic subdivision, you'll see now that's smooth and nice. Now you might say, well why do you leave the pupil and the iris and all that stuff? Because you're going to paint them well. It helps me know each part is going to be, I will just use them as guides. Now sometimes you'll see me sculpt with the iris and details going in. And you'll notice that the classical sculptors, they always use that. I love that technique because it as like a natural shadows, but for this one, it's going to work fine. I've done this with the bulldog. If you seen my bulldog making off, you'll see I use that technique for painting the eyes as well. Again, for this one, before I merge them, I'm just going to do a bit like maybe three subdivisions. I'm going to apply that. Delete, Delete, lower. I'm going to merge it with the head. Now I have the eyes merged. Now for this one I'm going to do the same. Maybe raise it a bit and do a dynamesh. Now you'll notice when you dynamih stuff with polish, you might lose a lot of detail. This will we had before and sometimes it's a good idea to keep polish off and do a dynamesh. It keeps the edges. Now you'll notice that it added these harsh edges to the sides. Again, from this view you're not going to be visible again. Keep in mind this is a free print this close you might see them, but that far you're not going to see them again. Now we have merged the eyes and the eyebrows, and we have the head and the hair ready for printing. 4. LESSON 03 Splitting the Neck: Now we can do the neck. All right. So you'll notice that the neck is part of the body, and this is why I said we're not going to be using a lot of the body anyhow. So you'll notice the body has three subdivisions as well. So make sure before we start splitting, just make sure you have this set too high and delete lower. 1.3 million is more than enough. If you need more, you can just go ahead and divide it and you can have more than that and you can delete lower so we can start. Okay, so what I need from this part is I need it for the neck. What I'll do now is I'll hold control. Okay, man and neath this, you're going to go mask lasso. Put transparency on. And just cut out the part that you want for this. Just try to cut out more because it's not going to just make sure you don't have enough parts. Just go ahead and make sure you don't have any other parts selected. And I'm going to go ahead and do control just to create a new poly group. And holding shift and control and clicking on it, it's just going to isolate it and do split hidden. Now we don't have that part anymore. We have the neck now. For the neck and just do dynamishwI have this piece? Don't worry about that because we're going to have the body cut out of the head and so on. To keep this tidy, move this to the bottom. All right? I need two things here. I need the torso. I'll take that part and move it down, and only when I work I get into the habit, into the parts that I'm keying or I'm working on split, they're the lowest ones. Just keep stuff tidy. It's just my own process. You don't have to use it, just the way that I work. You can do the same thing while keeping the sub tools up. It's not a thing of software, it's just more of my personal preference. Now that I have these two, I can go ahead and look to see if the shapes are good. Now what I don't I don't like to have a lot of waviness. I'll try to have it as clean. I don't I'm I don't mean have straight lines, but I need to think about this part is going to come into it and I need to make sure it's clean. Again, we're going to do a bullion cut, that's the shape you are going to get. That part is going to go plug into the shirt. Okay. I don't like how thin this is. This looks bad. It's going to be breakable, but don't worry about that. We're not going to leave it like that. Okay. So we're going to do live bullion, Go into and make bullion measure. That's the part that it created now. Right? You'll notice that whenever you do a bullion mesh, if you click on the poly groups, you'll notice that it always creates the part. When it cut, it creates like a new poly group. And that's really helpful. Now click W or are holding control. Click on it. Now I've selected only that body group. Move the gizmo in the middle and I'm just going to resize it and move it down. This is why I said don't worry about the thickness and then I'm going to size it and scale it down here. I'm just going to clean it up a bit because think about this is the edges that are going to go into the shirt. I just want this to be uniform. You don't have to do this. But again, when working in production, you just get into the habit of making sure everything is clean. Although, when we're creating prototypes, after you print your prototype, you might go back and redo some king or some splitting because it created some new errors or something like that. Now I can go ahead and dynamis this now. It leaves these, you can try to click Polish and do it again. It cleans some of it. They're fine. But I think you noticed by now I won't leave them like that because sometimes it's just going to create an extra edge or something that's going to poke out. I try to reduce as many problems that might occur because with three D printing, you'll see this piece has to go like through three software getting slid by the printer program. Now that piece is ready, I'm just going to go ahead and delete that. You see that's what naming is important because now you say, oh, that's the body. But it's not because we split it from the body that's deleted. These are the two pieces. This is what's going to happen when we split that out of it. It's going to sit right in. The purpose of that edge, of this edge is two things. One, it's going to add thickness as you notice from the fore front part. The second thing is it adds like a nice gap so it doesn't feel like the piece is floating on the neck. Because you've noticed that with cheap toys, you'll notice that it's going to add a gap between the two. And I'll show you that example when we do the sleeves. All right, so now that we have the neck, we'll bring the head down, hide the torso. Now we know that these two parts are going to be merged. Before I do that, I'll select the neck and I'll do a couple of edits because I know I want that part to be a bit here. I'm just going to get rid of because we had a gap here. This is why I said while you're king and while you're tweaking, you might need to sculpt a bit and move some parts around just to make sure everything is flowing nicely. All right. Now that we're happy with this, I'm just going to go move that down and I'm going to merge it now. We can go ahead and dynamash this, that is one piece. You'll see it's still going to keep the polygroups. I never get rid of the polygroups until I have to. Because if I notice something when it's printed or I don't know, maybe this is like way too out or one of the hairs is sticking out. I still have the option of clicking and tweaking this, making it bigger or whatever. If you have polygroups, don't go ahead and do you control just to have that keep them? Keep them, because you never know when you're going to need them. 5. LESSON 04 Gun Holster Straps: The head is ready, time to move on to the next piece, which is going to be the shirt. Now before we move to the shirt, what I want to do is I want to go ahead and have the head cut out of the shirt so we can have that part done already. We'll go ahead and hide everything by clicking Shift on the Eye and just going to hide all the suptoles as we did before. We're going to move the shirt down, Take the head, duplicate it, move that down, hide the other one. You notice I hit the one that says head, so I don't have to rename it again. So I'm just going to use head one. All right. We're going to do the same. Going to go ahead and inflate this. Selecting the part that's going to cut out of the other part. Go ahead to inflate and just go five again. It doesn't have to be five for me is just I just eyeball it like I'm used to it by now and I'm used to my printer and I know what's the tolerance that I can get away with, so usually five. For me it works if you want to go ten because also depending on the scale of the model, because the scale of the model in your zebra scene will change how much inflate is going to affect. Because sometimes you're going to go and add five and I don't know it's going to do something like this, right? And you don't want that, it's way too much or sometimes it's not. The effect is going to be subtle. Now, here's another thing you can check. If you're not sure about the gap, what you can do is on the shirt, you see you have this arrow. If you click that arrow, it's going to tell Z brush is like my bullion mesh is going to start here. Then I can unhide the head and I can see the gap. Because if you don't click that arrow, this is going to happen. Even if you show that head, this one is going to bull everything that's on top. I think these are layers. This is affecting everything on top of it. But if I select this arrow, it's just going to stop it. It's just going to tell brush. Okay. The boles starts from the shirt down. Okay? And this is a great way to visualize the gap. So you can go into it and you can check out, see if it is the gap enough for the neck to go in. Right? So I'm going to hide this and I'm just going to go in and tweak some stuff. Like you'll notice that this one I don't like and this is happening because there is like a tiny gap between the shirt and the head. And to fix that, make sure you have the shirt selected and you're going to move these parts. You can actually sculpt as well. If you want to add some stuff, you can just go in. And it's really helpful to visualize because this way you can see one other thing I check for. You see how that is going underneath that created because of the inflate. Because when this part inflates, the edges just go a bit round. They might go into the model, there's this small, it's not going to be a problem. But sometimes if you look at it from the side, they're going to be a C figure and might break when you put the part in. Do not have that, just move them down a bit, you're not going to have any of those problems. Notice that this like splitting and preparing a model as as it takes to