This
Elder Thing idol comes to us from Fogbank Minis. It's a great sculpt, the patina is excellent, but the striation artifacts from the figure being 3D printed are incredibly distracting. Is it just me? Whenever I bring up this issue I feel like I'm being a jerk.
You're not wrong.
ReplyDeleteYou're not a jerk for noticing. But is striations an issue?
ReplyDeleteStriations would certainly be a negative for any figure competition. Something for a RPG sitting on a table? Probably not as noticeable, and I wouldn't have bothered working harder on it.
The figures I've done in PLA for competition have had the striations puttied over, and the entire thing sanded flat (Speintz figure; Reaper forums). It was a bit of work to do that. But the results were worth it. Judges commented that they didn't realize it was 3D printed until they noticed the little display I had of the "before" pieces. Link to the WIP is in the name/URL.
With the lower prices of resin printers, this striation problem will become less of problem for smaller figures.
I think the paint job is great, but I find the striation distracting too. I generally use my cheap resin printer for detail parts to avoid the striation as resin printers don't normally have that as a visible issue, but it has a small build area (115mm x 165mm x 155mm)(I printed that exact miniature for a friend with it a few years ago, search "elder thing" on thingiverse for the model, there's a couple versions but the first was back in 2016 uploaded by Hermes_aile who gave credit to the artist Darbadar aka Joel Joan Gillet Llagostera). For anything larger I have a large delta printer (275mm diameter x 385mm high build area) that does a great job, but I have to spend quite a bit of time finishing the parts to where I'll be happy with them; PLA gives better prints than ABS in general but ABS can be smoothed with just a little acetone vapor. There's a ton of tutorials out there on "finishing" 3D prints, but like any prop it just comes down to what level of finish the person is okay with. All in all I think Fogbank Minis did a great job painting it though.
ReplyDeleteThere is a low-tech way those striations could be there (if we agreed to ignore the fact that we know it was 3D printed). It could have been cast in a cuttlefish bone. The result would be close, with the natural layers showing.
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