3D printing hair
imaginateca
Posts: 7
Hello, everybody,
After searching the info in this forum and across Internet, I don't get the key to do this. Please, help me if you can.
I have a new 3D printer (DLP, the Elegoo Mars). I have managed to print some pretty cool things, but I would like to print (for own use) Daz models.
The problem is that when I try to slice Daz hair, it is very complex, so in the end, it is not possible to print it. I have tried with materials and opacity parameters to make it marble alike, with no luck. Also, importing and using MMD (MikuMikuDance) hair props as they are more simple, but again, no luck. I know that modeling it in Blender, Zbrush or other software would be a solution, but it is very difficult (and, anyway, what I'm looking for is a recipe to make it possible from Daz hair, even if I have to convert it to other programs or whatever). Well, I have tried any possibility published in this forum, but still...
I was wondering, do any of you guys have managed to 3d print a complete Daz character WITH Daz hair? Would you share your technique, please?
Thank you in advance!!
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Comments
I added thickness in Carrara on the one I did
Hexagon probably does that too
I would highly recommend you test using the GamePrint plug-in and use their service to prepare your files. At $2.00 a model, I have been very, very, very happy with the hundreds of models I've had them do for me. In the rare instances that it was a failure, it's been 100% my fault. Timewise, I can't justify trying to prepare my more complex models for 3D printing.
Using their plug-in, pretty much all DAZ hairs will print, with varying results. I like to use the toonier hairs as I find them more predictable, but even complex hair usuallly works well. The thing to watchout for is transparency -- as you're no doubt aware, it doesn't come through in a 3D STL. As a result, some hairs that depend more on transparency might not work as well. For me, I occasionally forget about the skull cap -- often it's very, very minor, other times it means some editing in a modeler, or a little sanding, or occasonally just leaving it is as it actuallly looks like it belongs. Here's a quick sampler of some hair on 3D STLs that have been generated by GamePrint. I normally have my models put through at 3" -- less detail, but if I'm normally going to print larger I prefer things get thickened up unstead of thinned to non-existance. In the sample, you can see at least three models where the skull cap is present. If you have any particular hairs you're interested in seeing how they come out, let me know and I'll see if I've used them yet.
I have the same problem that imaginateca has. The issue with Gameprint is that unless things have changed, they still aren't printing to a specific scale. I need 1/72nd figures for Star Trek shuttles and Runabouts. I'd love to print some Daz figures to populate my scale models but you can't just specifiy 1/72nd and then away you go. As per their website they offer figures in, " 5, 7, 9 & 12 inches." This is a great variety but it doesn't help folks who may need a figure printed in a specific scale. Sorry to be a downer. Gameprint said long ago that scaling was coming in the near future, but it hasn't appeared, yet. Here's hoping that it will. I'd love to order a number of figures from them - think greenskinned space babes! I may be buying a printer of my own at Christmas for just this purpose, probably an Epax X1 to print figures and other starship scale models for the 'ol display case.
I had similar issues printing characters to the same scale when some were standing and some were sitting or kneeling — Gameprint picks the largest dimension and creates the STL at either 3, 7 or 12 inches (the sizes offered for STLs are different than those for printing). I was creating a small set of “reading fairies” for for my wife for our library and I printed the first one standing and reading, which was perfect at 3”, then the second was sitting cross-legged and reading but when I went to print it, the scale was quite a bit larger than the first. A 3”-high standing figure is smaller in scale than a 3”-high sitting figure. For me, the exact scale wasn’t that important, but since PLA is cheap I placed the two figures in the slicer software and eyeballed the scale of the sitting figure until it matched the standing one (I did this by superimposing them and scaling the sitting figure until the heads matched in size). Obviously that’s not going to work for exact scaling, especially when there may be characters of different heights to begin with and also in widely various poses. The second problem is that even if you took the 3” STL (the closest size offered to 1/72, assuming a 6-foot figure) and printed it at 33.3% (taking a 6-foot or 72-inch height character to 1”, for example, your 1/72 scale) things start to disappear. I accidentally had one of the reading fairies prepared by GamePrint at 7” and scaled it in the slicer to 3” to match the others. My wife wanted to know where their clothes went. Scaling the STL from 7” to 3” made most of the clothing too thin to print. The same thing happened to a 3” prepped figure I’d made for myself with a jet pack that I wanted to print as a 28mm figure for gaming — the jet pack disappeared because the walls of the jet pack were too thin, much like the clothing of the fairy (even though I could see them clearly in the slicer or a 3D program). I got around this issue by creating a 72” extruded cylinder in DAZ Studio, which I add anytime I need something scaled exactly. The cylinder is added to the character’s node so that it’s seen as part of the figure, but I keep it a slight distance from the character. If I need a character or prop printed at 1/72” scale, I would make the cylinder 3x taller, then send my model to be fixed at 3-inches high, which would prep a 6-foot standing character to 1-inch, or character or prop to 1/72 scale, regardless of the character’s pose. Once I have the STL from GamePrint, I pop into the free program Meshlab and delete the cylinder. (takes less than a minute).
As mentioned, I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of GamePrint's service, and thanks to them I've printed over a thousand items in the last year and have been very happy with the results (I only got my first 3D printer last September, so it's been just over a year).
