Making of Louis CK Collectible Toys

Collectible toys

This project start out of pure love for Stand up comedy, I actually only sculpted the bust of Louie CK at first just as a sculpting exercise.

I 3dd printed this guy as a Birthday gift for a good friend who is a huge Louis CK fan, I really wanted to get him something awesome for his birthday.

And I'm going to walk you through the process of creating Louie CK Figurine. As I said it all started in ZBrush this is the software I use to create my characters.

Once the digital sculpt is done the cleaning process starts, and making sure all shapes are clean and nothing is overlapping in a weird way that will cause some printing problems and also keeping in mind that this Louie CK toy figurine will be split into multiple parts to 3d printed.

Once I'm sure every ZBrush subtool in the 3d model is ready to be split I start adding Keys that will make it easier for this guy to be assembled once the 3d print is done.

And almost every-time I would check out how would it look like as a bronze statue.

Alright, now that I have split the model into different parts it's time to send those parts to be sliced on the 3d printer software to prepare each piece for 3d printing. 

I usually don't print all the pieces at the same time, because if the printer fails to print one model you will loose so much time and material and also because I don't print each piece at the same resolution, for example for the head and arms I want the highest resolution, but for the pants, shirt and shoes I don't want that much resolution because I want to embrace the texture the 3d printer is creating to add some nice texture to the jeans, smooth objects are not always great ideas, I have written about this in my Count Dooky Study, Sculpt and 3D print article.

Here is the head, usually I start printing the parts that need the most detail to see if the scale that I chose for the art toy is good enough for all those details that I sculpted will be visible. 

Below you can see the Head Torso and one arm 

And here are the pants and the shoes

Once I have all the 3d parts 3d printed I start sanding them to clean up the big lines that support from the 3d printing usually leave on the model, then I go with a finer grain and start sanding all the tiny lines until I get a smooth surface, if there are any big error or gaps in the model, especially in areas where the 3d printed model is sitting on the supports that are generated by the 3d printer, you might need to use some type of filler to fill those gaps. Keep in mind that sanding is sculpting so don't rush it, take your time cleaning each part.

 Now it's time to add some paint, for this toy I decided to hand paint the whole using brushes and no air brush, cause I wanted it to have that hand made feel and brush work can add some nice details and textures to skin. 

Also using the brush I was able to get this nice jeans effect, I used Vallejo paints Air and Model for the entire toy, and finally sealed the whole thing using Vallejo Matt varnish.

And Finally assembling this toy and giving it a proper photoshoot, I used my canon 550D to shoot the photos, I used one soft box and some bounce cards.

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