What’s up, Hive! My finger tips are burning because I’ve been working with resin and isopropyl alcohol [without gloves, which I need to get better about], but I’m able to share of what I did tonight, documented specifically for a post here tonight. Last night, I mentioned that I’ll be sharing an update on my Emrakul sculpt and 3D print. This sculpt is massive, shedding some light on my inexperience with file formatting. Almost 18 million vertices in this particular sculpture. The file from Nomad sculpt was 1.6GB. Fortunately, I was able to scale it down in Chitubox to 130MB, which was much more reasonable.
This whole fiasco with Emrakul came about because I was looking for a .stl file on the web to print. I’ve found various Magic: The Gathering files on the 3D marketplaces, so I thought for sure I’d find one of my favorite Eldrazi titans. I found a screen shot of an Emrakul sculpt, but it was just part of someone’s ArtStation portfolio. I decided I was just going to do my own. This was the beginning of a week long process of sculpting a giant jellyfish spaghetti monster with dozens of tentacles. I shared a previous post on the progress last week if you’d like to catch up.
The Emrakul form was hard enough. It did force me to seek out and learn how to work with tubes, which was an absolute necessity for this particular challenge. Once I got the form finished, I printed a test sculpt and to my surprise, it came out perfect! I was encouraged by that, and then went on to details, scratches and textures. On this many tentacles, it was daunting. In hindsight, that kind of detail should have been done first, rather than trying to awkwardly pinch and zoom in to the tight cracks and hidden areas of each form in Nomad.
Tonight, it was finally finished and at the end of a 10 hour print session, I was able to cut off, wash and cure not one but two Emrakul’s in their final form. This was really exciting because I’d consider this marketplace worthy. I’m not necessarily looking to sell my .stl files, but its great to know I finished something that I think would meet that standard. Not sure what’s next to sculpt. I’ve been watching a ton of videos and tutorials on YouTube to get inspired for something more human shaped/inspired. Whatever I decide, I’ll be sharing it here on Hive.