The design process for 3d printing

 

The redesign of the Daimyo

  • There is a mech in Battletech with amazing stats and weapons for its tonnage, called the Daimyo. There is one problem with it though it only has old, ugly, and made out of heavy metal. All of these traits make it a nightmare for any Battletech player to build, paint, and place on the battlefield with more up-to-date mechs. What to do?

    So what is a Battletech player to do if they want to field this monster of a mech onto the battlefield, but does not want to bring this? Simple, They make a brand new sculpt and print it

step 1

So the 1st thing I want to do is to make a mood board and see what new and old versions of this model and see what spoke to me.

Mood board

But this concept by Fedot really struck me, this design is still faithful to the old design but is bringing it to the modern age.

My quick concept art for 3ds max

I want to keep the overall same design and iconic heavy top poncho. But the one thing I had to change was the mechs arms position. Instead of them coming out of the center torso I wanted to make them come out of the Metal Poncho. This made more sense to me to let the mech arms rest without clipping into the legs, but it also made sense with how the BattleTech rules work. When a mech loses either its left or Right Torso, it also loses its respective arm. however, with the original design’s arms being attached to the center torso it would make no sense for them to come off when it lost its side torso.

Modeling it

I 1st started out by blocking out simple shapes to get a pose I wanted. after that I went to work modeling my 1st attempt I try exploring what ahead would like if it was curvier but eventually I decided to scrap it and make it more geometrical.

The Low poly version was done Now I could work on the higher poly in Zbrush. The reason I switched to Zbrush from 3ds max is that Zbrush has wonderful tools to edit mesh and can handle more polygons. I didn’t care how High the poly count reached because, with the resin printers I have, it is actually beneficial to have it high poly for the print to come out with more details.

After adding cuts and bumps in Zbrush It was finally ready to sent to Chitubox Printing software

With this software, I can add support to make models hollow and control how the 3d resin printer will use the UV lights. After printing a hollow version of the model I learn that washable resin prints are prone to cracking after the print so I went back to make it unhollowed and print again. After that, I washed it and shined UV lights on it to make sure everything was cured. But before I could paint it I have to UV unwrap it so I could textured it in substance

Then I can finally start painting the printed model

So after primer, I did a 2 quick coats of blue for the base. Then I pin wash black in the cuts I made in Brush to make the panels and cuts stand out more. after that I add some other base colors and washed everything with their base color. Finally I went back with a lighter blue drybrush to high light the top and edges of the model