It’s a case of serendipity this week guys as I show you, step by step,
how to convert this excellent 3D model into a wearable pendant using only FREE software.
Hey guys, Three things came together for me this week.
Firstly, I was asked by a friend to make her a Stormbreaker pendant.
Secondly, lots of you guys have been asking me to demonstrate how to use
free software to amend 3D models. And finally, I was very flattered
to be approached by Thangs.com, asking if they could sponsor one of my videos.
So let’s get on with it. It begins with a 3D
file and Thangs.com was admittedly new to me. Obviously I’m going to be a little biased here,
but I did find the website nice looking, very responsive and easy to navigate.
It’s described as a platform is for independent engineers, product designers,
and 3D CAD enthusiasts, including hobbyist – a sort of Github for 3D models.
Searching is very easy and, impressively, it’s a geometric search,
meaning it helps you find the models you’re looking for even if they’re on other websites.
It didn’t take long to find this fabulous Stormbreaker model but I do need to say
there’s various file formats on Thangs right now and it’s still finding it’s communal feet,
so what you find might not be STL… but don’t be afraid to ask the creators if you can’t find what
you want. It’s that kind of place! Anyway I downloaded this file and
I’ll place a direct link in the description to make things easier.
The first thing we need to do is think about scale as amazingly this model
comes in at over a meter or three feet long so that obviously needs changing.
Altering scale is a standard function of most Slicer programs, like Lychee, Cura,
Photon Workshop, ChiTuBox or whatever. Here I’ll use ChiTuBox, a free
downloadable slicer. And straight off, the model looks stupidly big.
But that’s what the ‘Scale tool’ is for. Just click it and look at the largest dimension,
in this case the Y axis at 1133mm. Making sure the Lock Ratio function is activated,
highlight that and type in something more appropriate - which will be 50mm.
The model has shrunk but stayed perfectly proportioned with all its detail intact.
Now it best practice to Rename and Save this STL file and again all Slicers usually do this.
In ChiTuBox it’s just a case of ‘Save As’, and we’ll call it Thor’s Stormbreaker 50mm.
To function as a pendant, we needs a loop for a chain or cord to pass through
and for that I’m going to be using Blender, an excellent free, opensource CAD package.
Now I can’t teach you how to use Blender here… it’s just too involved,
so I’ve got to assume you’ve at least got familiar with the very basics. Hopefully
you’ll then follow what I’m up to here… assuming I can figure it out myself.
I’ll start by deleting everything from the scene. It’s not relevant to what we’re doing here.
Next I’ll import our rescaled file. So here it is, floating a little and that’s
fine for me. I’m not going to reposition it. We’ll keep this nice and simple.
Moving around the 3D object is done by holding down the scroll down on the mouse. Zooming in and
out is done by rolling the scroll wheel. If you’re not already aware,
this gizmo here works like a compass, keeping a track of where the model is in 3D space.
It’s useful to click on these points to orientate the view of model squarely to the screen.
So to add a loop, we need to go up here and select Add, Mesh,Torus.
Now be careful not to click anything just yet, but let me show you that a small doughnut shape
has appeared just under the axe. It’s tiny and a bit pixelated but we can easily change that
by selecting this floating menu down here. My ‘Major Segments’ are 48 but my ‘Minor Segments’
are 12, so I’ll change those to 48 as well and you can see things have smoothed out quite nicely.
The Major or outside radius is too small at 1mm so I’ll change that to 4mm. This gives us a very
thin band, but by changing the Minor or inside radius to 1, we get something more substantial.
To move this loop, I need to click on the four-arrowed icon here.
You should now see these coloured arrows appear and by clicking, holding and dragging these,
I can move the Torus to an ideal position. I’m doing this purely by eye, judging
where I think it’s central to the handle and where I think it looks best.
Now I like that and we could leave it as it is, but I want to blunt off this
sharp tail end of the handle and we can use Blenders Sculpting environment to do this.
If you look at this Scene menu up here, you can see we have two objects,
Stormbreaker and the Torus. We can work on each one individually by selecting it,
so right now we need to ensure Stormbreaker is selected.
On the top menubar, click Sculpting. The Blender environment has changed
and the axe is now effectively made of clay, so we can do a little freehand sculpting to it.
Before I do anything else, let me just say that for this video I will NOT be using a graphics
tablet, only an ordinary PC Mouse. If you want to do any CAD work, I’d recommend buying this cheap
tablet from Amazon. It’s a great starter piece and it’s what you’ve seen me using
in some of my other videos. But today, with this video, the mouse will do fine.
Before you start, you’ll need to click the Dynamic Topology tickbox.
The detail size is 12 pixels and the I like to start with the Brush as Relative detail.
On this side of the menu you’ll see I’ve selected the Flatten tool and I’m going to start by just
rubbing down this jagged area. You’ll notice that to Tool doesn’t affect the Torus but only axe
as we previous selected Stormbreaker.
By working on the edge, I’m beginning to round it over
and give it more shape. It’s important to keep moving around to see things from different angles.
If you find the Torus obscures your view,
just de-select this Eye icon and it will become invisible.
Once I’m happy with the general shape, I change to Brush Detail,
giving me more control and finer pixilation.
Because the mouse has less control than a graphics tab,
I turned down the strength of the brush a little.
Here I checked to make sure things were roughly symmetrical.
Finally, I finished off with the Smooth tool. And I think that looks pretty good.
I switched back to Layout view environment as it was time to combine the axe
and the Torus into one complete 3D object. To do this, in the Scene menu, I clicked and
selected Stormbreaker. Notice the orange halo. Then by holding down Control and clicking Torus,
I selected that as well, as shown by the yellow halo.
Now we click ‘Object’, ‘Boolean Operators’ and ‘Union’… and we
have a finished, amended 3D object. Again for best practice we should save
and rename this file, so I’ll ‘Export’ as an STL and rename in Thors Stormbreaker 50mm Finished.
All that’s left now is to print it, which I’ll do on a resin printer,
so this time I use Lychee as my slicer of choice, which does have a Free version available.
But a quick word of warning here… when you amend files like we’ve done here,
Lychee often throws a wobbly and expects you to repair them using its built-in features. Whether
you do or not, I typically find they still work fine unless you’ve done something a little dire.
How you rotate the model on the build plate is down to you, but here’s how I did things.
Y-es, I do tend to over-support things. I prefer many light supports.
A few minutes cleaning up a successful print is far better than hours wasted on a failed print.
So for many of my viewers that’s it. They’re happy to print and
paint their creations which I sometimes do myself.
But for my casting buddies, let’s melt a bit of metal.
The blue prints are Bluecast X5 and the purple prints are a castable resin that’s
not on the market yet… so I’ll have to keep the name of that to myself for now.
Well I’m very pleased with these. They’ve cast perfectly for my mind.
The real surprise has been this mystery purple castable resin. The woodgrain
effect is purely accidental and is nothing more than the remnants of the print layers,
but to echo the great Bob Ross, it’s a happy accident.
So there you go guys. How to take a 3D model from Thangs.com or any print
library and amend it with free software to create something unique for personal use.
I hope you enjoyed this one guys. Take care and thanks for watching.