I've actually built a RepRap Mendel (that's one of the earlier DIY 3D printers) about two years ago and been using it regularly for various things ever since, and as I've always thought that the shape of a Reaper is aesthetically quite interesting and fitting for what they are supposed to be, I thought I'd give it a try. That, and maybe indoctrination.
This print is actually a prototype, since I intend to print a much smaller model next and put it above a cityscape that I'll print in white plastic – And I'm thinking about having the cityscape be generated procedurally (e.g. through a computer program), since the Reaper actually took a lot of manual (e.g. human-made) work to prepare for printing, and thus this is, at least to my mind, quite an interesting juxtaposition, considering the nature of what the final piece would show.
Anyway, the process was pretty much just extracting the Reaper model from the game files, posing it in a 3D modeling software (I wanted to go for a "symmetric-asymmetric" look in their "attack" pose, e.g. looking somewhat symmetric without being excessively so, like automatically posing it programmatically, in order to get a more organic feel to it), then printing it.
As it turns out, there seem to be quite a few uses of, ahem, mass effect fields in the construction of a Reaper (in our plane of comprehension also referred to as "disconnected edges"), which I had to clean up, as well as other forms of bending the laws of physics (like non-manifolds, self-intersections and inverted normals). Finally, I had to disassemble the model into multiple parts to print well and add some internal structures to make the model more stable, as I do not know how to print kinetic barriers.
The final monstrosity is about 22cm tall from the tip of the tail to the "foot" (that's what the 3D model data calls it) on the front claw. I've added a picture of the print sitting on top of the ME2 box as a size reference (my ME3 box is dark and metallic, so the contrast wouldn't have been too good).
Finally, here are the (quite rudimentary) pictures of it that I took. It's hard to do it justice, as the print looks and feels extremely good when you hold it in your hands.
For the technically inclined, I printed this in black PLA plastic at 0.2mm layer height on a modified RepRap Mendel with an ACME-rod z-axis, a PCB heated bed and with a .35mm nozzle. Hardly Reaper-tech, but still quite capable.
No humans had to be liquified as far as I know, though I have to admit that this particular run of plastic filament was suspiciously cheap and shipped from Hong Kong...
Modifié par geceka, 27 août 2012 - 09:12 .
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.... Oh my god.....
