Order Your Own Mini-Me

3D Print service Sculpteo now offers the ability to print a figurine with your own head on it! The process is pretty straightforward: take two police-lineup style photos of your face and send them off to Sculpteo with your order. Their artists will cook up a colorful design that you must approve before it's printed. Finally, you'll receive your "mini-me" in the mail for a cost as low as USD$75. They also offer "mini couples" for USD$150; they're simply two mini-me's holding hands together. 

 

Via Sculpteo

FigurePrints Revisited

Quite some time ago we reported on a unique service: FigurePrints. It's a totally niche 3D print service, but what's the niche? They print custom figurines of your World of Warcraft character. We thought we'd take another look at them. 

 

How does it work? It's pretty simple, really. You specify your character's name, Realm and Region and pay USD$129 (or €129,95 if your region is Europe). Then you wait a month or so while they develop a 3D model of your character and make it on their 3D printers. After some finishing work, it's ready to ship to you. Interestingly, the price has not changed in all the years gone by.

 

When we first wrote of FigurePrints in 2007, they were just starting out, and in 2008 were expanding rapidly, moving to 24 hour operation. Today they're still there - and offering services at the same price as two and a half years ago. Meanwhile, their competitor FabJectory, who printed characters from Second Life as well, seems to have disappeared as of May 2007. 

 

If you're into WoW and 3D printing, you might consider trying out FigurePrints and soon have your character eating out of your hand. 

 

Via FigurePrints

The Painted Terminator

The Herald of Anguish is a "non-profit project aiming to make a 3D-animated clip of an intense fight between a squad of Blood Angels Terminators and hordes of genestealers onboard a Space Hulk" composed of four 3D graphics friends who enjoy that genre and wanted to pay tribute to the storyline. Click on the image at left for a lot more detail.

 

Their project is ambitious and seems to be well on the way to becoming a reality. But being a video project, why would they produce a 3D print of their subject? 

 

They designed this amazing Terminator some time ago, and entered it into a Creative Tools modeling 3D printing lottery - and won! The model was printed, and as you can see in the unpainted image, it's quite detailed, but even more so when it was recently painted. 

 

Via Herald of Anguish 

Printing A Beautiful Figurine

There are quite a number of people who collect and design figurines, those small humanoid representations. Actually, this has been going on for a very long time, perhaps thousands of years now, but these days we're likely in the Golden Age of figurines, historically speaking. 

 

We read the adventure of how one figurine designer, Belgian student Kaetemi, managed to print out an absolutely beautiful figurine on a 3D printer on the Shapeways service. We think this would look even more exceptional if printed using one of their other materials. 

 

Via Figure.fm

The Karbon Kids

We were tipped towards a new service: The Karbon Kids. This service takes an approach similar to others, where the complexities of 3D modelling and printing are hidden from the consumer. In this case, a really friendly website helps you design a character from a list of standard components. Friendly example: when you finish editing, a smiling happy face says, "Please save your kid!"

If you are incapable of designing your own character, there's an extensive gallery of possibilities to choose or steal ideas from.

Once your design is fabulous, save and print the item and it's shipped within seven days. The costs? That depends. For a painted model, it's USD$50, while the dull, grey non-painted version is only USD$25 and you can paint it yourself.

And no, we don't look like that. Much.

Via The Karbon Kids (Hat tip to Shawn)

SporeZ

Z Corp has taken another step to integrate its equipment into the personal manufacturing cycle. Recently they struck a deal with Bentley software to link with the construction industry. Now they touch the gaming space by providing a way to easily 3D print your Spore creations.

Um, what's Spore again? The Spore Creature Creator is a wildly popular game that lets you create your very own amazing lifeforms. The possibilities are limitless, so it is used by many highly creative people. But what happens when you are tired of just looking at your creature on the 2D screen?

EA and Z Corporation created SporeSculptor, a new specialized 3D print service that permits Spore creature makers to upload their design and receive their creature in 3D form. Here's some interesting bits we noticed about the service:

• To overcome the complexities of 3D printing constraints, SporeSculptor provides very simple guidelines that will cover off at least 80% of the characteristics most likely to cause printing failure. Example: "Legs are Good". "No large structures supported by thin structures", etc.
• Only one sculpture per order is permitted. I guess they are expecting a rush, as has been experienced by similar services.
• A gallery of sculpture examples is forming. When we looked, there wasn't that many images. We're pretty sure there will be plenty to come.
• Pricing appears to be USD$49 per print, which sounds about right for this sort of thing.

We can't help but contrast this development against other figure-printing services. Most of the others have overcome the complexity problem by pre-making the designs and having the customer merely choose from a fixed set. SporeSculptor has an advantage because their customers by definition know how to design the figurines. Which approach will win? We suspect both.

Via SporeSculptor and Z Corp

Round the Clock FigurePrints

 

You'll recall FigurePrints, the 3D print service that specializes in transforming your World of Warcraft avatar into an actual, hold-in-your-hand figurine. It seems they've generated a bit of interest among WoW players. So much so, that they've decided to operate 24x7 nonstop punching out WoW figurines!

Their Vancouver, Canada production plant now has eleven staff and six 3D printers to service the tens of thousands of WoW players who enter a monthly lottery to win a chance at getting their character printed - at a cost of US$129.95 each.

We thought figure printing would be a big deal, and it looks like it's caught on with the WoW universe. Not so with Second Life yet, in spite of services available that can do the job.

Via The Financial Post

3dtotal GrowIts a Service

The variety of 3D printing services continues to astound us. This time we have a partnership arrangement between 3dtotal ("The CG Artist's Homepage) and GrowIt (a rapid prototyping print shop).

While the basic mechanics of the printing are provided by GrowIt, there is extensive instructions and assistance to model builders available on the 3dtotal site. Pricing, while based on volume like many printshops, is shown in terms of example figurines familiar to 3dtotal's model builders.

We think this is a terrific idea: link a well-run 3D print shop with a niche market, in this case model builders. Each side benefits, as do the model builders who now have an easy path to navigate for their printed objects. Consider what they would have to have gone through without this arrangement: learning about 3D printing, finding a suitable print service, determining the correct file format, ensuring their model is printable, sized correctly, etc.

Via 3dtotal and GrowIt