Designing a 3D-Printed Ducati Motorcycle!
**Title: Unveiling Jackie Wan's 3D Printed Ducati Motorcycle: A Journey Through Complexity and Precision**
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### Introduction to Jackie Wan and the Ducati Project
Jackie Wan, also known as vcro, is a mastermind in the world of 3D printing, collaborating with Ultimaker on intricate designs. His latest project, a 3D printed Ducati motorcycle model, showcases his expertise and creativity. This article delves into the challenges, processes, and triumphs behind this complex creation.
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### The Complexity of the Ducati Model: Challenges in 3D Printing
The Ducati model is an exemplar of complexity, featuring over 40 pieces due to its intricate details, such as air intakes and disc brakes. Traditionally, printing such a model on filament printers would be daunting, requiring numerous supports and extensive post-processing, which often results in subpar aesthetics.
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### The Process from Base Model to Final Print
Jackie began with an existing high-poly base model designed for visual effects, recognizing the inefficiency of creating everything from scratch. However, this model lacked internal structures essential for 3D printing. Jackie's solution was to remake parts and ensure a clean mesh throughout the process, avoiding common pitfalls like double faces that could crash rendering software.
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### Detailed Elements: The Chain and Rider Figures
A standout feature is the chain, printed as a single piece successfully after initial failures. Its fit on the sprocket exemplifies precision. Additionally, Michael Bowser from All Things 3D contributed a rider figure, painted to complement the Ducati's sleek design.
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### Post-Printing Finishes and Assembly
Post-processing involved minimal sanding for smooth surfaces and enamel painting for vibrant colors. The assembly required careful alignment, with the front wheel turning but the rear remaining stationary due to the chain setup.
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### Where to Find the Models
For enthusiasts eager to replicate this masterpiece, Jackie's models are available on ridicbreaks.com, while the Ducati is downloadable from umagine. This project exemplifies how intricate 3D printing can bring digital visions to life.
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**Conclusion**
Jackie Wan's Ducati project stands as a testament to overcoming technical challenges and showcasing creativity in 3D printing. His meticulous approach and attention to detail set a benchmark for future projects, proving that complexity is no match for dedication and skill.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody it's Norm from tested and Sean from tested 3D printing yes we have Jackie Wan that's right vcro who works with ultimaker designs some really awesome stuff intricate stuff it's beautiful it's functional and complex yes and he's here today with another project to share with us so let's go take a look hi we're back with Jackie Juan AKA vcro uh we've been doing a series of uh his prints and techniques and we're back today with a very cool model the Ducati um this blew me away when I saw it I was like uh it is one of the most complicated prints that I've seen done on a filament printer so uh let's let's talk about this a little bit um the the Ducati is actually printed in lots of different pieces yeah so this is around 40 pieces and it was the most complicated print that I made up to this point um and the reason because uh it it's got a lot of holes in it so a motorcycle has a lot of like you know natural crevices like um you know between the engine and and sort of uh air intakes and even even the wheels with the disc brakes and everything there's a lot of holes in it and that's a problem for 3D printing usually uh especially on like filament printers so for example we couldn't it'd be hard to print the Disc break uh here with the wheel because of the the separation between exactly if you did that if you tried to print this whole assembly in one go you would just have supports everywhere and you would probably spend like an hour trying to remove supports and it probably wouldn't look that good right uh so um that's why it's 40 pieces and because even the tire itself is probably like five to six pieces you know just to create the wheel itself so let's go through the the process of this uh so uh what was the base model like yeah so the base model we bought a base model to work with um and I mean there's no use Reinventing the wheel uh for that kind of thing and to be honest like if you bought a model probably look better than like if I would have done it from scratch and it would take far longer right and you're coming from a visual effects background so like time is money and and so if you can go out and buy a awesomely done Ducati model and and use it legitimately then yeah exactly and like if it's stuff that you know you have to create from scratch like if it's a design of your own then obviously you would create your own uh but if it already exists uh like in in visual effects and in Motion Graphics you usually just would find a model to work with uh to begin with anyway uh so anyway I went that route uh and just to be clear this was also this was not a model that was designed for 3D printing no no it wasn't it was a visual effects model it looked great uh but because it was a VFX model um the the shell of it was very high poly very high res uh but there was no internal structure so there's no volume within the shell itself so you would have to create that volume in order for the 3D printer to know how to actually like translate that into geometry and that that and just for those who may not be familiar the problem you're run into uh with trying to use assets for for games or visual effects is that uh you can do um unrealistic geometry so you can make a cube uh and if you're only going to see this side of the cube you can leave the back off and it's fine for digital purposes but in real life it's missing a side you can't it it has no volume watertight you can't print that um and so a lot of times when they're doing models like this things will just be crammed together in ways that you couldn't do in real life or maybe if if you didn't see the frame of the