3D Prototypes and Models in Adelaide, South Australia | Engineering service

3D Prototypes and Models

Locality: Adelaide, South Australia

Phone: +61 415 246 775

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25.01.2022 A relatively quick job to get done before Avcon, King Bradleys swords, from Fullmetal Alchemist. You cant really tell from the photo, but the blade is two-toned with light and dark silver and it has a slight curve. With thick pins going throughout the blade and it pinned into the hilt, this is pretty strong for a 3D printed sword. On that note, I will be sharing a stall at AVCON this weekend. I wont be selling anything, but I will have a few of my props there (notably the clawshot, probably my most popular one), a big poster of many props Ive done over the years and can explain 3D printing props to anyone whos interested. Any orders made through there for props will also get an even bigger discount than what I normally do for props. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

25.01.2022 Hollow Knights Helmet. Made from 10 parts, the eyes have a lot of visibility as its low density fabric, the camera cant focus on it though from the inside. Wearing it is very surreal. It echoes really well, similar to when you put a seashell to your ear and you hear the blood in your ears so if you put it on in the dead of night all you hear is your own blood... www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

25.01.2022 This was one of the most tricky 3D models Ive had to make. A customer wanted a 3D model of the front of St. Ignatius Church in Norwood, so I took a few photos from different angles and spent a lot of time drawing it up in 3D to print it. Given how big it is, I couldnt exactly measure many of the features and the perspectives in photos made it difficult to determine the relative size of everything. I also modified many shapes so they actually can be 3D printed, so that meant making some tiny features either a little bit larger, or removing them entirely so they can be made some other way including by hand sculpting. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

24.01.2022 A while ago I was put into contact with https://www.facebook.com/trudimentions/ about getting into the cosplay side of prop making, her work was impressive so I suggested seeing what she can pull off for Borderlands 3 which I know is going to be popular among cosplayers. With very limited in-game screenshots available to get the right angles and really only stuff like this to work off, she made the pauldron attached here. Its absolutely amazing and a great service Ill happily advertise to cosplayers in Adelaide. When you want the best cosplay you can get, definitely check her out. 3D printing remains a great option for small, intricate pieces that need to be durable but her work is well suited for larger pieces like that.

24.01.2022 I didnt exactly expect this scan to work given I am still learning this stuff and this seemed extremely complex, but it came out amazing. My little home set up may be a bit rudimentary using cardboard and some boxes to set up the scanning space, it works well though! www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

23.01.2022 A month ago I made this little stamp for use with wedding cookies and yesterday I finally got to see the result of it. Fairly quick and easy job with great results :) www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

22.01.2022 Heres a short post about a job I did back in March, showing the process involved in making custom car parts. No originals that suited the specific car to work off, an entirely brand new product. http://3dprototypesandmodels.com.au/custom-car-louvre-vents/

22.01.2022 I recently got asked to make a few props with the word Pretoria on it, I didnt really think anything of it at the time. Turns out they were to be used as props in the Escape from Pretoria movie being filmed now in Adelaide! Im not 100% sure, but the badge on this hat certainly looks exactly like this badge modeled up by Eric Lopez who works with me a lot on digital sculpting. Still looking for the other prop I made though.

20.01.2022 Always nice to see examples of products I helped develop actually make it all the way to mass manufacture. This hair toning brush started 18 months ago and is now being sold. There are other types made up, this is the main one though that was made first.

20.01.2022 Here's some props I worked on over the past few months. The 'Mage Mashers' from Final Fantasy, and an Anubis staff and mask from the show 'House of Anubis'. The Mage Mashers are particularly interesting as they join together to form a double-sided sword, and for the first time I tried using carbon fibre rods, along with normal pegs inside the sword. This makes it very strong compared to other methods when 3D printing swords, giving it high rigidity and high strength despite still having a moderate infil % to keep the weight down. The customer wished to paint it themselves. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

20.01.2022 I just finished what I believe is the third biggest printing job since starting this business. 90 military vehicles for a defence client, along with 100 laser cut flags to help identify the vehicles. These will be used on a very large map for training and strategy exercises. I did all the 24 3D models myself quickly as only low detail was needed. At an average of around 2 hours per vehicle, thats 180 hours of printing + 3 hours laser cutting + maybe 5 hours CAD... and I was only given 2 weeks to do it all. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

19.01.2022 Ive had these two rolls of PETT and flexible filament (1.75mm) for years and I dont think Im going to use them anytime soon. Theyve been stored in a dry environment and arent brittle, but I make absolutely no guarantees as to whether they are good or not. Ill give them away for free to the first person who can pick them up from me (Ridgehaven) if anyone is interested in experimenting with them.

