My most ambitious 3D design project has been the creation of an entirely new miniature from scratch. As you might expect, going from a sketch to a finished product is a lot of work and involves a complicated workflow of many different mediums.
Above is a digital render of the completed piece. Use your scroll wheel to zoom in or out, and click and drag to give it a spin!
Of course, there are a lot of steps in the process before the piece came to look like that. Below, I’ll walk you through some of the highlights of my journey in creating this unusual robotic spider.
Creating the general shape of the piece in SolidWorks was my first real step. The beautiful thing about CAD software is that, with a bit of confidence, one can skip the usual step of hand sketching and jump right into a 3D environment where it will be much easier to see what is and isn’t working.
I had the idea for this piece brewing in the back of my mind for quite some time – I knew exactly what the general look and feel of the piece should be before I ever set foot in CAD, so the early stages of prototyping went by rather quickly. Taking the piece from the state of the left image to the right image did not, however, go quickly at all – between these two images is over eight months of on-and-off work in detailing and refining the digital design.
Once I had a design I was happy with in CAD, I used a slicer called Chitubox to prepare each of the 58 individual parts for printing. Over the course of several days, my trusty Elegoo Mars 3D printer produced the parts I needed in wonderful detail. 3D printed resin is inherently brittle, so I assembled the piece with the help of countless steel pins inside hand-drilled holes and tiny dots of superglue. Some parts of the miniature, like the neck, were constructed with insulated wire and paper clips since their thin, winding nature meant they were unsuitable to 3D print at such a small scale.
Painting and decorating the piece was the last step in bringing my vision to life. Some careful yellow-white edge highlights and a surplus of grassy tufts were the stars of the show here.
I’m no stranger to painting miniatures, but there was something very special about adding the finishing touches to a piece I had created from scratch. Usually, when I paint a miniature, I can go online and find thousands of talented artists showing off their paintjobs of the exact same miniature. But not this time. What I held in my hand was entirely one-of-a-kind, without another one like it in all the world.
To give you a better sense of what the CAD workflow looks like when designing something like this, above is a timelapse in SolidWorks of a piece getting some detail work done. This piece is not a part of the spider miniature shown above, but is rather a component of something entirely new. I’ve learned a lot in the process of making my first from-scratch miniature, and have a lot of ideas brewing for projects in the future!