bike that's hiting behind the cowling here they would just not make that because it's not needed so EXA exactly and like all all the the main the red pieces although they look great on the exterior uh basically had no interior uh so so I mean this piece here was like a lot of work uh just to make the internals right because there's actually an intake that goes all the way through here right um and to make that work in terms of like real life volume uh was much more difficult than because everything has to be attached there has to be no missing faces uh for it to print properly so like I had to go in it's basically remodeled like some pieces were so um like shell like that I basically had to remake the whole piece right sometimes it's easier to remake it from scratch than to try to fix it now with with that a lot of times when when you get models that were not meant for 3D printing and then you have to do uh the work on it to make it printable after you do the work it can get kind of messy the the mesh can get messy and then sometimes the printer will it will cause an error in the printing so do you do you do any uh mesh repair uh on these when you're done before you go the printing yeah so usually I do my mesh repair while I'm adding in the geometry uh so if I keep it clean all the way through from start to finish then I won't have to repair stuff as I go but you know once in a while you have double faces like faces that sit on top of each other and those usually cause Boolean errors so it so when you're combining or subtracting parts from each other yeah so if you're trying to subtract one piece from another and there's one part where it has double faces it'll just air and it wouldn't know what to do or or the program will crash right uh so I had a lot of those kind of issues so so step one was just getting this cleaned up to the point where it could actually be printed yeah but you run into yet another problem that you can't just say print this and it'll print in one piece at least not on a you know filament printer at home um so what was the next step to like make this printable as far as the orientation of pieces yeah so once the model is good and it's clean um I basically have to go through and decide what printing Direction I'd like each piece you know to optimized for the best uh quality basically because the X and Y uh look the best and then the Z is always like a little bit iffy um so I choose the direction and then I have to choose where the seams are going to be and that that's sort of the most important part uh about deciding where you want your 3D printed things because if you had a seam across like the smooth areas of the bike then you'd you'd either have to fill it in later and then sand it and do stuff like that um or or you'd have to just like not do that um so so what I did was I chose the seams where they're naturally SE so between the the fuel tank and the body that makes sense cuz it naturally hides it then exactly so the fuel tank is actually printed this way and the body is printed this way um so that I could have the seam there where I wanted it and the printing direction would be nice so that gives me a good surface right so let's talk about some of the crazy details let's talk about like the chain like the chain I looking at that chain it looks like individual links all put together so how how did that print and and how successful was the print yeah so the chain was um my minimum detail level so so basically what I do with a lot of models is I'll find uh the smallest detail that I know I'll need to print and that will Define my scale for the rest of the model so so then you know that if that turns out everything else will exactly because all the details are bigger than that you know with the exception of the handlebars which is like almost that minimum scale as well um so I would test those two parts and see what prints at the minimum resolution and then and then find that scale be it like you know like 1.25 or whatever and then I would scale the rest of the bike at that same scale so that everything works together and I know it's going to assemble at the end I'm not going to be like you know create half the model and realize that one part of it was too small and now I have to make everything either bigger or smaller because that would just cause problems down the line so so is this one this chain is one printed as one piece and uh does it actually fit on the sprocket that's on there yeah so so the chain was printed in one piece uh it was printed very slowly but it it is one piece all the way through and it does it does actually fit onto the little teeth of the gears that you can see there so I mean this surprised me because like I didn't think it was possible to do that but you know it it came out and I was actually very surprised it all printed the one of the failed prints actually I printed a chain first and it failed the first time and all the links came loose because it didn't connect everything yet so like it it could have failed but you know surprisingly it worked out really well for this it looks amazing so um what about the the figure here yeah let's talk about that yeah the riter I didn't make uh the riter was given to me by Michael Bowser he's from All Things 3D and he was cool enough to like send me a writer he printed on the form one and uh I think he painted say like this needs a rider exactly I like it it's kind of Tron esque he he asked me for the scale of the ducatti bike so I sent that to him and then um he he basically posed the model and then he sent me the finished thing which is like super awesome of him so yeah uh mutual appreciation yeah and it fits perfectly on there uh it's just it's just really cool like as a showpiece it like completes the bik so let's talk about um this is another one you did finishing on and um so let's let's talk about that a little bit because it looks great like it the shiny parts are shiny like they should be yeah so so the finishing I didn't do uh a lot of sanding I'm not a big proponent of sanding but with you yeah uh but for the the red body parts I did have to do because that those you know those are known to be shiny smooth yeah very carlik it wouldn't look right with it sort of with lines and stuff so so those parts I sanded down a little bit I I filled it with a primer filler uh and then I sanded down a little bit with wet sanding and then and then those are enamel paints so enamel paints tends to stretch a little bit so it