WIP – 3D printed Aramture on OOAK Doll

If you know anything about my art you will know that while I love OOAK (one of a kind) hand sculpted Clay creations, I also love my 3D printer and the wonderful world of 3D printed items.

I also love the idea of meshing the two worlds together, I don’t think 3D printers are going to take away from the OOAK world – I think they are a tool to be used to enhance it.

Here is a sample of the worlds meshing together, this is a fun Tim Burton inspired character that I created by printing a few 3D core parts (skull, torso, shoes and hands) and then its all strung together with plastic coated wire that gives the piece the ability to be posed and played with.

3D printed core with clay meshup

The great thing about the 3D printed core is it can speed things up for quick fun creations that you want to be able to make and sell without taking for ever to make. And the 3D parts create a strong hole for the wire to go through, so repetitive moving of the wire wont start to break down the cooked polymer clay. The shoes and hands are completely 3D printed with no clay on them, that can speed up a very timely difficult part to sculpt!

I made these thinking I might make a fun course, for adults or kids, around making a ooak clay character over a 3D printed core, but I never did get around to setting that up. So if you are in my area (Hamilton New Zealand) and have a few friends who would be interested in doing a fun course in making a clay creation send me an email and we can set something up!

Anyway, so now onto the new piece I am working on. I want to take this to the next step and create an entire 3D printed armature to have under my clay. My hopes for this is to create a strong lightweight armature and also to get a fast start into the form I want to create.

3D filed file for OOAK doll

So I have started with creating my 3D figure in Daz, posed it and to be able to put clay on it I have completely emaciated the figure. Then its converted around a few 3D programs until I have it ready for the 3D printer (don’t worry about the unusual hand pose – these a reason to my madness, trust me 🙂

3d printed voronoi figure
It would have been better, I think, to Voronoi it (like the figure above made by Styxx over at Thiniverse) as that will make it use less filament, still be very strong and give it holes for the clay to grip too. But I’m impatient and didn’t want to muck to much with the file for my first try. So if this works out well then maybe I will do it next time?

I had supports but not enough, so during my print I lost one arm. Not to mind – I have just replaced the arm with a bit of wire (attached in place through a drilled hole with epoxy) In a way this method could be used in the future, hands printed separate and attached after with wire and glue) that would allow for arm posing, but I actually wanted to be set in the armature to avoid having to make pose/form decision after the 3d file was created.

3d printed ooak armature core
After the photo above was taken I needed to drill the two peg holes in the torso to make them a bit bigger. And in my error I didn’t hold onto the doll tightly enough when I started drilling. So the whole thing spun in my hand and I broke off the other arm (face palm!) not to mind, its wire and epoxy to the rescue again.

I also added a hole in the flat footed leg to have a tube inserted for standing, and I printed it with a void in the back to allow a nut to be epoxy in for the armature stand system (more on that below)

3D printed aramture for ooak on the armature stand reading for clay
Above is a picture of the armature stand I made up for this project. It was easily made with some threaded rod, wingnuts, washers and a L bracket. I then epoxied a nut into a cavity I already included in the 3D and its all ready for clay.