Kaetemi

First successful test piece for smooth FCS. More details in the thread on the Shapeways forums.

This is the exclusive figure I digitally 3d modeled for Tsunacon 2011, a manga/anime convention in the Netherlands, held last month on the 30th of January. The figure is of Tsuna-chan, the mascot character of the Tsunacon convention. It was printed by Shapeways on a ZCorp full color printer.

It's based on the artwork of the Tsuna-chan winter version made by Roos:

Some of you might notice the overly obvious references to certain popular characters.

Shapeways infuses the ZCorp prints with XLAform to improve their strength. Unfortunately, at this moment, this process still causes some slight off-white yellowish tinting, depending on the size and shape of the item.

They interestingly included a misprint, that was not properly processed during the infusion, with the package, together with the reprint. It shows less off-white, but there's light spots on the surface. There's also a lot of the XLAform stuff visibly remaining in some places where it's more difficult for it to get out, as you can see in the following picture.

More keychains in different shapes.
Available as co-creator template at Shapeways.
http://www.shapeways.com/shops/kaetemi?section=Gadgets

I printed out another figure. This one is printed by Shapeways as well (http://www.shapeways.com/model/190101/_santa_girl__figure__full_color_.html), in their "Full Color Sandstone" material (which is basically stuff printed by a ZCorp machine with some additional post processing for extra strength).

The result looks pretty decent, and the figure is quite heavy... It's about 16.5cm high.

I went a little overboard on shading in the texture (which I shouldn't really do, but it's just for testing purposes here), and this resulted in some black spots which seem to blend out quite a bit, so that's something I'll have to avoid, other than that the colors turned out roughly as I expected them to be.

Anyways, here are the pictures! :)

One problem with printing stuff in color using typical CMYK printing ink, is that it's often difficult to get the exact color you want. This color palette shows the color and grayscale range of the fullcolor prints offered by Shapeways. It contains a full hue gradient, to black, to gray and to white, as well as a black to white gradient, and the different base colors seperately. By scanning this color palette, and scanning another color on the same scanner settings, it should be possible to match the right color. The data available on the color palette should be enough to write a small piece of software that interpolates the entire color space in the print, and then get the required on-screen RGB for printing a specific scanned color in this material, which is something I'll work on in the near future.

One thing that is somewhat noticable, is the slight yellowish-ness of the white color. Plotting the hue values on the hue side a bit, shows how yellow/green is very saturated, while inversely the printed cyan is not as saturated as the original onscreen cyan. Note that this plot is heavily dependent on scanner type and settings, so observations may vary.

If you want to see for yourself what the colors look like, you can get one too.