19.01.2022 For a few years, Ive relied on outside businesses to provide 3D scanning so I never directly advertised that I offered it. Now that I have access to a portable scanner, along with various business associates who own turntable and other advanced scanning devices, Ive finally put a page up about it. http://3dprototypesandmodels.com.au/3d-scanning/ I can now also do full colour scanning, heres the first thing I every attempted. It managed to get the text pretty well. The white dots are reflective stickers, like those used in motion capture.

19.01.2022 Last week I visited IPS3 in Adelaide, where they have top of the line SLS Nylon and full-colour sandstone capability, more advanced machines of the same type that Shapeways prints from. I can definitely recommend them for all those sorts of jobs that people may have had to send interstate or internationally in the past as its now possible locally in a fraction of the time.

17.01.2022 Heres some props I worked on over the past few months. The Mage Mashers from Final Fantasy, and an Anubis staff and mask from the show House of Anubis. The Mage Mashers are particularly interesting as they join together to form a double-sided sword, and for the first time I tried using carbon fibre rods, along with normal pegs inside the sword. This makes it very strong compared to other methods when 3D printing swords, giving it high rigidity and high strength despite still having a moderate infil % to keep the weight down. The customer wished to paint it themselves. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

17.01.2022 If anyone is experienced with, or know someone who can make custom foam shapes let me know. I have a job to recreate a shape similar to an open-cut mine that will most efficiently be able to be made by cutting foam blocks to size like a contour map. Whether its hot wire cutting or something else as long as it gets the shape, it will work. Thanks.

16.01.2022 This was a job that had months of planning. Some of the castings beneath the bridge on Frome road to the Adelaide Zoo had fallen off, and a local business won the contract to replace them. They organised the scaffolding needed to get mobile 3D scanners close enough to scan the shapes and I handled the 3D printing, splitting the pieces up into more manageable sections to print from ASA, a weather-resistant ABS. Each of those castings is about 55 hours worth of printing with a fair bit of post processing to sand down and fill the gaps with weather resistant sealant. These parts are going to be coated by another local company and eventually be indistinguishable from original castings. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

16.01.2022 New record for longest print, I rarely do such things as I dont like the machines going over multiple nights, the bottom section here was 31hrs 15 minutes. Model from here https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models//landmark/roman-pantheon for a customer. It took 5 hours to clean the support out... And I was being fairly stingy with how much I used, in fact I manually drew the support up for the entire model. A lot of thought went into how I can put the support in while still giving me access with the right tools to remove them and not risk damaging the model or having support simply jammed in areas it couldnt get out of. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

14.01.2022 I often get contacted by people where the first thing they say about their request is "Its probably something really weird, I dont know if you can do it" I think its funny when the answer is usually "Yeah Ive done it multiple times in the past, including one a few weeks ago". Occasionally though I do get jobs that are in fact really weird, this was one of them. A local universities geological department had some arrays of data of resistivity in the earths soil across south... Australia. A 1000x1000x200km plot with over 11,000 points of reference. The data gets interpolated between the points on this geological software to look like the attached model (green). However, there was no possible way to export that visualisation as a 3D model. It only existed as an array of numbers that had to be manually re-drawn as a mesh. Even if converted into a point cloud, the generation was simply a plane (grey) which is not at all what we were trying to get like the green model. Ben Dansie, a local 3D artist who Ive worked with a lot is once again an absolute genius at 3D modeling and managed to generate 3D shapes of the resistivity which I printed out quite large at 230mm long each. It involved a whole lot of manual interpretation to get there, no software would generate this. So, I dont take credit for the amazing work done by Ben to bring this data into a printable model, but it certainly rakes high up there on my list of really weird jobs that I dont know if I can do it. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

14.01.2022 The second longest single-print job I've done, but its the largest by amount of filament used. An architectural model for a local firm, it took a long time to edit it to be able to print as there were originally somewhere around 100 rooms inside it, all far too small to print. At 1:500, 276x242mm, all walls shrunk well below printable size so it took over a week of back and forth with the customer and I making many changes along with making use of the fantastic site makeprintable.com which really is a lifesaver for extremely complex models like this. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

13.01.2022 No posts for a while because Ive been insanely busy. July was a very busy month followed up by August which has completely blown away my record of large jobs done in a month... and theres still 2 days to go! Too much sleep has been lost so I got another printer to help handle all these jobs, that takes me up to 6, with a 7th being loaned to me. Heres am educational model I finished this week of blood vessels. The red rods are just lollipop sticks as printing them would be very inefficient. I have many more cool things I can share once they are finished that have taken up so much of this month :) www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

13.01.2022 This is the second largest single-item print Ive ever done, coming in at 3.7kg and approximately 165 hours worth. A customer is a dressmaker and wanted a mannequin of her torso, the Adelaide Aquatic Centre happens to have a full-body scanner that people can use to scan themselves. With that file, I broke it up into 10 pieces, full of locating pegs to hold it all together and printed it in low density, high layer height pieces to keep this as affordable as possible. It will be covered in a fabric anyway so the seams are not important. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

13.01.2022 Looking for a desktop resin 3D print service, doesnt have to be in Adelaide. I have a few small one-off pieces suitable for SLA or DLP.

