AKA the Snat
I have a lot of ambitious sculpts in mind, but I needed to start off with something small and manageable. So thus: the Meowllusk.
I took inspo from some of the sofubi I've pined for a while now [did manage to get my hands on a mini negora for an ok price!]. The intersection between play-thing and art object that these and other designer toys really fascinating, and the process of taking a 2D idea and making it a tangible, 3D thing is still an exciting venture for me. Plus I can't pass up the chance to revisit feeling like I did when I was little and making figures out of cheap air-dry clay to play with.
Scope:
Sculpt must be make of two parts that can interlock and be glued together. Sharpen those CAD-adjacent skills
Keep things easy enough to paint, even with the chewed up brushes I have on hand.
Use an airbrush in some way to call back to that sofubi look.
Play with textural contrast.
Stick to FOSS tools as much as possible.
Try not to die from resin fumes.
Per usual, I did my sketch in Krita. I wanted to design something that'd be relatively easy to print and paint, and have some dramatic textural contrast between the shell and the body, so I opted for a chubby cheeked cat with simple details so the glossy varnish can gleam nicely off the surface, and a more detailed shell to better suit a matte finish
I spent about a week on-off sculpting the creature in Blender. With previous sculpts I'd start off with a sphere with sculpt the shape of the subject from there. This go around I spend more time modeling/blocking out the general shape of the subject first, then subdivide the surface, sculpt in the details, and rememsh as needed. I found this workflow a lot kinder to my RAM and processor lol
I'm still new to resin printing, so getting things set up for a successful print took some trail-and-error. Poor little dudes ended up with missing mustaches and wonkly blobulars. With some extra research and tweaks to the supports I managed to get a successful print the third go around. 'Ended up gifting that one to a friend.
Side tangent: coming from FDM printing, it's weird how there doesn't seem to be good FOSS slicers in SLA/resin print world.
For the 'final enough for this project' final, I printed the body in a clear green resin and the shell in the middle grey resin I've been using for the prototypes. I wanted to get a glassy, shiny candy-coated sheen to the body, so I explored two methods:
Method 1: Resin coat: Coat the figure in another layer of UV cure resin and cure. This was, go figure, cumbersome and messy. I used this method on the dark green version.
Method 2: Varnish: Just spray down the piece in several coats of high gloss varnish. This method was the easier and most successful of the two. This was the method I used on the cream version of the sculpt.
Painting was pretty straight forward. I used a mix of air brushing. spattering with a toothbrush dipped in paint, and go in the fine details with some of the smaller paint brushes I had around. Of the two I think Cream's paint job came out the strongest.
While there are some things I'd like to tweak with the model [the foot's supposed to have a logo, but it's a bit too fine detail/small to be legible], I am happy with the final results of this iteration of the figures. All with minimal failed prints and thus waste in the process, which is nice considering the waste product this print process produces.
With this under my belt, I'm aiming to try my hand at more ambitious pieces. Maybe something with articulation next.
