CGI ANH Stormtrooper and 3D Print

[AdamFX]

I've been working on this for sometime. It began as a very high quality 3d scan of a replica helmet with a bumpy cap (Not RSprops). Once scanned in, I began restoring it to closer match the sharpness and details seen on the original screen used helmets. There is still work to be done but I wanted to do a test assembly of the parts and 3d print it as a test. In 3d, I have all the parts separate like the original helmets so they can be assembled virtually to achieve the varied assembled looks of the original helmets. For those wondering, My goal was to make the best 3D stormtrooper helmet but not for printing 1:1 scale helmets. That's best left to vac-forming and the masters at RS Props. I'm much more interested in making a very high quality 3d model for 3d artwork and 3d printing for figure statues.

The first 3D print test turned out quite nice. The picture below of me holding the larger print in my hand is more representative of the quality of the print than the other photos which picked up specular highlights and got overexposed by my iPhone. I haven't done any clean up work on the test prints. I'm happy with the results so I'm going to continue to finish up detailing the helmet parts. BTW this is a solid 3d print but I did experiment and printed out the face mask as it would be on the real helmet (thin plastic). It's possible that I could print each part so that it could be assembled like a real helmet but it would depend scale because thickness of each part could make it quite fragile but it may be worth it for the look. I have to experiment further once I'm done with the individual parts.

Thanks for checking it out. This has been a 3 year project believe it or not. I've busy with work (3d artist obviously). I've moved on it fairly quickly this year as I started to get serious about finally doing something with what I started a while ago. After doing the test print, I'm pretty motivated to finalizing it and painting. I'd like to do the armor, maybe even a full figure although I have not scanned in any armor to do that so It's probably a long way off. But thats the dream

 

[modellbaubert]

Cool!
Nice Work! It wouldbe great to see a full stormtrooper figurine some day.
How did you do the 3d scan?

 

[AdamFX]

Cool!
Nice Work! It wouldbe great to see a full stormtrooper figurine some day.
How did you do the 3d scan?

Photogrammetry and Capturing Reality software . I was a beta tester for the software years ago and I found that with good technique, the software was/is unbeatable at photogrammetry.

I scanned the helmet a couple years ago. I took thousands of photos of the helmet on a turntable under studio lighting. I captured every angle of the helmet, many were close up images to get as much detail as possible. I also used spot check powder to eliminate the specularity of the helmet since 3d scanning doesn't work well with reflective objects. The powder also gives you lots of little spots for the software to track and the scan was phenomenal. I had very little clean up to do on the model. I did do a lot of detail touchup/restoring to make it look like a RS Props helmet because the replica helmet had softer areas like the corners of the tubes where it meets the frown. I added back the detail that wasnt on the tears under the eyes and corrected their softness as well. So there's manual modelling on top of the scan but I was very careful to not over sculpt or create anything that was too out of norm. Often I would sculpt detail in and then erase it and do it again until I was happy and sure it wasn't too off model. The goal was to try to keep it as accurate as possible. I used lots of reference images of RS props helmet collected from around the internet.

The goal was to make a 3d model as accurate looking as possible for prints and 3d art. It's not a 1:1 copy of any helmet at this point but it captures the essence of the accurate shape and features very well, certainly well enough for a 3d print or 3d art. I'm pretty happy with it. There is more work to do to add in even more finer details. I've been very careful and deliberate when adding in the detail or restoring what wasn't on the helmet I scanned.

I would like to create a full stormtrooper figurine that is as accurate as possible to the original. Unfortunately I don't have armor to scan. However now that I've finally printed a test and I'm happy with the results, I'm pretty motivated to continue to work on the project.

 

[modellbaubert]

Ok nice.
I've tried photogrametry in the past but never with your skills! Amazing work Sometimes RS makes offers some special offer. You may watch their website.
I bought mine on the first rund they made and am very happy with it. You should go for one and make an incredible 3D-model of it

Good luck on your projects.

 

[CatfoodRob]

This is interesting stuff , especially printed at small scale for dioramas etc ,as there isn't a decent helmet out there at the moment .

 

[Rubber Slug]

I always wanted to try this, but I didn't want to dirty up my helmet with some kind of spray or powder. But the result looks great!

