Designing 3D-Printed Mechwarrior Mechs!

The Evolution of Jackie's Mech Warrior Online Models: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Action Figures

I made one, then I made three of them, one like I kept, and then um I gave one to noet no sorry I gave one to the charity person and then I gave one to PGI who's the developer for the uh for MC Online. And um and yeah so this one is is a little different from this guy, I learned even more from this guy, uh and I applied all that to this, and basically this one has no seams where I didn't want it like if you look at this one there seems where the knees are and that shouldn't be there. But for this one I I was I broke it apart enough that uh it required no seams um the ball joint was like uh interlocking so once I assembled it it it would like it would tighten um.

The Progression of My Action Figure Game Making: From CG Models to Designing Your Own Action Figures

Adventures from go doing you know CG models to designing your own action figures basically, that's what my journey has been. I started with creating CG models and then moved on to designing my own action figures. This progression was a result of learning and applying new techniques, and I'm excited to share some of those experiences with you.

One of the key aspects of creating action figures is the finishing process. So, uh I painted these with a with a paintbrush I started doing airbrushing later um but basically I started with a paintbrush I was just like hey I got this cool model and it looks pretty cool but um like you know I wanted the Finish thing so so basically just base coat uh with paintbrush and then and then adding the detail and then dry brushing for the for the edges. I think I painted these out of sequence, but I painted this one first uh this was my test for an airbrush actually so so I just kind of sprayed it and I didn't know what I was doing.

Painstaking Attention to Detail: The Art of Painting

I also had to paint on like all the little pictures and stuff on there, there's Little Ponies and like rainbows on this one if you look closely uh there's a lot of paint detail so I just did that by hand. I used prepping of the model of of the pieces after you took them out of the printer to prep them for paint sanding, part of this learning process was designing the parts so that prints nicely so it wouldn't have to sand so much. Some of these can kind of see it especially on this one the earlier one you can see where the print lines are and I probably should have sanded it but for this one I didn't have to sand almost anything.

Filling in the Gaps: A Matter of Detail

I just used Ed like a aircraft modeling putty uh and then I just fill it in the sand a little bit, that's only like like one edge here. But when it comes to filling gaps or making sure the model is smooth, there are other techniques to use. One approach is to use primer to give you a good enough surface to start painting, which helps keep the lines of the print from pulling the paint outwards and causing a mess.

Molding and Recasting: The Next Step in Action Figure Creation

But what if I could break down these pieces into smaller parts that could be molded and recast for in resin? That's an idea I've been considering, but I haven't tried it myself yet. However, I believe it's definitely possible with the right techniques and materials.