Below is a shot from inside the slicer (I'm using Simplify 3D); all the models were prepped by GamePrint at 3" in size, the far-left character is still 3" in the slicer, the other three characters were scaled to 2" tall (back row with cylinder, front row with cylinder removed). What's important to note that without the cylinders, the three front-row scaled characters wouldn't be the same scale. The character on the far-right would be "normal", the scaled character on the far-left would be scaled slightly-smaller (the fin on her head would count towards her 3" height, scaling her down a little) except that the hair on the far-right character is roughly the same addition to the overall height, and the middle scaled character would be scaled quite a bit smaller (the top of the raised gun would be counted as the top of the 3" height, scaling the character down considerably). With the cylinders, they're all the same scale. If I scaled the full-3"-figure down to their size or smaller, her skirt and jet pack disappear in the final print as the thin walls of the mesh become too thin to print (you might have better luck with your resin printers -- in fact, you definitely will). I've added a second image to show the three scaled characters and how they'd be if I hadn't added the cylinder.
Hopefully, that helps a little without making things too confusing. Adding the cylinder to control scaling, doing the math to control the scale and removing the cylinder after the file's been prepared really only takes a couple of extra minutes, total.
I took a couple of half-hearted tries at prepping my own exported files to .obj format and I can't imagine the amount of time I would need to get them all printable. The fact that Gameprint thickens things like hair and clothing, and generally does a much, much better job than I think I could ever do (without taking a long time to hone the skills necessary, not to mention the time actually involved) and charges a whopping $2 makes the plug-in -- for me -- a no-brainer.
I went with FDM printers simply for the cost (and because I have nowhere I could safely use resin), but I've been very happy with even the .05 mm layer heights for the types of prints I do -- the resin printers you've both chosen look awesome, and with .01 mm layer heights (and the fact that there's far less printing drama with resin) your stuff's going to be amazing, regardless of how you wind up prepping your files.
Let me know if you have any questions, or anything I can help with.
-- Walt Sterdan
Thank you for your answers, people. Walt, I tried Gameprint becouse I thought that 2 bucks for preparing a model was fair. BUT then I tried to converse a hair with skull cap and the result I saw in preview was two square blocks (I used it not through the plugin, but through their website). I thought it was a bad result, but seeing your examples I think that I will give it a try again.
Thank you for your recommendation, Walt. I will post again if it worked for me (I hope so).
Definately use the plug-in, it's tailored for DAZ models. Remember that any geometry hidden by clicking it off in the scene tab won't print, but anything that is hidden by setting opacity to 0% will still print. Make sure that the entire model you want to print is in one node, and make sure that's the node you want to print; I accidentally selected the eyelashes to turn them off, sent the model to prep and since I had the eyelashes selected, that's all that was sent -- luckily I could see that in GamePrint's preview, so I didn't complete the transaction.
I always take a quick peek at the model I'm sending in DAZ with "Smooth Shaded" mode as it sometimes shows me potential problems. In one or two instances when I was trying something I viewed as radical, I exported the geometry and checked it in a modelling program, but that was in my "early days". I generally have a good idea now of how something's going to work.
Finally, always take the time to check GamePrint's previews, just in case, and make double-sure you've got the "$2 Standard" option checked, as the default is the "$50 Custom" option. I was batching a number of models one-after-the-other and I accidentally had the $50 option set without noticing. I did, eventually, long after I'd been charged and the model provided, and as a test I sent the same model with the $2 option and there were significant differences in some of the details, even in my simple character models. If I needed a super-complex model prepped for printing at a large size and I wanted to keep as much detail as possible and ensure the greatest chance of successful prints, I wouldn't hesitate to spend the extra money as their custom-prepared service really does do an exceptional job. This might be something I'd pursue if DAZ ever finalized the option for selling prints, but since I'm only printing for myself, the results with the $2 option provides results many times better than I would have thought I'd get even a couple of years ago, especially with the low-priced printers that we see today.
Good luck, looking forward to hear how it turns out!
-- Walt Sterdan
I have printed figures myself on my DLP Anycubic Photon, and have run into similar problems with surfaces modelled in DS.
The clothing was a problem for me, as the clothing came out as only one voxel thick and frequently collapsed in the printer. With the model I used, the hair had volume, rather than being thin sheets, so I didn't have problems there. To cure the clothing problem, I completed programming an add-on to my finite element modeller to give thickness to selected surfaces. This worked well and I was able to make the print I wanted. Next time I tried it, it was with Capri Hair. That didn't work well, as it needed to create 2.1 million facets to solidify the hair, and the Win32 program ran out of room for its arrays (there's a 1Gb limit total for all the dynamic arrays in a program in Win32 with C++ Builder). I think I'll have to write a specialist program to do the job, without adding FE analysis data or texture mapping data to bloat the arrays.
Sorry I have no workable solution at the moment, but I am working towards it.
Regards,
Richard.
the clothing basically needs to be embedded into the model so adding thickness to each polymesh and pulling it inside would be my suggestion
if you have Zbrush unified skin a good idea
You can easely scale ANY model in the slicer software (for example Chitubox) You just have to know what the size of the figure is in the scale you want.
I print figures in 1:87 scale (HO) and it works great (just scale figures between 16 and 20 mm if they are standing)
if bend You have to gues the length.