13.01.2022 I often get contacted by people where the first thing they say about their request is "It's probably something really weird, I don't know if you can do it" I think its funny when the answer is usually "Yeah I've done it multiple times in the past, including one a few weeks ago". Occasionally though I do get jobs that are in fact really weird, this was one of them. A local universities geological department had some arrays of data of resistivity in the earths soil across south... Australia. A 1000x1000x200km plot with over 11,000 points of reference. The data gets interpolated between the points on this geological software to look like the attached model (green). However, there was no possible way to export that visualisation as a 3D model. It only existed as an array of numbers that had to be manually re-drawn as a mesh. Even if converted into a point cloud, the generation was simply a plane (grey) which is not at all what we were trying to get like the green model. Ben Dansie, a local 3D artist who I've worked with a lot is once again an absolute genius at 3D modeling and managed to generate 3D shapes of the resistivity which I printed out quite large at 230mm long each. It involved a whole lot of manual interpretation to get there, no software would generate this. So, I don't take credit for the amazing work done by Ben to bring this data into a printable model, but it certainly rakes high up there on my list of 'really weird jobs that I don't know if I can do it'. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

13.01.2022 Something I worked on early last year, Ive done a bunch of these before for uni students in 3mm MDF but it looks so much better in thinner material where you can get much better definition. Can anyone guess which famous city this contour map is of? All the lines on the edges are wharfs and piers, its a popular port city. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

12.01.2022 The job I did a few months ago for the bridge across the Torrens is up. It was all primed, painted and finished by AFL Services. I have no idea whatsoever which ones were printed and which were originals. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

12.01.2022 This will soon be the Elementalist Magma Lux Staff from League of Legends, the customer wants to do the painting though so Im just providing the printed components and the staff. I did the same thing that I did with the previous elementalist staff where I used some clear acrylic to hold the sections together so it looks like they are floating. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

12.01.2022 The second longest single-print job Ive done, but its the largest by amount of filament used. An architectural model for a local firm, it took a long time to edit it to be able to print as there were originally somewhere around 100 rooms inside it, all far too small to print. At 1:500, 276x242mm, all walls shrunk well below printable size so it took over a week of back and forth with the customer and I making many changes along with making use of the fantastic site makeprintable.com which really is a lifesaver for extremely complex models like this. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

12.01.2022 Tonsley Innovation District. Done as a fairly rush order, I had a little under 3 weeks to do this. Based off satellite imagery, I made this combination laser cut and 3D print model. The plate is 638mm long. Theres an internal grassed area with 2 small trees in it as well. This will actually be used inside a holographic box, where a screen sits on top and projects moving images onto it below. From the outside, it could very well look like tiny people are walking all around it. www.3dprototypesnandmodels.com.au

11.01.2022 Looking for someone with experience in rigging up some LED lighting. A small paid job to correctly wire a bunch of LEDs using portable batteries that Im probably going to have to stack up in order to get 15-25V.

11.01.2022 This is one of my favourite props Ive made. When given a long timeframe, I can make stuff look really cool for pretty cheap rates. I dont actually know where this prop is from, I just had some screenshots of an anime to work off from the customer. Theres a lot of thought and testing that went into this which isnt obvious by looking at it. I went through multiple different types of LED light sources to try and get the most consistent glow without blinding your eyes. LED st...rips were the best but still very bright. So I put in some gold mirror acrylic to block the light from hitting your eyes at a precise angle and it also reflects the lights back into the centre of the visor glass, giving a very uniform glow instead of clearly visible point-source lights. All of the electronics are hidden behind easily removable panels and the batteries come out too. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

10.01.2022 Its always funny when I come across salesmen who enjoy telling me how desktop 3D printers are toys and cant do serious jobs like industrial 3D printers can. Today a nice man showed me this particular model and told me its impossible to do on a typical desktop FDM 3D printer. I told him that I can do it on a 5 year old desktop machine, its not too hard. They re-affirm that no, its not possible, only an expensive industrial grade machine can do it. The inevitable outcome in my first try. For anyone who wants to give it a try themselves, its here https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2197230/files the expert mode cube, and scale it down to 50% (it should be 42.15mm high).

