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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Materials.

    If you’d have seen the marble sculptures when they were new, you would have described them as anything but realistic. We now know that many, if not most, sculptures were painted in bright garish colours.

    Why paint a delicately crafted sculpture with a dodgy paint job? Party taste, perhaps, but more definitely because that was what was available.

    The paints that we have now are carefully designed, mixed and stored to deliver a wide range of colours of a consistent quality (and even modern companies like GW struggle with that!).

    The further back you go, the fewer pigments there are and the less sophisticated the binders are. It’s no coincidence that the rapid explosion in science and trade of the Renaissance led to the rapid development of paints. Even in those days, an artist didn’t buy paint, they made it - access to new raw ingredients was all that was needed.

    So, why the Renaissance? Because it’s the earliest point in time it could have been possible.










  • Overhangs were the biggest issue I found. So much so that I moved back to a 0.4 after a month of faff trying to find settings that would compensate.

    I use my printer mainly for minis, and figures that would print supportless on the 0.4 nozzle needed huge amounts of supports at 0.2 in order to print without missing chins etc.

    That said, the level of detail that I could achieve was better, particularly on the hair, but not enough to compensate for all of the extra faff and wasted plastic.



  • At the very simplest, you can just overlap things in the slicer without Blender.

    If you want to learn about Blender’s Sculpt mode, you can just Google “Blender Sculpt mode tutorial”. For convenience, try to use the most recent results, as the interface can be slightly different in older versions.

    Sculpt mode effectively allows you to alter the models as if they were made of clay or plasticine.

    A lot of the tutorials will be showing how to make things from scratch, but what’s important is that you see how the tools work.

    Once you have everything overlapping the way you want, you can join the using a Boolean operation. You’ll want to use a “union” operation.


  • To avoid the gaps you can line them up with an overlap.

    You can adjust the vertices of the model slightly to help facilitate this. The most natural-feeling way to do it in Blender is by using the Sculpt mode.

    You can use a Boolean addition operation to then make the two models a single piece of geometry. Or not bother (if you are printing on FDM or at 100% infill in resin, it won’t really hurt either way).