actually sculpt the piece. If you want your model to come out ready for production and clean, you can, if you want, especially nowadays, you can take that figure and print it in one piece. But it's going to be a nightmare to paint. And I'm not, I'm not good at those amazing war hammer painters that they do with one piece. All right. So now, now I'm happy with that and I'm ready to create like a bullion out of this. So I'm going to go ahead and make bullion mesh. I'm going to go into a pen and U mesh shirt. So you know, this is how you know that that's the shirt that was created with live bullion. Zebra always adds U mesh on top. So I went ahead and deleted those and rename the shirt. I know you're going to get sick of me telling you to rename your sub tools, but trust me, it's just going to help you a lot when you're working. Let's go ahead and do these with these parts. It's going to be a bit tricky. So we're going to move these down. I'm going to hide everything. I'm just going to unhide these two so these parts will just sit on top or glue on top depending what you're doing. Like if this is going to be for production, usually the client will make them out of a soft material. This might be like a rubber or something else and that's going to be plastic or PVC or whatever, right for me, because this is going to be printed in resin. It's not going to be from a different materials. Still going to be from that hard material. I need to make sure, because you'll notice that these are really thick. Now, for scale wise, you'll notice that they look a bit weird. They would have looked way better if they were a bit thinner. But the problem is I need to also keep in mind what material I'm going to do, if the part is going to be resin, if the part is going to be done in vial. So you have to keep in mind when you're working, especially even if you're printing it in your office or you're using a studio, you always have to keep in mind what's the end goal of that model. Is it going to be done in vinyl, is it going to be in resin? Is it going to be PVC or whatever? All right, so first thing I'm going to check, before I start, I'm going to go and take these and bullion them out of the shirt. What this is going to tell me, this is going to tell me like whatever, we have bright spots like these, that means it's intersecting them. If I'm trying to put these on, they're not going to go on because they're going to be bumping into these parts. Now you can do a bullion and have these cut out and go in and cleaning them. The second option is you can select the shirt. And what I love about it is you can see where each one is intersecting and just them down a bit like every area. And sometimes just go a bit over and you'll, you'll see that I'm going to do this again when I inflate these just to make sure that we have that gap. Just go in. Just make sure when you do this to go subtle at it. Because when you're doing a shirts, not a problem because it's just cloth. It's not going to look weird if the cloth has some bumps on it. It's still cloth. But if you're doing this on a face or you're doing this on something that has to be clean, just make sure when you're doing the edits to be subtle about it and double check. Always go back, zoom out and double check your now some parts, if you don't want to move them back you can also sculpt. So you can go in and you know, sculpt that detail and then soften it and then move it back. Right. It's not only the move brush that you can use, you can use any of the brushes, I'm just going around and moving some of these stuff just to make sure I don't have any parts intersecting. When I'm going to be putting these on top, they're going to just fit in nicely. I will do another rotation. You see miss this one. Okay. Now, second test. Duplicate this. I move this down. I'm going to keep that. Hide it. And another one, sorry. I'm going to move this one up. Hide this, just so I don't have to rename it again. These, if we look at them now, I'm going to go into Inflate again and I'm going to go five. Now I notice that I'm working with my UI, and if you want to download it, I'll leave a link in the bottom so you can download my UI or for inflate, you can find it here at the Defamation Everything here, you can take it out and customize your own. That's inflate. All right. This one we add inflate it. Yeah. Added inflate it. Now, I'm going to go back and check if that tolerance is affecting and it does select the shirt again and just go in and move those stuff around. Now when you're printing it for a commission piece like this, which is going to be a one off at the end of the day, it's not a problem if you don't do this step or you have some parts that they're not coming together because you can always go back and send them. The problem with this is when you have files that go into production. Because sending one piece is one thing, 5,100 250, it's a different thing altogether. Now I know that this is going to be perfect. I don't need this anymore. I don't need to do a bull. I know these parts are going to fit just nicely. You'll notice that for this one we had some straps in the back. If you look these, I'm not going to use these. These are just for me here just because I wanted to do some nice screenshots. But these I'm going to use actual, real material. Because I notice that when you add different materials to the model, especially when you're doing a one off piece adds a bit of more texture to it. Let's move sideways now. Now that we have this, let's move to the sleeves. So I'm going to move that down. And for this, let's work with the sleeves first affecting the shirt. Okay, for the sleeves, we're going to do the same thing. I'm going to do the bullion, I'm going to notice if we have any white, well, we don't have any because I've already done this while I was sculpting. Sometimes while I'm sculpting, because I know I'm going to do this step, I'll just go ahead and do it just knowing that that's going to happen when I start going into king. 6. LESSON 05 Splitting the sleeves: So what I'm going to do now, because although these are not symmetrical anymore, so I'm going to need to be splitting them because I need to do some extra work on this. Okay, now we do have a couple of options here. We either have an option to have these cut out of the shirt or have the shirt cut out of them. Usually I'll do the sleeves to cut of the shirt and I'll show you that in a second. So I'm going to go ahead and do split hidden, so now we have two of them going to hide. I'm going to work with this one. So now you can go ahead and add a key. So we can go ahead now and we're not going to get to that stage now, but let's say that's our piece and that's the key, which looks fine, right? The problem is when you print, it's not going to print that clean the piece, we're going to print something like this. Okay. Well, no matter how good the printer is, you're always going to have that gap. It's because of heat, it's because of the type of resin, it's because the wrapping, call it whatever you want to call it. You're always going to have that gap. And I hate that gap. I literally hate that because it just makes the figure look so bloody cheap and you'll notice it. If I go and put it like that, you'll notice just adds that gap here and here and it makes it look really crappy. All right? To prevent that from happening, we'll need to do a couple of things. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and, we don't have a poly group here. When I merged this, I didn't keep the poly groups. I think I'm going to go ahead round and round. This doesn't have to be exactly to the edge, but try to stay close to the edge as possible paint in a mask. I know you have to do it manually and it takes time. I love the fact that when you digital sculpt, people say you're now doing stuff manually. I'm going to go ahead round and round. You can do control and click just sharpens the masking. Now what I want to do is I want to do control. You notice in a second the control shift click. All right, and you're just going to hide that one that we created. And then I'm going to do order groups. Now what it did, it created three groups. Now I'll just hide this. And I have this control. And now it's going to be one model. When I hide this, I have two different poly groups. Okay, Now I can click on that and see how now to soften that, just do click on it, put it in the center. Just move this in a bit and scale it down. What it gives us, it gives us that nice lip. So now, even if it prints out with a gap, you get like a nice, you're not going to get that light going and it's still going to look like it doesn't look good now because we need to clean it. But you'll see in a second what I mean now, if I go in and I'll dynam this again, you can leave it like this but I don't like having edges that might interfere in my keying process. I'll usually just go in and just clean them up a bit to make sure. I'll usually use a flat brush. And smoothing flat, so I just, I need those parts to be flat a bit. Now if you want, you can even get rid of that edge. It's not that visible, but at that scale it's not going to be visible anyhow. But if you have like sharp edges, especially when you're doing something soft like that, while also on the subject of soft when you're sculpting, You'll notice that, especially when you're working with the client, going to tell you like, oh, I don't like that part, It's going to be too sharp and I always have to use exactly the same that it is like. Yeah. But in Digital, everything looks a bit too sharp. And we have to keep in mind that if this is going to be done in vinyl, vinyl being a soft material, you need to over sharpen stuff just a tad. Even when you're doing with SLA printing, even SLA softens the models a bit, you're losing a bit of that detail, especially. Especially sharpness, you'll get a bit of a call it a gauge blur. Like a bit of a I don't know, one gauging blur on each part when you're doing that. Right. All right. So you'll notice when we do that it's going to start affecting the shirt. So this is why we always, we're jumping between them and we might start moving some stuff around, moving the sleeve. And yes, you have to go back and make sure it doesn't affect the