Where to Find Out More: Jackie's 3D Printed Work

So, if you're interested in learning more about these figures or see more of my 3D printed work, you can check out myory online or ridic bricks.com where I post all of my 3D printed work.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey it's Norm from tested and Sean from tested and we are thrilled to bring you another 3D printed project made by Jackie Wan AKA vcro Jackie works with ultimaker to design print some awesome projects we featured him before on tested and he's here from Toronto to share another one of his Works yes let's go check it out so we are back with Jackie one also known as velcro and last time you chatted with Sean about one of your first projects that you 3D printed uh and you designed from scratch today we want to talk about a project that you actually modified and 3D printed and finished and they're right here in front of us these are some awesome mechs y so tell me a little about these mechs so so these are from Mech Warrior online uh it's a game it's a freeo playay game that you can download and play um and they have amazing Mech designs like like uh I played Mech Warrior when I was like younger like they're really old ones I think a lot of people have and um and those ones are like super low poly in Old School but like they they revamped all of the mech Warriors in Mech Warrior online so so these are some of the designs I saw them you know I played the game and I was like these are amazing so I I looked online for for Miniatures that you can buy but like you know they didn't have them available because of like licensing issues or whatnot um so what for whatever reason they weren't available so I was like hey you know I have a 3D printer you know I should try and make one spoken like a true M if it does not exist you can make it yourself exactly so um uh I I went on the forums and there was this big thread on like how to get game assets for like fan art um so I grabbed that and I exported some of these models so this is the first one they made it's a catapult uh at first I wanted to make like um a tabletop size miniature but that scale is just too small for for these these kind of printers so I thought you know why don't make it bigger it's actually kind of cooler if it's like larger so so I made this size version and this was my first model um it was pretty simplistic I grabbed the game files uh off the actual game and then um I had to do a lot of cleanup so so game files are like sort of the opposite of what you want for 3D printing there's missing faces um there's stuff printer training yeah right and and like you talked about last time when a game designer is modeling something whether it's for a game or even for a production for a film uh they're going to texture it afterward the model is kind of that foundation and you can do a lot of tricks in the rendering to give you some texture yeah so most of the detail on game models are done with normal maps and and that doesn't translate over for printing because for 3D printing um it only looks at the polygons that are there so like details like uh you know these little grooves you know they are going to be there so you have to after you clean up the whole model you're going to have to put all that detail back in you know if you wanted to show up in your print but what does the model actually look like when you pull out the game when you pull extract the files and what can you load it up in uh you can load it up in whatever software that you use I use 3D Studio Max um but you can load it up in anything it comes in as like an obj file okay I think they use a the crisis engine for this game so uh there there are sort of exporters that you could use to get it into whatever uh software package you're using but I use 3D Studio Max and it comes in like pretty like shoddy like there's there's faces that aren't welded uh there's missing polygons anyway like the majority of the work involved in these are actually just cleaning up the model uh cleaning like and adding detail and so two steps one actually making it a watertight printable model and then two actually adding more modeling of your own exactly that's detail and then there's one more step where I decided to add joints and stuff onto this model um so so I I broke this apart once I had a good model to work with like a cleaned up model that I could actually like manipulate um I broke this all all apart so that it could print in the right direction uh to get the maximum amount of detail uh and then I I started to design joints uh to go into the model do those things go hand in hand both the print Direction and kind of how you break it down whether it's an arm a torso a leg cuz I Can See For example the shoulder here you're printing side to side goes flat that way and I imagine that itself is one piece yeah so so you can see the seams uh in in this rocket launcher and then also in the legs and and that's where I sort of broke broke AP part for the printing Direction now this was the first one I did so it wasn't the best like uh I pretty good it's cuz it's painted but in terms of just sheer uh like print Direction and model uh it wasn't that great because you know it could have been printed much more efficiently now that I see it now um but this was the first one and then this was the second one I made which had much like I had much more experience after working with this one so when I made this one um I I knew how to like organize the print better and and I put all the joints in there properly so there's actually joint in the shoulder there's there's like a ton of joints in here it's a lot of complexity I mean if you look at something just like the foot you know that's not something that's just just prints off in one piece no it doesn't a lot of people think you can just grab game assets and then uh you know just translate it and then hit print but that that's not the case at all especially if you want it to look really good um