[vindowviper]

Quote:

Originally Posted by suprdave71

Honestly the most I've personally designed and printed myself are simple shapes and text. I customize playsets, so I made and printed my own Daily Planet letters, for instance.

I totally get what you're trying to do though... have you searched sites like Cults3D or Sketchfab? You could probably find the joints you want on there, then use Blender to piece them together. Blender is a little intimidating to me, the UI is a mess. I'd probably start with Tinkercad online and move up from there. Lol

Blender is intimidating to me, too. I was watching some tutorial videos this week and mustered up enough motivation to try my hand at modifying some 3d stl's I downloaded. I found a human foot design on thingiverse, downloaded the .stl, imported it in Blender, then used 'decimate' to simplify the geometry and then saved it again as an stl. I had to simplify it because it had too much geometry for sketchup to handle. I opened it in sketchup 2017 (last desktop free version, and far more user friendly than Blender), and created a sphere over the ankle, selected all, and intersected the faces with the selection. Then I just deleted the sphere and leftover geometry above the foot, scaled it to the proper size, used the "inspect and repair extension (a must-have for 3d printing), and exported it as an stl again.

For 3d printing, I have an Anycubic Photon Mono (sla resin printer), and I recently bought the flexible tough resin, which is amazing for figures and accessories, by the way. I printed the feet in clear resin and they are strong and have some flexibility to them (not brittle like basic resin). I'd say this resin is about as flexible and durable as professionally made action figures. Now I just need to drill for the ankle pegs and figure stand holes, paint the feet, and attach them to the figure.

I would not recommend 3d printing joints or other figure parts (other than heads) in standard resin since it is so brittle. I would also recommend against printing using filament (fdm printing), save for vehicles, large accessories, or diorama components, unless you are okay with less detail. They would probably work okay for inner joint parts of figures, if you have a small enough nozzle, though.