straps and I'll go through that before, you know, putting the piece out. All right, so now I want to do is move the other sleeve up. I'll duplicate this sleeve again. Okay, We'll use the one with one, move this up, hide it. That one I'm going to do inflate to it, so I'm going to do like a five. Then we'll do a bullion mesh. Okay. Now when we're doing this bullion mesh, you have to keep in mind a couple of things. Make sure you don't get super thin edges like that. All right, because these going to break super easily, especially when you're standing, especially if you're doing this in resin. Now, there are a couple of ways to fix that. One of them is make sure you can have this thinner. I'll go ahead and delete that. I'm going to go back to the shirt sleeve because I want to effect that one. Because you have to keep in mind that's the piece that's going to go into the shirt. You might need to go back. This part, this edge doesn't have to be thick, as I explained. It's just an extra precaution. Uh, and especially, you'll notice if you're a toy collector and if you have a vinyl toy or plastic or PVC, just pick up those toys and you'll notice the toys that have gaps into them. I don't know, they look a bit weird. I'm not talking about the toys that hands or arms or legs need to move because that's a different subject because those need the gaps between them because otherwise they're not going to work. I'm talking about figures that collect that are still in one pose on the ones that have magnets to them. They'll always have this nice lip that goes into the figure just so it can, and they look so much better. It's just a matter of jumping between the two. You'll notice I'm bringing these out and I'm bringing these in. You might say, well, we have a sharp edge now. We'll fix that. Just give me a second, because don't keep in mind that this one is going to cut out of the shirt. So I'm going to duplicate this. Move this up again, hide that. Go back to the one that I'm going to do inflate. I'm going to do inflate five. Now we still have a bit, but it's still better go in. Whenever you find a piece that's too thin, just go in. I had to move it a bit around and just add a bit of thickness. Okay, and we'll fix this in a second. Just give me a second. Now we'll go ahead and do a bullion mesh. I'll append the shirt, which is this guy, that's our new shirt. Now, now we have this again. We can go in and we can start smoothing it out. If I go ahead and smooth, you'll see it's still going to keep that edge because it created that with the bullion mesh and it's still going to keep it there now for this one, I'll keep it now and I'll do the other one. And then I'll do both of them because I want to keep the dynamish as low as I can and I'll do those when I have the other sleeve. For the other sleeve I'm going to do the same thing. I'm not going to record that one because I'm just going to spare you the trouble of watching it two times. Now we can move down to the other part again, which is the straps. We'll move the strap down, hide it, and keep the sleeve and the shirt, have them down, and then have a bully in. Okay. Now we can go in and see how that affects. Because you remember we moved some stuff around. Now you don't have to move only the shirt. Now you can go if you want, you can take the straps, although they're not visible, right? But make sure you have it selected. If I move them, it's going to move the straps. Now, the only problem with that is because you're not seeing, you don't know how much you're affecting the model. The good thing is when you do those moves unsolo the model moving some parts just hit solo. You're going to see if you mess something up for this piece. I don't have that many details. I don't have stitching. I will add stitching. But at the end of it, because I knew that I'm going to be moving these parts around, so I didn't want to mess up any stitching again, select it, move it a bit, and then I can go back to the sleeve and do like a mixture of two. I'm going to move these in because you have to think that those straps will affect the shirt a bit as well. We look in the back, it's not affecting the back anyhow. A good here, so we can move on to the next part. Now the next part is this piece, which is this one is going to be a bit simper. I'm going to move this down and I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm going to split them up, split hidden. I don't need the other one. Okay, now for this one I'm going to merge them. But before I merge two sub tools, especially when you have folds like that, I like to go in and just do a double check before just in case I have edges that going to overlap other edges. And it's just, and this way it's way easier to tweak because these two parts are separate. Because the moment you merge them, and let's say you have something like that, right? And you merge these two, it's going to create like you're going to lose that edge. You're going to lose that edge all entirely. So I try to make sure I don't have any of those. See, I have it here that's not visible. Because you always have to keep in mind if it's visible or not. All right, so move some stuff around and now we're ready to merge these two. Merge it down. Okay, once it's merged, go ahead, look around, see if something is looking. Now, let's go over the parts that we have. Ready? We have this part ready. The straps are almost ready. The shirt, half of it is ready. We have the head and we have the hair. 7. LESSON 06 Splitting the left arm: Now the sleeve is done. Let's move to the hand again. The hands are same part of the body with the body selected. Control. Take the lasso and I'm just going to go just select extra because you don't have to select to the edge. Just add a bit of extra just to make your life a bit easier. Command or control. Shift click and split hidden. Now with the shift click down and now we have the sleeves. Okay, Now I want the hand to cut out this, but if we look at the head now, it just looks like that. Like a gap, right? So to make it easier on ourselves, like you can go ahead and dyna mesh this and so on. But to make it a bit easier because going to go and use the shirt sleeve that we have and I'm just going to cut out of that even if it looks a bit weird Now, just give it a second, it's going to look fine. So we'll do bullion and we'll make bullion mesh. If I go ahead and append this, I'm going to do a pend body mesh now. And that's our hand and now I don't need that one. And I can go ahead and delete it. You'll see how we did the split. Now, if we print this like it is now, it's going to print out like that, okay? It's going to look just horrendous because it's going to have that gap. Because we add that key key, sometimes it doesn't fit right. We either have to send the hell out of it to make sure it fits even. The other thing is when you start adding glue, so let's say you add glue here. You're going to go and add glue here. The moment you glue it in, it's just going to drip out. Or you can see it because it's still going to leave a gap. And you can see it shining from the inside. And it just ruins the whole thing to fix that. Now, because we did the bullion thing, we don't have to do the masking again. Just move this up and we scale it in again. It doesn't have to be a huge smoothing. Okay, so you're happy with that? Can dynamish? We'll work on the hand once we get to the gun part. Okay. So now what I want to do is I want to have this hand cut out of that sleeve. So select the sleeve. And again, I'm going to go over and this is what's going to happen. See that's way too thin. Okay, Selecting this sleeve, just track this up a tiny bit. Something like that. Okay. Again, if you want, you can go back in and you can make this thinner. But from my experience, this works just work just fine. Left hand duplicate that I'm going to use. I'm going to keep this one up and I'm going to use this as the cut. With this selected, I'm going to go to inflate. I'm just going to go a five. Unsallow it. And then to double check, just make sure we have a nice gap. You can see it and look at it from the side. I mean, how lovely that looks, just looks nice and it just feels more natural because it feels like you have a hand inside the body. Now, if you want, when you're sculpting, when you split that, you can keep like the arm and just goes in. The problem with that is you have to make sure you have a lot of tolerance. You have to make sure the folds don't go through it. Because sometimes you might have a fold which is like really close to the skin and when you printed, that part is going to come out as a whole. Or it's just going to break for me, this one, because it's not going to be visible anyhow. You just want to make sure no light goes through it. When, right now that we're happy with this, we're going to go ahead and do a bully and mesh append. Um, now because we have it named, we have mesh left sleeve which is this left sleeve. I'm going to go ahead and save this. We can move to the next part. With the magic of editing, I went ahead and did the other sleeves. Now to recap, just going to go over and isolate all the parts that we have. We have the hair, we have the head, we have the left arm, we have the left sleeve. We have the shirt, which is not done yet because it's still going to be connected to the pants. I'm going to put this here. We have the straps, the shoulder holsters. We have the right arm, right shoulder. 