July 24, 2015 | By Alec

While we’ve seen 3D printed tributes to video game franchises before, most are more playful than artistic. However, the monstrous and awesome sculpture visible above, 3D printed by Myminifactory’s Italian designer Francesco Orrù as a tribute to the upcoming DOOM release, certainly fits in the artistic category. Amazingly detailed, the sculpture of this monster was based on the preview art for the upcoming game.

Now the name of Francesco Orrù doubtlessly sounds familiar, because we’ve been seeing quite a few of his designs lately. You might know him as one of the in-house designers at MyMiniFactory.com, where he specializes in Zbrush digital sculpting. In the real world, he is also a master’s student at Kingston University. An avid guitar player, he has especially gathered praise for a series of gorgeously designed and intricate 3D printed guitars, like this recent model inspired by nature.

However, this latest sculpture is taking things into a different direction. As he explains to 3ders.org, he wanted to pay tribute to a fantastic and long-awaited game franchise. ‘I thought that was a very cool character to model as I am very passionate about organic shapes and sculpting freely from a dynamesh sphere,’ he says about the model. The design itself was based on a few pictures of the cover art of DOOM. ‘The main inspiration of this project was the recent launched trailer of the upcoming shooting game DOOM 4. Probably one of the most frenetic shooting games ever with Unreal Tournaments and Quake,’ he says. He also used some references found in Google images.

The design process itself was quite time consuming, taking about three whole days from start to finish, with several hours of painting the model after 3D printing not included. ‘First of all I've added a Zsphere and I build a skeleton or what we can generally call a base mesh that represent an armature for the model. This is a pretty nice workflow to start with in order to define the primary shapes of the model, keeping a low polygons number and study more the proportions of the model more than the details of it,’ he explains.

After that first step, he began working with an adaptive skin under Dynamesh, with a low resolution. ‘At this point using mainly my preferred 3 brushes (Move, Curve tube, and Trim dynamic) I blocked in the primary shapes of the entire model using symmetry during the sculpt,’ he explains. ‘[Then] split the model in various subtools depending from the anatomy helped me to work with a more fluid workflow because you can isolate precise parts, masking or selecting them. What I did to finish the sculpt was to increase the resolution of the model while still maintaining  a good topology using the Zremesh algorithm. Define more fine details with Dam standard and Form soft it's a classic task if we want to show up the anatomy of the model, in particular when we got a creature that is very organic.’

As a finishing touch, Francesco subsequently used Tpose master as a plugin to create a clone of the mesh and posed the high-poly sculpt into a more easy, dynamic and asymmetrical way. ‘Don't forget also that alpha and different skin textures can add a lot of more realism to your final model if you have enough density on the surface to work with,’ he advises budding designers.

The model was then cut into eight different parts, all positioned to minimize the amount of support material necessary. ‘Having 8 different subtools before to export as STL and import everything in Netfabb it's always a necessary step to decrease the number of the polygons of our statue because different slicing programs can react differently with height density meshes. I usually tend to decimate in different steps at a 40% - 50% quality in order to keep almost the same details each time,’ he says.

This complex sculpture was subsequently 3D printed in about 15 hours spread out over two sessions, using a Dremel and a layer height of 0.2 mm. The supports generated were very easily removed and Francesco told us that he was very pleased with the results. ‘The post processing that I did for this creature include a very quick glue phase of 5 minutes and around two hours of acrylic painting where I choose the color scheme and added few layers to give some transitions between darker and lighter areas. Once the color was dry enough I've also added a soft layer of varnish on top to give a very cool shiny effect to the model,’ he says.

The results certainly look amazing, and most importantly: you can easily recreate them yourself as Francesco has made all 3D printable files available through myminifactory here. It’s just one of those amazing objects that would be almost impossible to recreate without a 3D printer. ‘The best benefit I would say is simply that having a normal 3D printer and the ability to design a cool statue of opur preferred characters or creatures we can have a final statue at home without to pay 50 pounds or more in a shop,’ he tells us. And we completely agree.

 

 

Posted in 3D Printing Applications

 

 

Maybe you also like:


   





Leave a comment:

Your Name:

 


Subscribe us to

3ders.org Feeds 3ders.org twitter 3ders.org facebook   

About 3Ders.org

3Ders.org provides the latest news about 3D printing technology and 3D printers. We are now seven years old and have around 1.5 million unique visitors per month.

News Archive