 

[AdamFX]

I always wanted to try this, but I didn't want to dirty up my helmet with some kind of spray or powder. But the result looks great!

I think the powder is still on the helmet It's a messy process.

 

[Stormy320]

Like it!

 

[Too Much Garlic]

The 3D model and prints turned out great. Gotta love this new software and hardware. You say it isn't scanned from the RS-Props helmet, so what is the source and did you get the creators permission to scan it?

 

[AdamFX]

The 3D model and prints turned out great. Gotta love this new software and hardware. You say it isn't scanned from the RS-Props helmet, so what is the source and did you get the creators permission to scan it?

It's from ebay. No I didn't get any permission. It's just a personal project for myself.

 

[Too Much Garlic]

I feel I must apologize. I didn't mean to sound so stand-off-ish. Your work is actually pretty cool and you put a lot of work and effort into it. It would be nice to see more scaled offerings of accurate helmets. Would be cool if the source was a known helmet and you could get permission from the maker to offer scaled copies.

When looking at your first image I couldn't help but remember the pictures of the old Master Replicas / eFX 3D scan of an original stunt helmet. I know it's not exactly like those images, but it was just the first thing that popped into my mind.

 

[AdamFX]

I feel I must apologize. I didn't mean to sound so stand-off-ish. Your work is actually pretty cool and you put a lot of work and effort into it. It would be nice to see more scaled offerings of accurate helmets. Would be cool if the source was a known helmet and you could get permission from the maker to offer scaled copies.

When looking at your first image I couldn't help but remember the pictures of the old Master Replicas / eFX 3D scan of an original stunt helmet. I know it's not exactly like those images, but it was just the first thing that popped into my mind.

No worries. It's been a side project of mine for a while. I was learning photogrammetry at the time and thought it would be a good subject to learn with. I never really got around to doing anything with it after until recently when two things happened. First I stumbled upon the news in August that RS Props announced that they were putting out an HDPE anniversary helmet. I've always wanted an RS Props Helmet and this got me excited. The second thing that happened was I began thinking about learning 3d printing and buying a 3d printer. Unfortunately the printer I wanted had massive delays from the manufacturer (Elegoo Saturn) so I had to wait until they finally were available on amazon in early December. So during that time, excited about my 2 new toys... I did what any artist would, I wanted to create! So I dug up the old project and figured I'd try to improve the scanned helmet to look like an RS props using photo references from online. It then became something I could use to learn my 3d printer. Having something like the stormtrooper helmet helps inspire me to learn new things that are difficult and stick to it, so It's been helpful and fun.

As for scale helmets, I do think it's really neat. I've never seen a scale stormtrooper toy that I felt captured the look right. So it's cool having printed these 2 helmets out. I think I'm going to paint them and be done with it. If I was going to do any more work on the project, I'd have to go back a few steps and go back to detailing the helmet more because I'd like to make it more "accurate" looking. I never quite finished it. I kind of rushed it together because the 3d printer was finally arriving.

As for permission to make scaled copies, I hadn't even thought about it honestly. I suppose if I got permission and people were interested, that would be the proper way to go about it (if thats how things go like this) but I dont even think I have the time. If I even considered it, I'd still want to do more detailing work and explore some other ideas perhaps trying to make a 3 piece small scale helmet that could go together various ways like the real thing. But thats just a crazy idea I haven't really explored much and there's probably limitations with scale and how thin things can be printed. I'm so far away from even attempting that. I'm just happy to have printed this out and I can paint it now and post a picture and feel some sense of accomplishment. There's a lot more work to be done if I was going to do anything further. I love Stormtroopers so It's an exciting project and I'm still motivated to go further. Right now I'm just looking to paint the two helmets and post some pics. Hopefully I don't do a terrible paint job I've started cleaning and prepping up the models so maybe by next week I'll have something to show.

BTW I'm not familiar with the "Master Replicas / eFX 3D scan of an original stunt helmet" Is there an image of it? I'd love to see how their scan looks. Scanning an original helmet would be awesome!

 

[Too Much Garlic]

These were found online. I'm sorry, but I can't remember where.

 

[AdamFX]

Thats cool. It's too bad the pictures are so low resolution. It looks like they converted it to NURBS and didn't scan the ears?