8. LESSON 07 Right Arm and Bracelette: Time to move on to the other ones. All right. Now for this hand, you have a couple of options for me knowing that this is going to be painted. And I would like to do some leather painting on this and I would like to do some dry brushing. And I want to do some nice details. I'm pretty sure I'm going to mess up the skin paint to make sure that doesn't happen. What I'm going to do is I'm going to split the hand into three parts. I'm going to do this part and this part. And then the hand with the gun. Okay? So to do that we're going to just move everything to the bottom. I'm going to move this to the bottom as well. We're going to use this to cut our hand now because when I emerged, this is still has polygroups. This is why I said always keep your polygroups because you never know when you need them. Selecting the interior one, Delete hidden. Now if I dynam this 1 second, see why. Because it had that sleeve our problem. We can fix this. I'm going to go ahead and mask this part and the part on the top. What we're doing here, we're just trying to isolate so we can create multiple islands to see what I mean in a second. Now if I go ahead and do command, you're going to create these two, right? If I do that and I do auto groups, what it's going to do is now I have this as an auto group and I deleted everything that was inside. Okay. If I do closed holes, I should create these. Now I can go ahead and move this just closer to the edge. You'll see. Just going to save us a bit of time cleaning. I'll do the same for this one. Notice I have on that polygroup selected. Okay. Now going to do on Dynamite again. Now the dynamesh might be a little too low. If that's the case. I'm just going to raise it up a bit, then just smooth that part, you can hide those valleys like this. Just take the flattened brush and bring them to holding the old will flatten up. Like it's going to add terrain to your model to think of it as like adding a bit of clay. If you just leave it normally it's going to flatten but cut out of it. Keep that in mind. If you have pressed, it's going to remove, it's going to add it. If you just use it normally, that goes to at all of the brushes inside brush. Okay. So that's our leather strap. So we're going to be using this to cut out our hand. Now I'm going to take that, do a bullion mesh and it's going to do this. Okay? Now if I go ahead, you'll notice that I don't like this. I'm just going to add a bit of okay to fix that. I'm going to go in and I'm going to fix that part. That's why I said when you're going to do bulls and stuff like that, make sure to go around. And I mean, you can't fix it after you do bullion. Don't get me wrong. It's just the fact that it's easier to do it when you still have everything separated. It just makes a whole difference. Now when you do stuff like this is why I said sometimes when you dynamish and you merge stuff, you're going to lose some detail or you forgot some parts like this one. I need to make it look like a stitch. You can still sculpt. It doesn't matter if you're doing keying. It's not as if you can't go in and edit stuff and add some details. It's just like 99% of your sculpting should be done before you start doing any of this stuff. Now with leather you can do, what you can do is you can do a bit of an inflate. So you can do like a two. See how. And just adds that bit of, you know, gap there. Okay, So are we ready now? Let's see how that looks. Now we still have that block there to fix that. I'm just going to move it way better. Okay. So now I do make bully and mes. You don't have to do this. If you're a character, it's one piece and you don't want to go into the trouble of like splitting stuff and putting parts and you know, because you have to deal with mi, more parts than to, you know, hollow, add holes to them and so on. But as I said, when I work with this stuff, I always try to keep in mind when I'm painting this. Now if this was for a factory, I would have left that no problem because they do some masking techniques that they're not going to run into that problem. They know how to fix that for me. Because this piece is it's going to be a one off. And I know I have to hand painted. I'm just trying to remove some of the headaches that I might have. Okay. Again, I'm still going to do what I showed you in the other one. Still going to select that part, resize it at a bit of an edge. You still have to go at one point, you'll notice that I'm doing exactly the same thing for each part. The process, I'm doing multiple parts. I'm doing all the figures, so you can see multiple parts how to work with them. But I'm doing the same exact thing. It's not anything new. It's going to be a bit difficult at the start, but once you get the hang of it, you're going to fly through this because it's not difficult. Just a bit of time consuming if you just take the time to be a bit organized. Not crazy organized or something. Just a bit organized. Just saves you a lot of headache afterwards. Okay? Now, if you get that here, when we do the leather strap, I'll leave it because I need to say first if you get that, it just looks way better because it looks like the leather is pushing on the meat. It's not a bad look. I'm going to do the same here. Take that size it to the scale, move it in again. It doesn't have to be a huge edge, just something so we don't have that glue or light leaking through it. Okay, let's go clean this up a bit. We're going to have the leather strap which we're going to add a key here and a key here. And we're going to have the bottom of the arm, which is going to be, we'll have a key here that goes inside. And for this one I'm going to go maybe the male and female have this to be the female for both of them. We'll see once we get to the keying, sometimes depending on the thickness of the pee, we'll decide which goes. 9. LESSON 08 Working on the Holsters: Moving on to the next part. Now for the next part, I'm going to go to the holsters. And for this one I went ahead and did the gun. So you'll notice that this gun looks bad, but it looks that way because this gun is going to be sitting inside this holster. I know that this piece is going to be glued in. I use the same technique that I've showed you before. You see we have a gap. I've removed any extra parts that I know I can slide this in and I can glue it. And why did I do that again? Because I wanted this to be painted leather. Because you remember when I do this one, it's more of a planning as well. Not only because this is going to be leather. I want to be able to paint this with air brush. And then I can go in and I can do dry brushing without affecting the gun, without having to figure out how do I mask this and so on. And this one I can paint gun metal or do any details to it. And then I can glue it in ready and it's not going to be visible like the parts that are visible. It looks like a full gun because this is going to be tiny. Like it's maybe 2 centimeters or 3 centimeters high. So all right, now for the holsters. Okay. We have two holsters. We have this one. These are going to be attached to this. Now I'm still figuring out if I'm going to print this as one piece. I think I'm not. I'm going to go ahead and this piece is going to be keyed to that one here. For that one, I'm going to make sure we have enough thickness here because you want to make sure when I add a key to this I can go into that part. We're still going to need the key because when you're having surfaces like this, it's really hard to get them right. Although it's tiny, we're still going to go in and add a tiny key, even if it's small, if it pokes out of the other side. We can fix that after we can send it in. Makes your life way easier. And you know, these are going to stand. What I want to do now is I want these two and make sure that I don't have too much of them going in. So to do that, I'm going to take the move brush and I'm going to do what we did before, just move them out a bit while looking at your model. Like for this one, again, it's not a huge thing because it's a leather piece. But keep in mind when you're doing this on a piece that for example this one, because this one has a gun into it, right? If I start moving this around it, it's not, it's going to affect the gun for this. What I might do is I move it out. I'll put the gizmo here because it's taking a lot through that. I'm going to move this piece a bit out. Nothing too crazy. Then with the move brush, I'll do those subtle. Okay? Here, I don't need any bullion. The only thing that I'm going to do here, again, make sure it didn't affect it didn't affect the gun. All right. That is sitting in see it did affect the gun. Now I just the placement is not important to just make sure the gun when it cuts through it, we don't have too many parts that are intersecting because when we moved it, Yeah, that looks good. We do have these inside. You can go ahead and tweak this if you want. I didn't because it's not going to be visible Anyhow, I'm going to stick a gun into it. Anyhow, for this part, maybe for this one, we'll go ahead and smooth it. Now you'll notice when you smooth it, you'll ruin your sculpting details outside. Click shift and make sure you have face mask this way. It will only affect these faces and it's not going to affect the faces in the inside. On the outside like those are done. Now, again, in relation with three D printing, you have to keep in mind anything you move, it will affect the other pieces. You always have to go in and make sure if I move that a bit, did it affect the shirt? And it did. Now I'll move this down, I'll take the sleeve. Move that down with this selected can go in. See, that would have been like a bit of sending for me just to figure out. Instead of spending that time sending, I'll just go in and I'll move this part in and just make sure I get enough of a gap. When I'm going to glue this, it's not going to give me any headache. I don't think it's affects the shirt, but again, you're not going to lose a lot of time if you double check it here instead of figuring out when you print it. You're going to go, oh, why the hell isn't that fitting? It's hitting something. 