Print figurines and toys, learn scanning and modeling tricks, and make an extruder from a diesel glow plug!
I’m a big fan of video game character toys (recently springing for a killer set of posable Orbital Frames from Zone of the Enders), but as characters become more customizable, 3D printing may be the better way to bring your personalized gaming persona into the real world. FigurePrints (figureprints.com) can export your battle-weary, Level 90 Paladin from World of Warcraft or your hand-built, palatial masterpiece from Minecraft and print them on Z Corp machines in all their full-color glory. MineToys (minetoys.com) will print a figurine with your Minecraft skin.
For the DIYer with more retro sensibilities, Mikola Lysenko posted an ingenious method for creating 3D models from 8-bit style characters. Old favorites Mario and Zelda can now face off against new favorites like Meat Boy and Gomez for the fate of your desk space! makezine.com/go/3d-8-bit
For a fun, quick project, update the classic push puppet toy, where you push the button and the figure collapses, then let it go and it springs back up. Thingiverse user Spencer Renosis shows how to design your puppet in Tinkercad, 3D print the parts, then add fishing line and a spring. makezine.com/go/3dp-push-puppet
Autodesk’s 123D Catch is great for making 3D scans from digital photos, but it’s a cloud-based freebie that limits the number of your photos and the resolution of the resulting 3D mesh. Digital compositor Jesse Spielman wrote an incredible tutorial showing how to use VisualSFM to roll your own point clouds without arbitrary limits, then use Meshlab to generate a mesh and paint it with the full-resolution photo texture. makezine.com/go/diy-photogrammetry
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