10.01.2022 Possibly the most complex job Ive ever done. I come across many complex jobs that require a high amount of CAD or 3D printing knowledge, but this one required all the usual stuff of CAD, 3D printing and laser cutting in addition to working with model grass/trees, electronics, hand painting and a bunch of outsourcing to get the really large parts. So a lot had to come together all perfectly. This is a Hydrogen Gas Plant, to be built at Hydrogen Park in Tonsley Park, Adelaide ...https://www.agig.com.au/hydrogen-park-south-australia Its a 1:100 model, at 870mm long (and weighing about 15kg!) and features a lighting control panel to let up 11 different areas on the model. The model will be on display at https://hysafe.info/ichs2019/ www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

10.01.2022 This was one of the most tricky 3D models I've had to make. A customer wanted a 3D model of the front of St. Ignatius Church in Norwood, so I took a few photos from different angles and spent a lot of time drawing it up in 3D to print it. Given how big it is, I couldn't exactly measure many of the features and the perspectives in photos made it difficult to determine the relative size of everything. I also modified many shapes so they actually can be 3D printed, so that meant making some tiny features either a little bit larger, or removing them entirely so they can be made some other way including by hand sculpting. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

10.01.2022 Today marks 5 years of this business running as my full-time job. Theres been around 1,300 jobs, over 17,000 print hours and 33 weeks full time consulting at university with customers from Adelaide to Dubai, Zurich and New York. As Ive mentioned before, theres so many fantastic inventions I get to work on that would never have seen the light of day had it not been for 3D printing. People used to talk about the decentralisation of manufacturing but that never really happened, reducing the cost of entry for inventors to prove their concept by a factor of 10 certainly did and I hope more and more people continue to try it.

08.01.2022 Portal gun, from Portal. Made for a customer. The model was downloaded from here https://www.myminifactory.com/obj/3d-print-portal-gun-18342 but I custom made all the electronics, which had no instructions at all. It required fairly extensive custom modifications to make it light up, and I used all sorts of things to make it. The front has what Im referring to as a refractor, a clear, thin walled cone such that when a point light source such as an LED shines behind it, it g...ives the illusion of a much larger, less powerful glow. The rear of the prop also has a unique shape. Since I want this to be able to be disassembled and re-assembled easily, most parts are push-fit in and not glued. I have made it such that you can push the switch into the middle, easily separate the back part and push it through the other hole in order to make this left or right handed. The original certainly wasnt ambidextrous, so I made that to allow it. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

07.01.2022 The "Sanctified Vigilance Shell" From Destiny 2, with a light up interior. This was certainly tricky as there are so few reference photos available for this thing so there was a bunch of guesswork involved as I modeled it as its a fair bit different from the relatively common straight-edged ghost. Powered by a 3V battery and white LED light with clear blue acrylic in the central section to give that glow. Painting this was... quite the challenge. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

06.01.2022 The Oneida Kestrel, used by the Green Arrow from the series Arrow. Modeled up by me. I really have no idea how compound bows work, so the ropes may or may not be doing anything as its very hard to tell where they go off images with so many pulleys! Definitely one of the cooler props Ive made. Not a drop of glue required in this, it will hold together quite strongly with the internal pegs. The customer wanted it unpainted, so Ive left it solid black, as printed. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

04.01.2022 A student just sent me this, a completed photo of their final year architecture model. What isnt shown is the sheer number of parts we broke this up to in order to minimise support as much as possible and get the overall print down to around 50 hours worth. A few hours of rework takes the model down to almost half price in less than half the time. Model design by Elliot Mortimer

04.01.2022 Im preparing to make an order from an overseas supplier I use for SLA prints, if anyone is interested in getting extreme high detail prints (<0.05mm) in solid reason, this is a really affordable option. The only downside is the cost of postage, thats why I try to bunch orders together and split the postage across many people. With enough I can even get express couriered. So let me know if youre interested in this stuff. Its really useful for things like miniature figurines as the pieces are completely solid and get maximum detail.

02.01.2022 Ive discovered 3D posts which is kind of cool so I can show some models I work on through here. Theres a fairly restrictive file size limit though and most work I do isnt available to share, but Ill put up what I can. This was the very first prop I made, the Flame of the Firehawk shield from Borderlands 2. www.3dprototypesandmodels.com.au

01.01.2022 Im looking for anyone in Adelaide who is capable of making food-safe silicone molds. So wed also need a centrifuge and possibly a low-temp oven to ensure the molds have no bubbles whatsoever. I would provide the master copy 3D prints. If anyone knows an individual or business in SA that can do this, please let me know. Thanks :)