10. LESSON 09 Preparing the pants 01: Let's move on to the pants. Now, you noticed when we laid out the parts, we notice that the pants have multiple pieces. So we need to go in and gather everything. I need the belt hoops, I need the belt strap I need, and I also need the pockets for this one. I will also need the belt and the buckle. Okay. And I'm going to go ahead and hide everything that I don't need. Those are my pants. Okay. First thing, I'm going to select this one again, because we have that nice polar group. I can go ahead select that, the lead hidden. If I do close holes, I have a beautiful model that I can work with and cut and it's just clean. Now for these I'm going to just dynamash them add some more subdivisions to them. Again, as I said before, while I'm here I'll just double check if when I sculpted or when I created them, did I have gaps. Like for example this one. It will cause problem in printing it. Just take the time, go through all your because I don't know if you've heard the expression, it's called watertight. So you want to make sure your piece is watertight. If you have gaps like this, Z is still going to create the interior of the model. It's still going to add those polygons. It's because it doesn't know if you want that to be removed. So I'm just going to go in and make sure I don't have any gaps that I don't need because I need this tight and I need this piece to be one piece and go around. See, it's a good idea to work in a different color because you can see the contrast better. That's why turn poly groups on. Okay, let's see the leather buck buckle it, leather strap or hoops, if that has any gaps were good. Now for the buckle, I'm going to add a bit of inflate to this, maybe see if three is good. I can go higher to because I don't, I don't want gaps on the sides. I don't want to gap here like I want to give the impression of a hole. But I don't, I don't want any big gaps. It's going to cause a lot of headache when painting. It's going to cause a lot of headache when All right. Do the same for this one. I'm going to add the dynamic subdivision to four. For these, again, four, apply them. Make sure the pockets doesn't go into the edge. The pockets here don't go over the edge the same on the other side. Okay. I think we are ready now for this one. I can't split the belt. I'm going to go battle through it and paint that belt manually. And then I don't mess up the paint that much. We're going to start with the pants. I'm going to move the pants to the top. Going to apply all the subdivisions. Make sure we have all the subdivisions applied. Apply. Okay. And then I'm going to go in and start merging them. I'm going to go here. Merge down again. Always. Okay. Merge down. Merge down. Merge down. Now we have the pants as one piece. I'm going to go ahead and raise it to 800 and do a dynamesh. Now, there is a technique for this one. You don't need to whenever you have a piece and you're not sure if it's watertight or what you can do is you can create a cube, make it a bit larger than your model, put it underneath it, turn the bullion, and then just go through its because if you think about it, this is how your printer works. It's exactly like that. If it's an SLA, it's SLS or if it's anything, it's still painting each layer this way if you have an area in the middle which is not filled. Then that's going to cause a bit of error. Usually, if I'm not sure you see this is what I'm talking about, it has an island inside of the pants. Although now I'm not worried about that. Why you may ask? Because I don't know if you remember, this guy is wearing boots. Anything underneath the knee is going to be deleted, so I'm not worrying about it for now. But if he wasn't, then I would have gone in and made sure I don't have that gap here. This is if you have a complex shape and you're not sure if you have any interior areas. Because then you'll see when we move this into mesh mixer or any other software that hollows your pieces, you'll notice that if you have Dors like this, it might just give you some headaches when you start adding a bit of what's it called, drainage holes if the walls are not thick enough or you have multiple walls because that will happen if you have multiple chambers. And then when the printer is trying to print and knows that that chamber is one piece and the drainage hole for the other piece, then you might run into trouble of having suction areas that failed prints. This is why I double check. Okay. Now for the other strap, for this one I'm going to keep separate. I want this to slide in. I can make this work for these parts. I'm not sure if that work, this is the first time I'm trying this because I want to print one of this and put them in. You'll notice this on this is just an homage to Hell Boy and Hell Baby, because I have a toy named Hell Baby was a commission as well. I wanted to use those for my collectors who know my work. All right, let's get to the other one. This one. Now this one, I already went ahead and merged with parts like this. What I might do is I might do like a two inflate just to get a nice and then raise this to about five. Go around as I've shown you with the other one, make sure we do, we don't have any huge gaps. All right, for the buckle. I think I can go a bit higher with the buckle. I can do maybe two and then I go to seven. We should be good. All right. So, let's go ahead, maybe this one I can bring it out a bit. It's going to be tiny anyhow, but All right, the provision of five. I'm going to apply the letlow. Let's dynamash this into one piece. Looks good, go around, make sure everything is looking good. Now, hide everything. Just let the pants. And I'm going to cut this. I want to go around, make sure if this is hitting anything. Now if you want to double check, you can do also have this and move it up and down. Usually this is how you test if parts will fit inside other parts should be co, come in nicely. Maybe a bit to fit here. I'm going to do. Just going to make the move brush really large. It affects a just move these out of the way. Just the dad, we should be good on this. Now for the bullets. I already made sure that these are a bit smaller than the hole because these are going to be glued in. I'm not sure if they're going to sit in. The problem with when you do resinin, you paint them. If you take these out, they might just chip and scratch the paint. We'll see. I'm going to see I can have them sit in nicely. If not, I'm just going to glue each one in. Okay? And for this one, I don't have to tell you this, but I will. You just need one. You export one and you duplicate it inside the printer. You don't have to take all of these out, you just need one of them out. All right, so let's do another recap just so we can have the hair have the head with the hair back, the left arm. Left. 11. LESSON 10 Preparing the pants 02: We have the leather bracelet, the right right hand, right arm. The holsters. Holster straps. Actually the gun that's sitting in the strap, the other sleeve, the shirt, which we need to cut out of the pants next and the holster. And now we have the pants, I'm just going to slide them here. Then we have the, the other leather strap. Okay, So off to the next piece. We have the shirt ready. Move it, that down. And we have the pants ready. We'll move these down, hide everything, and only show these too now because we have a nice clean shape on the top. We'll go around and see if we have any parts that are going through the pants. Going to select the pants and cut that out of how clean is that? Oh man, I love it when it comes out like that. I'm just going to go ahead and Bullying, bullying. And you'll notice that I'm still naming everything like the magic of editing, but I'm naming stuff, it helps. Let's go and mesh this. I'm going to go pend shirt. I don't need that shirt anymore. So I can go ahead and delete it. Now for this, again, same thing. If you would leave it like that. The amount of times it happened to me gets annoying. At one point, you make sure it's perfect, you make sure the print is good. And then when you paint print a piece, it comes out like that. It's the most horrible thing you can do with your figures. Annoying because what happens with flat areas, especially like these, when you cure the material because it goes into resin, it goes into alcohol, it goes into the UV chamber, it gets Dn up, sometimes it just buckles up and just adds a bit of wave to it. When that happens, this one when it sits on top, and if this one has a cold, imagine this one has a bit as well. Then they just sit on top really weird, and you get that ugly, ugly gap in the middle. Okay, for this one where I'm going to select, I'm going to select the two groups. Not only I need this and I need the purple, because sometimes it creates that as well. Click on that, move, your Gizmono, the middle. Now what I want from the side, just scale it down. You can rotate this and make it as straight as possible From the side. You can go in a bit deeper with this. Like you noticed, I stayed away from the edges. I went a bit deeper. Why? Because now, if I go ahead and cut out of the pants, this is what we get. I don't want the edge to be thin, I want this to, you have like a nice slope inside. Still still need to fix this, but you're just trying to prove a point. Okay. Do this to about 1,700 dynamin. We take the flat and we clean it. Now when we have areas like this, don't leave them like that, they're going to cause headache. What you do, take your clay brush, you can either go in or add. Just try to have more uniform shape. Don't too many valleys and peaks. When it comes to keys and connected parts, just take my word for this. If you don't want to take my word for it, just try it printed and you'll see when you have some warping, how annoying these pieces are when go in together. I have a friend named Evan that taught me so much about three D printing and all that stuff. When I taught him how to key like this, he used to call me crazy, like, oh man, why do you do it so clean? And it's like, oh, this is waste of time. And then he started doing it and now he absolutely loves this technique. And it just saves him a lot of headache when it comes to. And gluing and sanding, and also he does casting as well. So when you're also, you cast your own toys. You have to think of so much stuff. Okay? So something like that. It's good. Again, the edge doesn't have to be big. It's just a matter of when I cut into that just gives me a nice, you know, you see, see this is what I'm talking about, this. I don't want any valleys like that when I get these. I just want to go in and, you know, not going to get rhythm them entirely. But at least I can make this area as flat, as clean as I can. You'll notice that it's a lot back and forth. It's a lot of jumping between each one and just seeing if it looks good. All right. Now now that edge will fix it once we bully in. Now I'll duplicate this, keep one of them. It doesn't matter which one because I didn't name these. But I'm going to go ahead and inflate for this one. I might go for six, even just make sure I have enough. Now if you think that some edges are