Showing posts with label ballet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ballet. Show all posts

Saturday 29 March 2014

Contact

How about this amazing pose in another photo I found on Pinterest
It appears to have come from the Raw Moves collection by photographer, James Houston.

I love the point of contact of the feet, which reminds me of some of the abstract works of Henry Moore or Jean Arp.




I think it will print OK. I'm just not sure how well it would translate into a female pose. 


What do you think?


Well, I had to give it a go, didn't I! As it turned out, getting the pose right was the easy part. I increased the muscle tone a bit and shaped the breasts into a position that suggest they are hanging in the correct direction.
Finding a way to actually print the model proved much more challenging.

Here is a view of the model in MeshLab.





The biggest problem was the contact point of the two big toes - I just knew that the tiny point of contact would be incapable of supporting the weight of the top leg growing upwards above it without breaking. After experimenting with several different ideas and some abortive prints, I decided to cut the model across the middle and print it in two halves. Finding the best place to make the cut took several attempts but the final solution turned out to be the obvious one - cut exactly between the two big toes at the contact point.

Here is the model in Cura, ready for slicing. I used MeshMixer to generate the support structures because it allowed me to place them exactly where I needed them.




And here is the same view in Repetier Host, showing the Gcode file ready for printing.




OK, it's finished! I had to reprint the leg because the toes broke on the first try due to poorly positioned supports. After cleaning them up in Blender I had another go and it came out much better.
I printed in PLA and after cleaning up the support material I used superglue to join the two halves together.

Straight from the printer, supports still attached.



Front view, reproducing the original pose.

Viewed from the back.


 
There are some nasty blemishes left behind where the supports were removed and I've also noticed that I'm getting more Z-banding on the models than I used to see. Maybe time to think about tuning up the printer again.

Tuesday 25 February 2014

Kayleigh

One of the most beautiful poses I've seen recently on Pinterest was this one.



It had been repinned many times, so clearly other people agreed with me, but wasn't being properly credited. I used Google image search to track down the original version and discovered that the model is Kayleigh Lush.


I used my favourite character modelling software to emulate the pose (not exactly right, but good enough to capture the spirit of the picture, I hope) and then exported an OBJ file. I then used Blender to correct the orientation and scale and to flatten the base and remove the eyelashes, before exporting an STL file.


Here is the screen capture of the 3D model in Blender.




This time I used Project Miller again to select the external surfaces of the model, then used Kisslicer to generate the gcode file with full support turned on and printed in white PLA from Faberdashery at 0.15 mm resolution. 

Another pretty successful print, in my view.



With hindsight, it might have been better to have sliced with Cura and used the expert setting called 'Fix Horrible' - type B, which closes all internal holes and deals much more nicely with limb overlaps. Maybe next time.

Saturday 16 March 2013

Inspiration

As impressed as I was with the success of removing support material from my 'Sascha' prints (both ABS and PLA plastics worked surprisingly well), I am still drawn to the challenge of finding poses for sculptures that will print well without the need for any support at all.
I searched a few glamour and comic art sites and came up with these two examples of the kind of thing that might work quite well.




However, they are both rather similar to previous models and both have the problem of the horizontal right arm which is going to be difficult to print without support.
Then I saw this picture in the arts section of the local free paper and was struck both by the beauty of the pose and the potential opportunity for printing.



I think it looks like a great challenge so I think I'm going to try this one next.