I've mentioned the Translucent Tuesday Fight Club before and how it's basically translucent Minimates beating each other up. The guy behind it, Geohound, ran his own TTFC contest on the Multiverse. I was getting the animating itch again, so I created this:



You can see all the the entries here.

In early 2013, I purchased a consumer 3D printer. Not one of the industrial types that Shapeways uses, but an open source, plastic extruding, home model. Specifically the Ditto from Tinkerines Studios. After assembly and many hours of refinement I started printing Minimate parts. Large Minimate parts.


Using the models I created for animation I was able to produce a scaled-up version of the basic Minimate.


Like anything new there are bound to be problems. I printed many versions of the various pieces to get the fit and feel just right. I've also had a couple controller chips die so I end up waiting for replacement parts.


Print lines are very obvious in these early prints. It seemed whenever I would print a torso, about halfway through the printer would get off track just a bit. It would either skip layers or go over the edge a bit. It's gotten better, but still not ideal.


Also you can see the little blobs that indicated the starting point of each layer. These have been minimized quite a bit with recent prints. But I'm still sanding and filling to get the finish I want.

I've also purchased the Ditto Upgrade Kit that should improve prints as well. Unfortunately it uses a thinner plastic filament so I have to use up my stock of plastic before upgrading. I've got about three spools to go.

This is still an ongoing project. I don't yet have a fully assembled jumbo Minimate. When I do, it will be posted here.

Concluding the 2003 Blanks series (for now) is "Red". It's a bit of stretch for this image to fit the theme. But it seems to work if you don't think about it too hard..or if you are a recent recipient of light head trauma.

The 2003 Blanks series continues with "Yellow". The pavers and reflections came out really nice in this render. I ended up using one of my Vegas photos for the environment map, it really seemed to fit the theme.

A continuation of the 2003 Blanks with "Blue". Two more to go, I wonder what I'll call them.

Time for something a little different. I'm starting a series of Minimate images titled "2003 Blanks". The name comes from the common description of the first batch of two-inch promotional Minimates released in 2003. Coming in four different colors, these were no-frills Minimates without printing apart from the occasional copyright line.

Here's the first image, titled "Green". (Click img for larger version.)

What do you get when you combine a 3D model with an emerging technology? In this case, something with some heft to it.
Read More...

After spending the last couple of weeks on this Minimate animation I've realized that it might be a bit more than I can handle right now. There's probably a good four minutes of storyboards all layed out. The scene and characters are all modeled and textured. Unfortunately, I'm running into problems with the animation process. Things that should be simple and straight-forward aren't working properly for me.

It's not the end of the world, I think I just made some mistakes early in the process that weren't apparent until now. The bad part is that I don't know what those were. So instead of starting over and repeating my mistakes, I'm going to scale back and accomplish smaller projects like a creating a Wolverine with functioning claws, Cyclops with an optic blast, Banner transforming into Hulk. Try to learn something from each little success.

I'm not scrapping the large animation project either. I'm just postponing it until I have more experience. Here's one of the many test renders I made for it. Click the image for a 1080x720 version.