thick, again, go to select the pants or the edge, the piece you're not going to cut. To make sure you have like a big move brush. It doesn't affect. You'll noticed when I dynamished this, we got Yeah, Don't worry about it. We can fix those after. Let's go ahead and do a dynamish bullion. Sorry, pants are dynamishedh. Now we have these, we can go in and we can start cleaning them. I'm going to do this dynamish that then now you need to notice something. When you do smoothing, make sure you double check after you clean. Because what it does sometimes smoothing adds to add some volume. This is why one of the reasons add like that gap, because I know I'm going to go back and smooth it. But still, even if you do just before you export and before you decimate your pieces, just double check them and make sure because it's easier to go like this rather than after you print you have gaps or overlapping areas. Right now for this, I don't like how sharp this is because at the end of the day this is a shirt. When you have areas like this, you can go in and fix them. Yeah, one of the things that I don't like about when prepping the models and you have to do a lot of zero meshing and dyna meshing and so on, you'll lose some of that detail. This is why you always have to keep in mind to make sure you get you get enough resolution. And go back and double check. Just cleaning those edges. All right. We can move, you can always go down and you can have each part double check it on the other part. Have the shirt cut out of the pants. Have the pants underneath and have them see if you have any intersections. It looks good. Even if you get an error and it prints like that, still doesn't look horrible. You have some edge to work with. 12. LESSON 13 Splitting the boots 02: The other. I'm going to go ahead and apply and delete lower. I'm going to do a resolution of maybe 600. See if that holds all the details I want. Then we get to this part. You see how the part this is what I was telling about, testing them out. Right. I'm going to go ahead and hide everything. I'm going to take the part that we had before. I'm going to do that one. That's one. I'm going to take this and move it down. You see how we get those islands like gaps which we don't want on so many of them see that just double walls and headaches or that part just floating in midair. We'll go back to this and to fix this, easiest way to do it, like you can start moving stuff around. Just take spheres and shove them inside. That just does it and you move them to hide. You don't want to be visible but just just filling those gaps. That's how I fix most of these because it's an easy trick. It doesn't affect the model. I can see how you have this here. Like I should've went in and this is why I said, don't get rid of your poly groups. Um, I can select this now. I should have done this at the start, but he sometimes and just go to inflate and do three. And just do the same here, three. Now if I do a dynamish again, again with this one as well, I did the same adder. Should have double checked because I don't want that edge because it's not going to be visible anyhow. It's just a tiny, but sometimes you'll miss something having those poly groups ready for you, it's just a pity not to use them. You see, I still have that gap here. I don't like that. I can select that and I can move it to the. This is why I said it really depends how visible that part is. Because this is going to be tiny. Half of it is not going to be visible. Anyhow, you got to select what parts you need to spend time, or again, it comes back to material if the client wants to have those type of accessories that you can remove, or multiple shoes, or those type of Nikes and Jordans that you ca, put on the character and it's made like a different material, then you have a lot more work to do to make sure. Now, here's one part I was talking about casting. If you were casting this or you couldn't do that, I like the caster would have sent you somewhere. If you would have sent him this, we wouldn't be happy because those would break when you pull them out of the mold. You can go in with also the inflate. The problem with inflate it does this, this is why I'm not using it. Like you can try pinch as well, but again, it's not great. I'm not sure if I'll just add that because I don't know if there is a goal there. But just to make sure I don't have any holes. Again, I'll go back to my model, then I'll double check to see if I have anything that's standing out and I don't, Which is great. Now, I went ahead and merged the top of the boot with the bottom. And then we can go ahead and duplicate these. We can get that nice edge. And don't forget to add a bit of an inflate. I'm going to go do five, this one then we can go go ahead and append the new boots. I'm going to go and delete these two. Okay? Okay, now we have this. Just going to go ahead and dyna mesh that. I want these edges to be clean. All right, let's do one recap. That's our character. We have the boots here, the pants, the shirt, the holsters, the belts, the shirt sleeve, the gun that goes into the holster. We have the other holster. The straps put these here. The arm, so that's the arm with the bracelet, the hand, the bracelet can put that here. And we have the other sleeve, other arm, the head, and the hair. These parts are going to be just one piece. Then we have the final pieces which are going to be a bit more tricky. Which are the guns then. Yeah, don't forget, I need to also do this one. I'll do this one first. We have the holster because it's pretty simple. Now finally, we have those tiny details which I'm not going to use. These are not going to be used, these are not going to be used, but we must not forget about these. I'm going to go ahead and merge these. I'm going to move these down. I'm going to take the shirt, move that down as well. I'm going to make sure the buttons now, for the buttons, I think we can go and make them a bit larger. So I'm going to do maybe two. Yeah, just makes that thread stand out a bit more. I'm going to do maybe dynamite of four, then I'm going to merge these down. Now I have that, it was one piece. 13. LESSON 16 Keying Pants and Boots: Now that we have the key for the pants, we'll move that down. Take the pants, move them down. Now we can bully in that. Here again, we're already here. We'll do the ones for the legs. Just make sure you have this in, we'll do the other one. Just push that in. Again, always double check with what it's connected with, have transparency on because sometimes you'll do a key and maybe it a bit too thin, I'll show you that and when we get to the holsters. All right, those look really good. Now if you don't want to do auto group multiple times because we hope we don't want the auto groups here anymore. We'll do auto groups like that right now. If we see we can go ahead and select this. Just make sure because sometimes it might select the one inside. Just make sure that doesn't happen, split hidden. Now these keys are for the boots. I'm going to keep those up. I'm going to hide those two because I don't need them now. Okay. Now we have one that cuts here and these two, I don't have anything else that attaches to you can always double check because this one I don't want it to be attached to the belt. I'm just going to add it there now. Again, I will do make bullion mesh pants are ready. Let's do the shoes. So you have the keys for them. I went ahead and move the shoes down and now we have the keys that cut into the top. The shoes will not be connected in anything. I might create holes for magnets at the end, but we'll figure this out a bit later. Let's go ahead and do a bullion on this. You'll notice that I'm not worrying about renaming now. We'll still have to do a bit of renaming once we finish all of them, because that then becomes crucial, really important, when we have to export each piece and know what parts are reprinting. 14. LESSON 17 Keying Holsters and Straps: Let's do this part. Let's move this, and let's move that together. This is what I was saying about parts that might go through it, right? We'll select the keys and we can drag that. This one because it's thin. If I drag it in, it will reveal the key inside, which is not a problem because the gun is not going to sit into it. You can do that. It's not a huge problem. But I'm going to do is I'm going to resize this. Okay? So it doesn't poke out on that side. But I don't mind if it pokes out on this side. Because once I glue these on, I can send it, but I'll try to make it. Because the problem is if I make this here, it's going to be so thin it might break, not going to even worry about that. I'm just have it go through it then I'll cut that and I'll send it. Once I get to the sending stage, I'll do order groups. I'm going to do split hidden. Now I'll move that down, hide that one. This is how it's going to split on that part. I'm going to do make bully and mesh this way when I glue these parts and we'll see what I mean in a second. You also have to keep in mind that you'll notice something with these keys that the outer part is a bit larger and bigger. Now that you look at this, see, it's not that a huge gap. When I glue this, I'm just going to have to send this a bit down. Should fit in just fine, and it's not visible from the inside. This is why I was saying sometimes you have to check to make sure it doesn't go through the model. But for this one we want it to go through the model. All right, what else? Let's do the holsters. It we'll move both holsters. Okay. We'll take this because this one will have the same technique as these. What I'm going to do is I'm going to merge these two down just for a second. I don't have to do it for each piece and put transparency on. And I'm going to make some keys with this one. You, you don't make the key, so it pops out on this side, the ruin your figure ruins your stitching. And you have to make sure it's going through the whole piece because this piece is so thin. You see you don't want these. You got to make sure it goes through it and it's big enough. Thick enough. Again, you want that part to be hidden as much as possible. Try to have that key not visible from any side as much as you can. This way makes it easier for you when you have