 

[janglesworthy]

You can always reference the Battlefront games stormtrooper models, those were made from scans or an original trooper. People are selling 3d printable armor of that all day on etsy so it's easy to find in both game format and stl format.

 

[AdamFX]

You can always reference the Battlefront games stormtrooper models, those were made from scans or an original trooper. People are selling 3d printable armor of that all day on etsy so it's easy to find in both game format and stl format.

I suppose I could build armor off the game model. Maybe i'll try making the chest piece and shoulders as a test so It can be a bust.

 

[janglesworthy]

you can find good reference here also, It's good reference. ST armor isn't that hard to model, it can get tricky in the topology of the chest piece, but if it's for 3D print who cares about topology. People can pinch the edges too sharp but if you reference the BF models you'll find the middle ground.
original stormtrooper armor

 

[Hoth Gossip]

I've been working on this for sometime. It began as a very high quality 3d scan of a replica helmet with a bumpy cap (Not RSprops). Once scanned in, I began restoring it to closer match the sharpness and details seen on the original screen used helmets. There is still work to be done but I wanted to do a test assembly of the parts and 3d print it as a test. In 3d, I have all the parts separate like the original helmets so they can be assembled virtually to achieve the varied assembled looks of the original helmets. For those wondering, My goal was to make the best 3D stormtrooper helmet but not for printing 1:1 scale helmets. That's best left to vac-forming and the masters at RS Props. I'm much more interested in making a very high quality 3d model for 3d artwork and 3d printing for figure statues.

The first 3D print test turned out quite nice. The picture below of me holding the larger print in my hand is more representative of the quality of the print than the other photos which picked up specular highlights and got overexposed by my iPhone. I haven't done any clean up work on the test prints. I'm happy with the results so I'm going to continue to finish up detailing the helmet parts. BTW this is a solid 3d print but I did experiment and printed out the face mask as it would be on the real helmet (thin plastic). It's possible that I could print each part so that it could be assembled like a real helmet but it would depend scale because thickness of each part could make it quite fragile but it may be worth it for the look. I have to experiment further once I'm done with the individual parts.

Thanks for checking it out. This has been a 3 year project believe it or not. I've busy with work (3d artist obviously). I've moved on it fairly quickly this year as I started to get serious about finally doing something with what I started a while ago. After doing the test print, I'm pretty motivated to finalizing it and painting. I'd like to do the armor, maybe even a full figure although I have not scanned in any armor to do that so It's probably a long way off. But thats the dream

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Hi there. These look amazing! I really want an accurate 1/6 tk helmet. Would you be up for printing one? Happy to pay. I'm in UK. Cheers, Seamus

 

[TK55557]

Can you send the files, or sell to us? Pls!

 

[AdamFX]

Can you send the files, or sell to us? Pls!

I've actually started to work on this again recently. I'm just getting started with the armor. I'm using the battlefield armor as a base of reference even though it's obviously ROTJ armor. That's the tricky part, using ANH amor reference images to rebuild it by hand along with the game's geometry to help somewhat.

I'd really like to finish this. It's a lot of work to get it as nice as I want it to be. I want to make one hell of a scaled statue out of it when I'm done. I have some wild ideas in terms of the level of detail but... it's so far away at this point. Although I've done more work on it this month than I've done at all in years.

Here's some recent images. I know the armor isn't right yet. I've just begun to lay down the foundation for the parts based on the ROTJ armor and once I have a basic form for all the parts... I'll begin to make it very ANH. I've already been working on that as you can see with the Abplate. It's quite hard to convert the crappy ROTJ one to an ANH by hand using just images as reference but I'm getting there. Right now it's in pieces for landmarking. I'll do my best to make it as close as possible to the real thing... but I dont have any real armor myself. And yes the shoulder straps are wrong. It's all place holder right now.

I really want to finish this... sadly I have slipped away from it very recently. I need to get back in and roll my sleaves up. Theres so much wrong with the body armor right now but it's all a very early WIP. I just see a mountain of work in front of me and I'm a perfectionist. It would be so much easier to just scan it but I don't have access to the armor to scan it and clean it up. I think once I'm happy with the ab plate I can move much faster. The helmet still needs some final touches too. I'd like to make different assembled styles of the helmet. That's absolutely possible with the way I've built it. I've done some tests recently and its' very cool.