Okay its been a bit, but we got some new figures added to the theatre
Fozzy Bear, a couple Weeping Angels (with popcorn so you know they are off duty), Gaffer the Muppet cat, and of course, Statler and Waldorf. We also added a small piece of the original Pantages theatre in the form of a tiny paint chip.
So to make Statler and Waldorf I got lucky and found a couple heads on thingiverse
Protip about thingiverse, they removed all the copyrighted material from their search function, but didn’t remove the models from their site, so if all you can find is a remixed version of something, check the description to see if it links to the sources, they often do.
Heads are no good without a body so I went down a bunch of different tool chains before settling on the following. MakeHuman → Blender → Rhino 8 → Meshmixer → Orca Slicer → Bambu p1p with 0.2mm nozzle->prime and paint. Bear in mind, I have no idea what I am doing when it comes to animation, posing, rigging etc. so my toolchain might be considered madness.
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MakeHuman - Good at getting a basic human figure that can have clothes. Can export a fully rigged model (ie with posable bones and such) directly into Blender via a non intuitive combination of a blender plugin and a socket feature in the program.
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Blender, used this to pose the figure and export to an stl
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Rhino 8 - used this to shrinkwrap the model which filled in the MANY MANY holes left by the above. I think Blender also has a shrinkwrap option, but I am more familiar with Rhino.
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Meshmixer - Used to combine the heads and make changes like increasing the size of the hands. I love this software for doing fast and dirty changes to stls. In addition to being able to mesh boolean, you can selectively highlight parts of the model and scale and transform just those bits with a gradual falloff. The sculpting tools are pretty intuitive too. Protip, put your cursor over part of the model and press C, your view will now rotate around that point.
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Orca slicer - I am printing these out on a Bambu P1P with a .2 nozzle. I am going FDM because I just don’t want to deal with the toxicity and clean up of resin in my house and at 1:55 I can JUST get away with it.
Key settings are use arachne as the wall generator (prints lines smaller than the nozzle), 0.06mm layer height, slow down to 80mm/s, tree supports, rotate your figure so its on its back, and print using per object order so you aren’t stringing back and forth between models.
These are printed out using Bambu’s basic PLA because that way I don’t have to calibrate all the flow settings, otherwise for different filament running Orca’s flow dynamics calibration makes a HUGE difference to print quality on this type of thing.
Here they are printed, the printer kracken ate Statler’s legs, which worked out because Janet had to chop Waldorf’s feet off later to fit him into the balcony. Happy accidents.
Primed it with Mr Surfacer primer, thanks @TankGuy for introducing us to that product range
And finally painted by hand with a small brush. I used a mix of speed paints (used a lot in wargaming, they tend to pool in spots to give you lots of color variation with no effort) and regular acrylics. At this scale you don’t need to be too precious or exact. I am happy with how Statlers suit and tie came out, considering I just painted it all blue and added two white lines to represent the collar. I used a fine tipped pigment marker for the eyes and I am very happy that Statler will only be seen in profile because I walleyed the heck out of him.
We still got another couple hundred seats to fill if you got a favorite character you want to add. 