to clean. Yeah, sometimes just auto saves, especially when it gets to 30 million polygons. But I try to keep them as high as I can just so we don't lose any details. Now with this, I'm going to do the same. I'm going to go ahead and resize this as much as I can, while at the same time I don't want to make it too small because I need to have a bit of support, okay? Now I'm going to do auto groups, I'm going to split hidden, okay? Now I can go back to the other one, transparency, and do the same thing here. Again, make sure, go through, make sure it doesn't go out that other side solo. It, the keying part is not difficult. The only difficult let's say about this is it becomes a bit overwhelming. Because you have like so many stuff to think about. But once you do it, I don't know, once or twice, it's just becomes easy. You'll find your own workflow. With this, we'll do auto groups and split hidden. Okay. Now these are done. I can hide them and I have these keys that will cut through it. Both of them will cut through that. Okay. Now you can merge these if you want. You can merge the keys because these two are going to cut from the same thing. One other thing I forgot to see. I have to redo this. This one is way too close. It will cause some problems. When I'm going to, this might break. I'm worried about that whenever you have problems like that, it's always better to fix them beforehand. Okay. I think I'm going to redo all of them. This one as well. I'm going to delete that for this because these are poly groups. I'm just going to select them. I'm showing you this just so you can see that it doesn't matter, screwed up the keying, it's not going to affect the model that you worked on. It's not a huge deal. It's easy fix. That's why I created those keys because I wanted something that doing this as full time job, I wanted something that I can key really fast, low poly, without being too heavy. That's the only thing I forgot to check is I want this to be centered from these signs. It doesn't get too close to any of the edges. We want to make sure it looks good on the other ones. Let's go ahead and do that one as well. One thing I had to make sure is make sure are rotated as well. Okay. We have enough edge on the side, enough edge on the other side, make sure here we don't have anything floating here now. One looks good. Okay, now we can do auto group and isolate this. And I can isolate that. Now I can split hidden, move these under the straps. Do if I do now, much better. Now I have enough space here and enough space here. The piece is not going to break. When I attach to those, I'll do bullion for this one, the process is the same for all the other parts. I'm going to show you all the process. If you want to skip ahead, you can go ahead and skip ahead. I just wanted to make sure you see how each piece is being keyed. If I go ahead and do a pen, put that in, I can go ahead and delete these two. 15. LESSON 18 Keying Arms Hands and Bracelette: And the next one would be the arms. With this one I'm going to do the same center this, put it in. I'm going to keep this long. But again, double check like always, always double check to see if it affects the model or not. Do auto, groups, do split hidden, take the key, drop it down. I'm showing you like you can work inside your model. You don't have to do my thing of dropping down stuff. As I said, I always try to say this, my workflow isn't perfect. You don't have to do exactly what I'm doing. I'm just showing you my workflow. Sometimes you know how it is you've been working for so long on a type of project that you might be doing some mistakes. Or maybe someone will look at this and like, oh, there is like a simpler way to do this. I'm pretty sure there is way simpler stuff and way easier. That's how I've been working and that's how I work on the projects and it works fine for me. Okay. Now I'll take this, move it down. I'll take the other one and move that down can hide these. Now I can merge these two. Put these down. Now here's the thing. You know how these are visible now they're not merged. But if I go in and I'll do bullion, it's going to create a bull. Both of these meshes and with the parts cut out of it. See pen just saves you that extra step of doing doing stuff twice or three times. You'll notice that I don't do okay. Always. Okay. Because sometimes you might delete stuff easy in Z brush and I don't want to do that because you can't bring it back. You have to make sure you saved it. This is why. Okay, what's next? So now the hands have it here. Redone. Oh, let's see. Okay, let's see. Okay, let's. No, no, we're not done. We have this guy. Okay, for this one? Yeah, I'm going to add the key here. We'll add the key here. I'll move that for this key. I'm going to make it a bit wider. Yeah, with these keys you can make them. We like that. Still going to work? No problem. I think this is like version 2.0 because I changed them a bit, like the first one was really crap. Each time I change them, I update them. And you can go ahead and download them. You'll always have the latest version for this one. I want to double check because this is a tiny part and I don't want to go through that piece too much. So I'll do auto group split hidden that key. I'm going to move it down. Then I'm going to take this hand, I'm going to add a tiny one for this one as well. I'm going to. Yeah, I'm just going to keep it like that. It's going to be a tiny piece. Anyhow, I'm going to do a group, see how sometimes might select the one in the middle. And this way, you know, oh, that's the one inside. One of the reasons that I've put that is too easy to differentiate between them. And also the second thing is when you print, sometimes the edges, I don't know, the pile up some gunk or they print up a bit crooked. And this way I know it's going to fit in nicely. And for me, it works really nice. Okay, here's the thing. You'll notice that with the keys, it has a bit of a gap. If that gap is too large, you can tweak it in the keys that I send you. You can tweak the gaps to, to your own liking. If you know what's the distance that usually your printer prints. I'm not that much technical into this usually if it looks good. All right, here's the problem that I didn't check. You see how that added like an extra face? Well, this happened because I wasn't careful. What I did here is I did that. I didn't check to make sure this goes right straight in. Now I have to redo that. So I'm going to do redo the keying here. I'm going to make sure those goes in. Okay. I'm going to do order group for this one. I'm just going to delete this one. To delete hidden, go back to this and I'm going to do split hidden and I'm going to take the key and move it down. Now, we don't have that. That's why I always say like double check. Double check because it's, you might miss something. Bully in, make bully mesh. I think that's the last part we have. 16. LESSON 20 Setting up Calipers: Of the final steps in Zbrush is to size this to add a size to it for export. I'm going to go ahead and append a cube. Okay, I'm going to move this to the top. I can delete this because I use that just for naming it. Because in Zebra names, the file, depending on your first sub tool, I'm going to size this. It holds the figure inside the gun, just from the top of the figure till the end of the boots. It doesn't have to be perfect. Okay, here is what I used to resize my figures inside. Plug in, I use a plug in called caliper masters. All right. There are multiple ways of doing this, but this is the way that I use and I've been using for a while now. What I love about this is I can use multiple sizing, I can save the sizing and so on. While you have the gizmo, you go ahead and turn off the gizmo. You go back to the transpose, you make sure you have constrained into y because we want the y axis. And I'm going to click here on top. And then just do set caliper point. And then I'm going to click on the bottom and they set caliper point. And this is the caliper here. I'm going to go in and type in eight, and I'm going to select custom inches. Now if I tell a display measurement that's 8 ", now I know my figure is 8 ". The best part about this is I can save it, and I can save this as a caliper unit of 8 ". Now one more step and the figure is going to be ready to take into mesh mixer or whatever other software you want to be using. I know there are a lot of you can do to box, there is to box Pro, but I'm using a mesh mixer for that. The next step is about just going in and decimate. And I'm not going to go over all of them because it just takes a lot of time and it's just the same thing. Decimation is just making sure the printer and the software can handle the same because this head is 4 million and you can't send that for printing, you don't need that much usually. This is my rule of thumb. Anything that has details, let's say torso pants, maybe those. I'm going to keep at 250, let's say pants, I'm going to do 250 K. It's going to go ahead and analyze the mesh. And it's going to go ahead and decimate this. From 5 million polygons down to 250 K, more or less, right? And this is why I'm always you, I'm not going to go through each one of them because it just takes a long time for each one to happen. So I'm going to show you this one and I'm going to do the head, and then I'll do the other ones. And then we can jump into a mesh mixer and prepare the models for sending them to your printer slicer. Okay, so now what I want to show you, this is the figure with 249. This is the figure with 5 million. You can't tell the difference exactly. That's the whole process of decimating. I'm just going to do the head again for this one. I'm going to go from 4 million down to 250. You can go lower. I think even 250 is an overkill. But again, it's just a thing of your workflow and how you got used to working. Because sometimes you'll work with jewelers, or sometimes we'll do like a pendant or something like that and they might print it at five microns or some crazy like that. And then you need those details so you make sure you don't lose anything for this one. We're not going to do that anyhow. But this is my rule of thumb when it comes to splitting pieces because then it's easier for me to decide if it has a lot of details. 