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Old 5th January 2014, 01:09 AM   #1
Ranchoth
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Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 6
Default 3D printed, displacement mapped "mummified relic" custom gamepiece

If I may toot my own horn a bit, my latest (slightly grisly) creation, modeled almost entirely in AC3D—a custom sculpted mummified "relic" gamepiece for a boardgame, as a Christmas present:



Full gallery.

Kind of an interesting story behind the creation of this one. The "head" itself was actually modeled first as a physical object, built up with polymer clay and wrapping tissue over a Halloween decoration skull (styled after the mummy of Ramses I, as a matter of fact)—



And actually "scanned" in with Autodesk's free 123D Catch software—uploading about 70 photos of the model from all angles produced a detailed, textured 3D model, which I could open directly in AC3D:


Full Gallery

The head itself, from that point, was a cinch—mostly just recoloring/contrasting textures, and patching up a couple of holes.

The pedestal was a different matter—for that, I actually used displacement mapping. In other words, mapping a grayscale "elevation" map to an object (a simple cylinder, in this case), and then deforming the mesh for extra detail.

The texture/displacement map, I bought from surfacemimic.com, which sells quite a variety of texture map/displacement scans, for that very purpose. A tremendous amount of variety was possible, just from that one image combo!



But for the effect itself, which isn't a "standard" option n AC3D, I had to use a 2008 plugin from independantdeveloper.com—as a matter of fact, this was quite stable, and easy to learn. But the problem was that it's only compiled for the PC—and I'm a Mac user.

Luckily, I have Windows installed on a Bootcamp partition, but I only have a license for one copy of AC3D, at the moment, and that's on the Mac side. So, I used the plugin with the 30 day demo of AC3D. Which is kosher, as far as I know—and believe me, it's sold me on buying a dual license copy of AC3D 7, as soon as I can—but it put me under the gun for getting the project completed and saved within the trial period!

Displacement done, with touchup work and optimization done on my Mac side, I printed "The Relic" on Shapeways, my 3D printing service of choice, in full color synthetic sandstone, which allowed the use of the texture file.

All in all, I'd call it a success—and it was a hit as a Christmas present for my little sister (heh!). My only quibble is wishing that displacement mapping was a standard feature of AC3D, or at least, that that plugin could be compiled for my beloved OS X. I'd pay extra, even.

Not too bad, if I may say so, for no special training on my part, no special equipment, and mostly consumer level (or even free) software. And special thanks to AC3D—my modeling software of choice for many years so far, and hopefully many years to come!
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