because your printing Direction matters the most in terms of getting the most detail out of your models do you look to things like other model kits for example like a Gundam and how the the parts interchange and and lock together I've seen them but I haven't really played with them myself like I wasn't much of a model builder like when I got 3D prin I was like oh I like I started looking at that stuff but I I never had that experience beforehand uh so I just sort of I sort of winged it it's like Anatomy you know okay you's got to be joints of the arms you want it to stand pretty firm so torso's got to be solid like that and then that's that's what you came up with I actually put a ball joints on on the knees or sry not the knees the the the waist hair uh to you know to get the proper pose that the game had like I wanted this to be able to pose like the game had it you know and that was sort of my um it's a posable action yeah exactly I mean you thought you wanted to start with something that was more like Warhammer like a tabletop gaming miniature and like you said you know the print resolution wasn't necessarily going to be good enough or you wanted more Fidelity and so you went with like a 6-in tall action figure totally awesome but I thought it was cooler like like once I I like I only thought that I could make a small tabletop but then when I thought I could make it bigger and it was like sort of it all opened up and I'm like oh this could be even more awesome and that's when I started designing joints and to it and okay and so this is the the the last guy that I made the latest one and this was actually a charity Jenner so the people on Mech online you can buy this and then all the proceeds went to charity oh so so I made one I made three of them one like I kept one and then um I gave one to noet no sorry I gave one to the charity person and then I gave one to PGI who's the developer for the uh for MC Online and um and and yeah so this one is is a little different from this guy I learned even more from this guy uh and I applied all that to this and basically this one has no seams where I didn't want it like if you look at this one there seems where the knees are and that shouldn't be there uh but for this one I I was I broke it apart enough that uh it required no seams um the ball joint was like uh interlocking so once I assembled it it it would like it would tighten um the ball joint on this one the ball joint's a little bit loose like after a little bit of play it started to um not work so well so so this I learned all my lessons here and I applied it to here and and that's sort of the progression of my yeah my action figure game making wow Adventures from go doing you know CG models to designing your own action figures basically what about the finishing process can you talk about how you painted these yeah so so uh I painted these with a with a paintbrush I started doing airbrushing later um but basically I started with a paintbrush I was just like hey I got this cool model and it looks pretty cool but um like you know I wanted the Finish thing so so basically just base coat uh with paintbrush and then and then adding the detail and then dry brushing for the for the edges uh so I think I painted these out of sequence but I painted this one first uh this was my test for an airbrush actually so so I just kind of sprayed it and I didn't know what I was doing uh this one I painted a little bit later uh so I just painted the base coat did all the shading and then I just used a paintbrush to do all the white Det details and then adding the the sort of weathering in the edil and then this one I did the same thing uh but I also had to paint on like all the little pictures and stuff on there there's Little Ponies and like rainbows on this one if you look closely uh there's a lot of paint detail so I just did that by hand was there prepping of the model of of the pieces after you took them out of the printer to prep them for paint sanding I know you designed it so you can see the seams yeah so so part of this learning process was you know design designing the parts so that prints nicely so it wouldn't have to sand so much got it so I'm not a big fan of sanding things and some of these you can kind of see it especially on this one the earlier one you can see where the print lines are and I probably should have sanded it but for this one I didn't have to sand almost anything uh I had to fill some edges uh like the top here but for the most part like it's not finished at all in terms of sanding or or filing so what do you do for the filling what's your process for that uh I just Ed like a aircraft modeling putty uh and then I just fill it in the sand a little bit but that's only like like one edge here like there's there's really not a lot of that I I us usually just go base coat uh and then a primer will give you a good enough surface uh to start painting and then if you use an airbrush uh it sticks on well if you use a paintbrush directly on the model that the lines of the print will actually pull the paint outwards and that usually causes a mess but if you do primer uh and then you uh do a base coat usually it'll keep that somewhat under control now are these pieces pie could these be broken down to pieces that you could then mold and recast for in resin for example have you about that you probably could but I haven't tried that myself that's the next step yeah I'll probably like look into that next um but but yeah I mean it's broken in part into enough pieces that you could definitely try to cast it that would be great very cool I love the aesthetic I I like actually I like that you can see that it's three printed and the finishing job is wonderful um where can people find out more about these figures uh so you can go on meory online um I posted there and you can also go on ridic bricks.com where where I post all of my 3D printed work awesome thank you so much Jackie for sharing with us your Mech Warrior online