How They 3D Print Your WoW Character 54
WoW Insider had the chance to sit down with Ed Fries, the founder of the new and highly unique business FigurePrints. Fries is best known for his work at Microsoft on the original Xbox, but he hasn't been idle since he left the company in 2004. His newly launched service allows World of Warcraft players to 'print' their characters out as 3D sculptures. He and blogger Mike Schramm discuss the origins of the company, and the process used to make the figs: "At heart, it's basically an inkjet printer, which is pretty cool. It actually uses HP-11 inkjet printheads. But instead of printing on paper, it prints on a thin layer of plaster powder. So you have to imagine that there's a bay with a platform, and a spreader bar comes in and spreads a very thin layer of plaster powder, which has the consistency of flour. So it gets spread onto the platform, like a sheet of paper. And then the printheads come out, and they print right into that plaster. It sets the ink on top of it, and like paper it soaks into it-that plaster hardens."
Re:That's actually the whole idea (Score:2, Interesting)
As for wandering around the woods, the mountains, the sea... at a basic level that too gets at the same "fun" that, as you say, can be found playing a game or watching TV. But I think I can safely say that nobody has ever had a peak experience of total peace, fulfillment, and understanding in front of either of those monitors. I'm not at all religious, but maybe that's the sort of feeling they have when they're tuned in to whatever they worship. Maybe someday, when we can jack into realistic VR, we'll be able to do it from home, but until then you will only experience the most base levels of "fun" if you never get out of your chair.
I don't mean to sound accusatory -- if anything, I hope to encourage somebody to go exploring. Under the day star. I know, I know, it burnss usss, but I promise you that the payoff can be greater than any game.
PS: Boy, we got just a titch OT, eh?
Cool technology (Score:3, Interesting)
Over the last few years, a new category of 3D service bureaus has begun to pop up where you can place an order for model prints fairly quickly [3darttopart.com].
I've actually used this process on a couple of projects that I've worked on, and every time I walk through the exhibit hall at Siggraph I find myself hoping that a desktop model will reach somewhere around $1k soon.
Currently, it's an imprecise science -- you have to make certain that your model is "watertight" -- meaning that it registers as a solid object when passed to the fab software. You also have to thicken things like teeth, swords etc because the glue process makes thin items rather brittle.
Depending on the fabricator, you might have to paint the model after the fact, and on a whole lot of these you actually need to sand and prime the finished figure as many of the fabricators leave a sort of "fuzzy" surface that needs to be smoothed to look good.
Anyhow, it's a really cool tech for concept art and rapid prototyping, and if you've got the skillset to watertight models you create, you can have your 3DS/Maya etc models printed pretty reasonably ($45-150ish depending on bounding box volume).
Print Resolution's Effect on Faces (Score:2, Interesting)
I've seen their promotional images (which aren't very large) and the models look pretty good (color bleed is a bit much in places), but I can't tell if they are doing something (like sanding) to get rid of that stratification effect. $115 is pretty cheap, though.