creates sort of a more candy like uh shell so that's why it chose sort of the red um enamel paints for the rest of it the chains and the engine parts that all acrylic painting and I didn't sand any of those parts they look great like the tires the tires look like tires yeah the good thing is if you if you print well like if you can make your print Direction good and then you print at a high enough resolution you don't really have to do that much to it you know for it to look good yes um and uh is there any like does the steering function on this or uh the steering does move um it's a little fragile right now delicate uh but yeah that that does move uh the we wheels don't turn the front wheel turns but the back wheel doesn't because of how the chain is set up like the chain is not a real like chain link so that's what prevent EST from turning uh so and you have these this is available to download and print yeah so you can download this and print it yourself and build it yourself it's it's 40 Parts it's fairly challenging as a print um but if you can if it looks it looks great yeah I mean but yeah totally great and uh is there where can we find you on the web uh so you can go to ridic breaks.com to find where I've put all my 3D models and then you can go to umagine to download uh the ducatti bike and other models that you've done yeah exactly all right well thank you we'll see you next time uh with another episode with Jackiehey everybody it's Norm from tested and Sean from tested 3D printing yes we have Jackie Wan that's right vcro who works with ultimaker designs some really awesome stuff intricate stuff it's beautiful it's functional and complex yes and he's here today with another project to share with us so let's go take a look hi we're back with Jackie Juan AKA vcro uh we've been doing a series of uh his prints and techniques and we're back today with a very cool model the Ducati um this blew me away when I saw it I was like uh it is one of the most complicated prints that I've seen done on a filament printer so uh let's let's talk about this a little bit um the the Ducati is actually printed in lots of different pieces yeah so this is around 40 pieces and it was the most complicated print that I made up to this point um and the reason because uh it it's got a lot of holes in it so a motorcycle has a lot of like you know natural crevices like um you know between the engine and and sort of uh air intakes and even even the wheels with the disc brakes and everything there's a lot of holes in it and that's a problem for 3D printing usually uh especially on like filament printers so for example we couldn't it'd be hard to print the Disc break uh here with the wheel because of the the separation between exactly if you did that if you tried to print this whole assembly in one go you would just have supports everywhere and you would probably spend like an hour trying to remove supports and it probably wouldn't look that good right uh so um that's why it's 40 pieces and because even the tire itself is probably like five to six pieces you know just to create the wheel itself so let's go through the the process of this uh so uh what was the base model like yeah so the base model we bought a base model to work with um and I mean there's no use Reinventing the wheel uh for that kind of thing and to be honest like if you bought a model probably look better than like if I would have done it from scratch and it would take far longer right and you're coming from a visual effects background so like time is money and and so if you can go out and buy a awesomely done Ducati model and and use it legitimately then yeah exactly and like if it's stuff that you know you have to create from scratch like if it's a design of your own then obviously you would create your own uh but if it already exists uh like in in visual effects and in Motion Graphics you usually just would find a model to work with uh to begin with anyway uh so anyway I went that route uh and just to be clear this was also this was not a model that was designed for 3D printing no no it wasn't it was a visual effects model it looked great uh but because it was a VFX model um the the shell of it was very high poly very high res uh but there was no internal structure so there's no volume within the shell itself so you would have to create that volume in order for the 3D printer to know how to actually like translate that into geometry and that that and just for those who may not be familiar the problem you're run into uh with trying to use assets for for games or visual effects is that uh you can do um unrealistic geometry so you can make a cube uh and if you're only going to see this side of the cube you can leave the back off and it's fine for digital purposes but in real life it's missing a side you can't it it has no volume watertight you can't print that um and so a lot of times when they're doing models like this things will just be crammed together in ways that you couldn't do in real life or maybe if if you didn't see the frame of the bike that's hiting behind the cowling here they would just not make that because it's not needed so EXA exactly and like all all the the main the red pieces although they look great on the exterior uh basically had no interior uh so so I mean this piece here was like a lot of work uh just to make the internals right because there's actually an intake that goes all the way through here right um and to make that work in terms of like real life volume uh was much more difficult than because everything has to be attached there has to be no missing faces uh for it to print properly so like I had to go in it's basically remodeled like some pieces were so um like shell like that I basically had to remake the whole piece right sometimes it's easier to remake it from scratch than to try to fix it now with with that a lot of times when when you get models that were not meant for 3D printing and then you have to do uh the work on it to make it printable after you do the work it can get kind of messy the the mesh can get messy and then sometimes the printer will it will cause an error in the printing so do you do you do any uh mesh repair uh on these when you're done before you go the printing yeah so usually I do my mesh repair while I'm adding in the geometry uh so if I keep it clean all the way through from start to finish then I won't have to repair stuff as I go but you know once in a while you have double faces like faces that sit