Experiments With 3D Printing

When I was 13 I saw Toy Story at the cinema – and I instantly knew that 3d art was what I wanted to do. I had always been a doodler – I liked drawing cartoons and inventing things. I was also a lover of computers – so seeing Toy Story, discovering that I could combine the things I enjoyed the most (and get paid for it!) – I knew what I wanted to do.

So, everything from then on was targeted towards 3d art and animation.

Anyone who knows me, or who has read this blog, knows that things didn’t quite work out. I went to university and studied digital art – specialising in 3d art. My passion turned towards interactive 3d art and I wanted to work in video games – but I just wasn’t good enough – so I turned to my other computer design hobby, web design, and have since done reasonably well at that.

But I still love 3d art. I posted about my old 3D art portfolio a few weeks ago, and I’ve been dabbling on and off for the last month or two.

Recently I had one of my 3d models printed.

Dr Carter 3D print

Dr Carter 3D print

The model is of Dr Carter – an Indiana Jones style figure – that features in a number of games on Miniclip.com (I made 2 of the games he’s in 🙂 – Cave of Despair and Wheels of Salvation).

Dr Carter Wireframe View

Dr Carter Wireframe View

3d Printing is growing rapidly. There’s so much potential with it, for more than just artworks. I was reading recently about how doctors were doing 3d scans of patients and then printing the scans so they could examine the problems more easily – it seems it was cheaper and quicker than the current methods used. Not only that, apparently there are experiments going on to do with 3d printing real human tissue.

It’s the stuff of science fiction but it would be amazing if this became reality. Even small things like creating replacement parts for things that are no longer made. When it comes to 3d printing there’s potential pouring out of every orifice.

Anyway I’m hoping to spend some time doing more of this stuff (creating artworks and jewellery – not body parts).

Have you experimented with 3d art or 3d printing? Do you have anything to show off?

Dr Carter 3d Shaded view

Dr Carter 3d Shaded view

Let me know what you think on Mastodon, or BlueSky (or Twitter X if you must).

Related Posts

17 Dec 2007

Videogames don’t make people stupid! Do they?

Recently a UK politician claimed teens playing games is making them less intelligent, in fact the following quote comes from a very popular tabloid – the Sun. KIDS hooked on computer games have sent England plummeting down world league tables...
05 Oct 2021

Randomness with PHP

When I was making my generative art I needed to generate a lot of random things. The simplest way to do that with PHP is to use the rand() function.The rand() function selects a random integer (whole number) between 0...
29 Mar 2008

In the workplace

37Signals have recently posted a couple of articles on improving the workplace experience and they’re doing things I can only dream of. The posts in questions are workplace experiments, and fire the workaholics.Workplace experimentsSome of their ideas are great. I...
28 Dec 2006

In game ads don’t work?

Advertising in games is something that has been getting a lot of media attention recently. Some reports say that gamers love it, provided things are in context (ads on billboards in a city for example) and, more recently, they say...
06 Sep 2005

What I do at Miniclip

I do lots of different things during my day job at Miniclip, web design, graphic design, animation, and programming – I have to turn my hand to whatever is required, and I seem to be working on something different every...
29 Mar 2010

Toy Story 1, 2 and 3

I’ll be honest – I’m posting this because I was sent free copies of the recently re-released Toy Story 1 and 2 movies (Blu-Ray and DVD of both films). I was very close to turning it down – I don’t...