Setting up Nemesis Figurine for 3D Printing (Cults3d)

New week and new exciting 3d stuff is ahead. Few days ago I have finished Nemesis Fanart miniature (few posts back).

But you can't use it in any way apart from rendering at this point, so let's upload it to Cults3D Website so people can download and 3D print it.

This is our final model:

But we can't just export it right to a 3D printing preparation software because:

5 million polygons in total

It's 5 million polys heavy at the moment - no 3D printer software can process such large amount, so we have to decimate it in Zbrush first:

Decimation will reduce the polycount but keep all the nice features

I like decimate to 5% or even 3%, it mostly depends on how much of the model feature is being eaten. It's absolutely safe to to loose the polycount as much as possible because 3D printers are not so precise and you and on a small 90mm miniature you will not get absolute smooth perfection anyway.

Here's the result on 5% of decimation, instead of 5 Million polys we get 255k, which is fine for a 3D printer.

down to 255k polys

if you look really close you will see that it's face is now a bit triangulated, but it will be smoothed out by resin on 3D printers, so we don't really care about such little details, I am even assuming some of the details will be eaten anyway, decimate or not.

a little problematic cavity

We can see some cavities that may cause problems, but we will hope that the next step will fix it.

And we go to - Meshmixer

Meshmixer is a great free app for preparing your model for 3D printing. I already figured out how it works and will show you now:

First export as .stl (universal 3d printing format)

Import your model into Meshmixer.

Then do all the necessary transforms - make sure the model is 90mm tall (in my case) and stands on the ground and centered.

Then you have to run "Inspector" to fix problematic parts. It will fix all the defects.

Just press "auto-repair all"

And the last part - in my case it's the "Overhang" Tool. It will generate automatic supports so the model doesn't fall during the printing process.

As I don't own a 3D printer and I can't test how it all prints out, I just generate supports automatically and also upload both supported and a "no supports" version to Cults3D, so customers can choose what suits them better.

Supported version looks like this -

That's it, now we just upload it to the platform so everyone can download this tiny cute Nemesis.

Here's an example of my previous fanart 3d model already printed out:

looks quite clean

It's so fun to see your own digital creation as a real-life object

This is just a super basic principle of getting your models printing ready, advanced 3d printing professionals would probably roast me, but at list for my needs this is good enough and should be working.

If you have more insights on 3D printing preparation - please feel free to comment or contact me.

All of my models are available here - Cults3D Website

See you soon!