on top of each other and those usually cause Boolean errors so it so when you're combining or subtracting parts from each other yeah so if you're trying to subtract one piece from another and there's one part where it has double faces it'll just air and it wouldn't know what to do or or the program will crash right uh so I had a lot of those kind of issues so so step one was just getting this cleaned up to the point where it could actually be printed yeah but you run into yet another problem that you can't just say print this and it'll print in one piece at least not on a you know filament printer at home um so what was the next step to like make this printable as far as the orientation of pieces yeah so once the model is good and it's clean um I basically have to go through and decide what printing Direction I'd like each piece you know to optimized for the best uh quality basically because the X and Y uh look the best and then the Z is always like a little bit iffy um so I choose the direction and then I have to choose where the seams are going to be and that that's sort of the most important part uh about deciding where you want your 3D printed things because if you had a seam across like the smooth areas of the bike then you'd you'd either have to fill it in later and then sand it and do stuff like that um or or you'd have to just like not do that um so so what I did was I chose the seams where they're naturally SE so between the the fuel tank and the body that makes sense cuz it naturally hides it then exactly so the fuel tank is actually printed this way and the body is printed this way um so that I could have the seam there where I wanted it and the printing direction would be nice so that gives me a good surface right so let's talk about some of the crazy details let's talk about like the chain like the chain I looking at that chain it looks like individual links all put together so how how did that print and and how successful was the print yeah so the chain was um my minimum detail level so so basically what I do with a lot of models is I'll find uh the smallest detail that I know I'll need to print and that will Define my scale for the rest of the model so so then you know that if that turns out everything else will exactly because all the details are bigger than that you know with the exception of the handlebars which is like almost that minimum scale as well um so I would test those two parts and see what prints at the minimum resolution and then and then find that scale be it like you know like 1.25 or whatever and then I would scale the rest of the bike at that same scale so that everything works together and I know it's going to assemble at the end I'm not going to be like you know create half the model and realize that one part of it was too small and now I have to make everything either bigger or smaller because that would just cause problems down the line so so is this one this chain is one printed as one piece and uh does it actually fit on the sprocket that's on there yeah so so the chain was printed in one piece uh it was printed very slowly but it it is one piece all the way through and it does it does actually fit onto the little teeth of the gears that you can see there so I mean this surprised me because like I didn't think it was possible to do that but you know it it came out and I was actually very surprised it all printed the one of the failed prints actually I printed a chain first and it failed the first time and all the links came loose because it didn't connect everything yet so like it it could have failed but you know surprisingly it worked out really well for this it looks amazing so um what about the the figure here yeah let's talk about that yeah the riter I didn't make uh the riter was given to me by Michael Bowser he's from All Things 3D and he was cool enough to like send me a writer he printed on the form one and uh I think he painted say like this needs a rider exactly I like it it's kind of Tron esque he he asked me for the scale of the ducatti bike so I sent that to him and then um he he basically posed the model and then he sent me the finished thing which is like super awesome of him so yeah uh mutual appreciation yeah and it fits perfectly on there uh it's just it's just really cool like as a showpiece it like completes the bik so let's talk about um this is another one you did finishing on and um so let's let's talk about that a little bit because it looks great like it the shiny parts are shiny like they should be yeah so so the finishing I didn't do uh a lot of sanding I'm not a big proponent of sanding but with you yeah uh but for the the red body parts I did have to do because that those you know those are known to be shiny smooth yeah very carlik it wouldn't look right with it sort of with lines and stuff so so those parts I sanded down a little bit I I filled it with a primer filler uh and then I sanded down a little bit with wet sanding and then and then those are enamel paints so enamel paints tends to stretch a little bit so it creates sort of a more candy like uh shell so that's why it chose sort of the red um enamel paints for the rest of it the chains and the engine parts that all acrylic painting and I didn't sand any of those parts they look great like the tires the tires look like tires yeah the good thing is if you if you print well like if you can make your print Direction good and then you print at a high enough resolution you don't really have to do that much to it you know for it to look good yes um and uh is there any like does the steering function on this or uh the steering does move um it's a little fragile right now delicate uh but yeah that that does move uh the we wheels don't turn the front wheel turns but the back wheel doesn't because of how the chain is set up like the chain is not a real like chain link so that's what prevent EST from turning uh so and you have these this is available to download and print yeah so you can download this and print it yourself and build it yourself it's it's 40 Parts it's fairly challenging as a print um but if you can if it looks it looks great yeah I mean but yeah totally great and uh is there where can we find you on the web uh so you can go to ridic breaks.com to find where I've put all my 3D models and then you can go to umagine to download uh the ducatti bike and other models that you've done yeah exactly all right well thank you we'll see you next time uh with another episode with Jackie\n"