250, if it's smooth areas and stuff like that. It's, I don't know, 150, 75,000 If it's a tiny piece, 30,000 or 20,000 Again, I'm going to show you, this is the piece at 245, and this is the piece at 4 million. No difference, looks great either way. And this is the final step inside Z brush. As you noticed, I went ahead and named each piece. Now naming is important, so you know which part are you printing, which part has it failed, which part you need to reprint. And then also if you start working with clients and you start sending them these files and they tell you, all right, shirt pants or TCM. Ctm. That's the one that has a bit of problems. You know which files you need to fix. It's also a thing of a workflow and also keeping tidy. All right, for the last step, I'm just going to go ahead and export these. To export these, I'm, you can go export and you can export each piece, but that takes a bit of time. So you can go into Z Plugins, you go into Subtool master, not scale Master. Subtool Master, You have something called export. Then you select your file format. 17. LESSON 21 Hollowing in Meshmixer: And then it's going to go through each sub tool and save that. Now for the next step, you can freely choose whatever software you find helpful for hollowing your models. Now you can keep your models full, but I don't recommend that. Now for small parts like the holster and the straps and the tiny holsters, I'm not going to hollow those because the amount of materials inside, the amount of materials inside is not that huge. Right? So what we're going to do now, I'm going to go ahead and open up a mesh mixer. And you can download for free or you can use something called a chat box. And you can also download Chet Box for free as well. Models inside mesh mixer. We can start hollowing parts. Now for this you can imagine I'm not going to add any hollow to the holsters. I'm add any hollowing to the gun. None to the straps as well. The most, I'm going to add hollow for a lot of parts who have a lot of volumes For this one I'm going to go edit hollow. Usually I'll just leave everything as it is. Just do this again, I'm going to do the pants and then edit, except then I'm going to go ahead and do the rest. I went ahead and hallowed each piece. Now for the last step, just go in, Select each one from the list and go export. And save that. Go ahead and do that for each one. 18. LESSON 22 Chitubox and Drainage holes: Now I'm going to show you the same workflow for the hollow inside che to walk. We're going to use the same OBJ files for that one. I'm just going to take each part on its own. I'm going to do shirt import that in for this one I'm going to hollow yeah, wall thickness. I want the wall thickness to be two and I'm going to do start, it goes about that really fast. And then also it gives you a preview of how, how that's going to work. Now for the final step which I do in chat box because believe it or not, adding holes in drainage holes inside mesh mixer is difficult, let's put it that way in chat box is just amazing. Here's what I do. I'll hide the holes and I'll put them around 3 millimeters size. I'll hide them in keys. If I have a key, I'll just create a hole. Make sure it goes through. Uh, here, do another one here. Another one here. Here's a amazing thing about to box. It also saves your keys. If you would like to print those out, I never do. I don't need those. Let's say you're putting this on the bed like that and it prints all. Sometimes it will tell you, okay, we're getting I'm going to show you that with the form labs software. Sometimes if you have that, what I'll do is I'll add extra ones outside. But for that maybe the hole a bit smaller, maybe like 2 millimeters or 250. I'll add a hole here. Maybe for the depth, I'll make it a bit tiny because sometimes it's just going to ruin your model. I'll add here. Okay. Just to make sure it gets enough. Now if you want to make sure you're not, I'll add extra Danish holes because usually if it's not going to affect my model, I don't need to fill them up or I don't need to because let's say you add a drainage hole here, right? When you print this. You need to go in and fix it, but sometimes you can't without doing that. Sometimes there maybe you're working on a piece which has details from all over and it's just, I don't know, you're printing a sphere, for example, or a helmet and you're still going to have that part and you don't have any part to disguise. And this is usually how I hide all my start. Okay, and then we'll do to box, add that one there, for example. With this you can hide some stuff because we have the head split in a weird way because we're going to have hair here. We can add one here if you add another here if you want. Hopefully doesn't need more drainage holes. All right, once that's done, I'll go ahead save as selected model and it's going to save it as an STL. All right, we'll do another one. Let's do the right boot and let's hollow it, 2 millimeters start. Okay. Now let's go ahead and add holes for this one. Maybe eight. It's not working. You can do is you can raise this up and you can do the hole from the inside out. For some reason it's working there. For some reason it's not working there. I'll add one here that should be enough now for these. If you've seen my making off, you'll see how I fill these holes with resin and the UV before curing them. One tip is when you print any of the pieces, always make sure to leave a hole. All the gases inside the resin escape. The piece doesn't break because it doesn't fully cure it. Always going to be curing do pants that one the same Do hollow. I'll add one for the key doesn't work, make it smaller. I'm going to do two should be working. This is why sometimes to box is a bit weird with hollowing. If I do the hollow inside inside mesh mixer, I don't get that problem. I think it's because maybe I'm, maybe I'm doing something wrong here. In the previous versions it didn't have precision, percentage. Maybe I should be changing something to have more precision. But something like that, I'm trying to hide as much as I can inside. Now let's say for some reason you can't hide it and you need to do whatever you do. Don't hide them in areas like this, crevices and stuff like that because they're going to be horrible. You can't send them but actually add them in areas which are play like that because then you just fill the hole and it's super easy to send and you get a flow for each piece. Now it's just a matter of going over each one, the light sleeve, again doing the same thing, hollowing it. Let's do a precision of 90% if that makes a difference. It takes longer because then the interior one has to have more resolution. Okay. Do 3 millimeters that worked. Just make sure how long this is. Doesn't do a hole on the other side. Because I've done this a couple of times. Usually I'll forget how long the cylinder is. As long as these are hidden, don't worry. You can add as many as you want. 19. LESSON 23 Preform: All right. Now that we are inside preform, I went ahead and added three pieces, the pants, the head, and the shirt. Usually how I work is I'll tell preform to do an auto orient sometimes it sometimes it doesn't. I end up orienting it how I think it's going to work. I've been doing this for a while. Okay. Once I'm happy with that, I'll just go in until it at generate and it's going to go ahead and generate supports for that part, and that's what it comes up with. Usually it adds more than enough. You can go in and tweak them, but usually does a really good job. I'll do auto orient. Again, the thing with orienting, I've used to do this manually with like a B nine software and when I used to print on a Moi, you have to try to stay away from areas which have details. I don't want any supports on his face. That's obvious. I will try to have the supports in areas I can send easily ruining the design. I'll do that. You'll notice in a second what I meant about now. This works fine, but the problem is you have a cup, which is this. If you leave this to print, it's going to fail because I know the supports have been added here in the top of the head. You can print the piece like that and you won't have any cups. Let's see if I generate supports now. All right, and that works nice because it doesn't add. Maybe move this a bit because I don't want any supports on the nose. I think something like that works good because let's say you're going to have supports here, but that's going to be covered by the hair, everything else is going to come out really nice. Or you do have the option to print it like this. Again, just make sure you look at it from all sides, maybe a bit lower. Then if you auto generate, again you won't have suction cups because remember we have drainage hole here and we have a drainage hole here. I think I'm going to leave it like that because it might just get rid of that or just make it on the back a bit and do and generate it again because I want this part to be clean, it's going to be easier. Half of his neck is going to be covered by the shirt. Anyhow, for this one, again, a orient, as you can see with the auto orient is hit and miss. It's not always the best option. I mean, you do have the options to tell it where the base is and then try again, but usually it's pretty stubborn about where to put supports, something like that, maybe on the side. See if that has that works, then I'll do auto generate. What I love about fo labs and Pre form is you have this assesses your pieces and it tells you if you you're going to have any problems with the print. And I'm pretty sure a couple of new software do that now or you can print this the other way around like that. But then you've got to make sure you have support. I think this way it will work nicely. We're ready to print now. Obviously I'm going to bring in the other parts as well. Pieces like this are usually really weird to print because they're going to be filled with supports and I think something like that should work just fine. I'm going to go auto generate selected. Yeah, that's good. That's really, can actually do auto orient on this. See that brings us that's pretty good as well those pieces already. Now the next step is to send this to the printer and we're ready to print.