5 ways 3D printing is affecting the design industry
Books:
3D Printing For Dummies Paperback – January 13, 2014
Companies manufacturing toys using 3D printing
Livesforce- toy design software
The Chaos Bunnies will be a “blind boxed mini-figure series” – a staple in the designer toy world, meaning these will be an assortment of 4-inch tall figures boxed randomly in identical packaging. Like baseball cards, you don’t know which one you might get. As some figures are more rare than others this encourages collecting, and brings excitement, trading, community and often a touch of frustration to the designer toy collecting game.
Almost always made in limited editions of 1,000 pieces or lower these are often seen as 3D fine art prints or sculpture, but instead of using bronze casting, it utilizes more democratic and affordable materials like plastic and vinyl.
Development- sketches and ideas
Turnarounds After I scan them into the computer I can work them out in Adobe Illustrator where it’s much easier and faster to make precise and to-scale renderings of the figures. Once I have my turnarounds completed in Illustrator, I’ll print them up and pencil-in artwork ideas to figure out what works best to further narrow this project down to 12 different figures. At this point the factory needs two things from me: turnarounds of each of the 12 figures and artwork mock-ups so they can give a price estimate based on complexity of the artwork, sizes of the figures, how many molds will need to be made, and the amount of tooling required.
Factory Pricing / Negotiation
Once I have all the turnarounds and mock-up artwork completed I copyright each character. (I'm going to make these on a 3D printer, so this part of the process isn't relevant to me. tm)Sculpture
Wax Samples
Master Mold Pieces / Paint Samples
have these figures here and design the final artwork by hand.
Like with any painting I begin these designs with pencil sketching on the figures. Using the contours of each shape to get the most out of both the sculpts and the design.
it’s important for me to give them the exact deco that can perfectly wrap around the curvatures of the heads.
Vectorize
Once these have all been painted I need to photograph them so I can trace my paint work in Illustrator to provide the factory with vector art that is usable for them to create pad prints and spray masks they will use to apply my artwork during production. This part of the process can be super tedious – and it’s really my least favorite part. Here I need to make templates of each figure at all angles
Next, I move on the tracing the black linework of the figures.
Packaging
Once all the vector work is complete and emailed over to the factory I move right on to the packaging design. Based on the figure sizes the factory provides me with a perfectly sized template for both the individual blind boxes as well as the display case. Of course beginning with a rough sketch concept and moving forward on the design. Just like with the figures, it always best to make design decisions if you have the object in your hands. So I make rough mock-ups – which leads to design adjustments. And once I feel I have something that works for me, I go forward with an actual full-scale mock up to get the perfect idea of how the final product will end up.
Photography
Bonus Cards I get back to work sketching the set of cards that I want to include with each figure.
Art Deco corrections
This is one of the toughest parts of the process, because the factory often makes mistakes here. It’s important to be calm, and clear with the corrections and not to overdo it. I always prioritize and fix the important things first.
Promotion
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