models we'll have more projects with Jackie more cool things to show in a future episode so stay tuned until then we'll see you next time byehey it's Norm from tested and Sean from tested and we are thrilled to bring you another 3D printed project made by Jackie Wan AKA vcro Jackie works with ultimaker to design print some awesome projects we featured him before on tested and he's here from Toronto to share another one of his Works yes let's go check it out so we are back with Jackie one also known as velcro and last time you chatted with Sean about one of your first projects that you 3D printed uh and you designed from scratch today we want to talk about a project that you actually modified and 3D printed and finished and they're right here in front of us these are some awesome mechs y so tell me a little about these mechs so so these are from Mech Warrior online uh it's a game it's a freeo playay game that you can download and play um and they have amazing Mech designs like like uh I played Mech Warrior when I was like younger like they're really old ones I think a lot of people have and um and those ones are like super low poly in Old School but like they they revamped all of the mech Warriors in Mech Warrior online so so these are some of the designs I saw them you know I played the game and I was like these are amazing so I I looked online for for Miniatures that you can buy but like you know they didn't have them available because of like licensing issues or whatnot um so what for whatever reason they weren't available so I was like hey you know I have a 3D printer you know I should try and make one spoken like a true M if it does not exist you can make it yourself exactly so um uh I I went on the forums and there was this big thread on like how to get game assets for like fan art um so I grabbed that and I exported some of these models so this is the first one they made it's a catapult uh at first I wanted to make like um a tabletop size miniature but that scale is just too small for for these these kind of printers so I thought you know why don't make it bigger it's actually kind of cooler if it's like larger so so I made this size version and this was my first model um it was pretty simplistic I grabbed the game files uh off the actual game and then um I had to do a lot of cleanup so so game files are like sort of the opposite of what you want for 3D printing there's missing faces um there's stuff printer training yeah right and and like you talked about last time when a game designer is modeling something whether it's for a game or even for a production for a film uh they're going to texture it afterward the model is kind of that foundation and you can do a lot of tricks in the rendering to give you some texture yeah so most of the detail on game models are done with normal maps and and that doesn't translate over for printing because for 3D printing um it only looks at the polygons that are there so like details like uh you know these little grooves you know they are going to be there so you have to after you clean up the whole model you're going to have to put all that detail back in you know if you wanted to show up in your print but what does the model actually look like when you pull out the game when you pull extract the files and what can you load it up in uh you can load it up in whatever software that you use I use 3D Studio Max um but you can load it up in anything it comes in as like an obj file okay I think they use a the crisis engine for this game so uh there there are sort of exporters that you could use to get it into whatever uh software package you're using but I use 3D Studio Max and it comes in like pretty like shoddy like there's there's faces that aren't welded uh there's missing polygons anyway like the majority of the work involved in these are actually just cleaning up the model uh cleaning like and adding detail and so two steps one actually making it a watertight printable model and then two actually adding more modeling of your own exactly that's detail and then there's one more step where I decided to add joints and stuff onto this model um so so I I broke this apart once I had a good model to work with like a cleaned up model that I could actually like manipulate um I broke this all all apart so that it could print in the right direction uh to get the maximum amount of detail uh and then I I started to design joints uh to go into the model do those things go hand in hand both the print Direction and kind of how you break it down whether it's an arm a torso a leg cuz I Can See For example the shoulder here you're printing side to side goes flat that way and I imagine that itself is one piece yeah so so you can see the seams uh in in this rocket launcher and then also in the legs and and that's where I sort of broke broke AP part for the printing Direction now this was the first one I did so it wasn't the best like uh I pretty good it's cuz it's painted but in terms of just sheer uh like print Direction and model uh it wasn't that great because you know it could have been printed much more efficiently now that I see it now um but this was the first one and then this was the second one I made which had much like I had much more experience after working with this one so when I made this one um I I knew how to like organize the print better and and I put all the joints in there properly so there's actually joint in the shoulder there's there's like a ton of joints in here it's a lot of complexity I mean if you look at something just like the foot you know that's not something that's just just prints off in one piece no it doesn't a lot of people think you can just grab game assets and then uh you know just translate it and then hit print but that that's not the case at all especially if you want it to look really good um because your printing Direction matters the most in terms of getting the most detail out of your models do you look to things like other model kits for example like a Gundam and how the the parts interchange and and lock together I've seen them but I haven't really played with them myself like I wasn't much of a model builder like when I got 3D prin I was like oh I like I started looking at that stuff but I I never had that experience beforehand uh so I just sort of I sort of winged it it's like Anatomy you know okay you's got to be joints of the arms you want it to stand pretty firm so torso's got to be solid like that and then that's that's what you came up with I actually put a ball joints on on the knees or sry not the knees the the the waist hair uh to you know to get the proper pose that the game had like I wanted this to be able to pose like the game had it you know and that was sort of my um it's a posable action yeah exactly I mean you thought you wanted to start with something that was more like Warhammer like a tabletop gaming miniature and like you said you know the print resolution wasn't necessarily going to be good enough or you wanted more Fidelity and so you went with like a 6-in tall action figure totally awesome but I thought it was cooler like like once I I like I only thought that I could make a small tabletop but then when I thought I could make it bigger and it was like sort of it all opened up and I'm like oh this could be even more awesome and that's when I started designing joints and to it and okay and so this is the the the last guy that I made the latest one and this was actually a charity Jenner so the people on Mech online you can buy this and then all the proceeds went to charity oh so so I made one I made three of them one like I kept one and then um I gave one to noet no sorry I gave one to the charity person and then I gave one to PGI who's the developer for the uh for MC Online and um and and yeah so this one is is a little different from this guy I learned even more from this guy uh and I applied all that to this and basically this one has no seams where I didn't want it like if you look at this one there seems where the knees are and that shouldn't be there uh but for this one I I was I broke it apart enough that uh it required no seams um the ball joint was like uh interlocking so once I assembled it it it would like it would tighten um the ball joint on this one the ball joint's a little bit loose like after a little bit of play it started to um not work so well so so this I learned all my lessons here and I applied it to here and and that's sort of the progression of my yeah my action figure game making wow Adventures from go doing you know CG models to designing your own action figures basically what about the finishing process can you talk about how you painted these yeah so so uh I painted these with a with a paintbrush I started doing airbrushing later um but basically I started with a paintbrush I was just like hey I got this cool model and it looks pretty cool but um like you know I wanted the Finish thing so so basically just base coat uh with paintbrush and then and then adding the detail and then dry brushing for the for the edges uh so I think I painted these out of sequence but I painted this one first uh this was my test for an airbrush actually so so I just kind of sprayed it and I didn't know what I was doing uh this one I painted a little bit later uh so I just painted the base coat did all the shading and then I just used a paintbrush to do all the white Det details and then adding the the sort of weathering in the edil and then this one I did the same thing uh but I also had to paint on like all the little pictures and stuff on there there's Little Ponies and like rainbows on this one if you look closely uh there's a lot of paint detail so I just did that by hand was there prepping of the model of of the pieces after you took them out of the printer to prep them for paint sanding I know you designed it so you can see the seams yeah so so part of this learning process was you know design designing the parts so that prints nicely so it wouldn't have to sand so much got it so I'm not a big fan of sanding things and some of these you can kind of see it especially on this one the earlier one you can see where the print lines are and I probably should have sanded it but for this one I didn't have to sand almost anything uh I had to fill some edges uh like the top here but for the most part like it's not finished at all in terms of sanding or or filing so what do you do for the filling what's your process for that uh I just Ed like a aircraft modeling putty uh and then I just fill it in the sand a little bit but that's only like like one edge here like there's there's really not a lot of that I I us usually just go base coat uh and then a primer will give you a good enough surface uh to start painting and then if you use an airbrush uh it sticks on well if you use a paintbrush directly on the model that the lines of the print will actually pull the paint outwards and that usually causes a mess but if you do primer uh and then you uh do a base coat usually it'll keep that somewhat under control now are these pieces pie could these be broken down to pieces that you could then mold and recast for in resin for example have you about that you probably could but I haven't tried that myself that's the next step yeah I'll probably like look into that next um but but yeah I mean it's broken in part into enough pieces that you could definitely try to cast it that would be great very cool I love the aesthetic I I like actually I like that you can see that it's three printed and the finishing job is wonderful um where can people find out more about these figures uh so you can go on meory online um I posted there and you can also go on ridic bricks.com where where I post all of my 3D printed work awesome thank you so much Jackie for sharing with us your Mech Warrior online models we'll have more projects with Jackie more cool things to show in a future episode so stay tuned until then we'll see you next time bye\n"