3D Printing Doctor Who - Print and paint your own 5.5" scale customs

[3DPrintingDoctorWho]

It's a good thing I don't actually do any of this stuff for money, since I'm constantly changing tracks, but the Capaldi console and Cailleach figure has been temporarily put on hold because we have a new designer named David Turner who has recently joined our Facebook group who specializes in heads, who has been kind enough to share his work for free, beginning with an absolutely stellar recreation of the Meddling Monk. This was a figure I intended to work on myself at some point, so I already had a fairly good starting body picked out. Luckily there are a lot of monks and saints with statues and Saint Anthony of Padua proved to be a close enough match to get me started. This is where I'm at as of last night:



I spent most of yesterday tweaking the original source body to be closer to the Monk's proportions and a bit more symmetrical, separating out the arms, adding in some feet, rescuplted the rope belt to be a single strand only, and modifying a few other bits and pieces here and there like cutting down the back cowl to have a straight across cut rather than a triangular point.

It's looking close enough that I could probably release it now, but I'm going to spend a few more days fine tuning it for maximum screen accuracy before I start adding articulation, which should be fairly easy, since it's all simple rotational pivots except of the elbows. I haven't gone back and rewatched the entire episode yet, but from source photos and YouTube clips I can tell that the Monk's cowl V's up a bit in the front and has three buttons and a draw string. I also need to add the oversized ring to his right hand, smooth out the edges of the back cowl, shrink the hood slightly so it's not as wide (a side effect of stretching the model to give him some extra paunch) and make the tip of the hood a little pointier so that it almost touches the bottom edge of the cowl.

But all in all, this may end up being the easiest figure, and certainly the easiest remix figure, I've ever worked on, and I'm pretty sure I'll have it finished and ready for test printing by this weekend!



But that's not all! One of our other designers, Jeffrey Fink, has already built a Monk's TARDIS, so I'll be adapting that as well to create a complete Time Meddler set to rival anything produced by Character Options!
I'll be adding some stone texturing to Jeffrey's design, and as a super sneaky bonus, I'm going to take the late great Chris Jones' wonderful 60's TARDIS console and shrink it down to about 1.5" in size, so (for those who want to print the optional parts) you can open the doors in the back and see the tiny little shrunk-down console room inside!

And as a bonus bonus, I'll resize the sonic shades I made for the 12th Doctor into a pair of sunglasses you can put on the Monk to recreate the desert sequence from The Daleks' Master Plan.

Meanwhile, David is currently working on a Tobias Vaughn head (which with the addition of some cheesy facial hair can become Mavic Chen) and one of our other modellers has created a rather nice Nyder from Genesis of the Daleks. All three of these figures should be able to use modified versions of my Noah body, so I expect there will be several humanoid figures coming down the pipeline in rapid succession.

[Deborah J]

The facial likeness there is amazing, but did the meddling monk have that bald bit in the back of his head? My memory was that he had a little hat on, something vaguely like a yamaka, but I could be wrong of course.

[3DPrintingDoctorWho]

The facial likeness there is amazing, but did the meddling monk have that bald bit in the back of his head? My memory was that he had a little hat on, something vaguely like a yamaka, but I could be wrong of course.

Yep, added the skull cap in this evening while I was working on the cowl and hood. I wanted to watch the episode first to make sure he didn't take it off at any point, but since he wore it all throughout The Time Meddler, and from what telesnaps still exist for his episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan, I decided to make it part of the head rather than a separate accessory that can be taken on and off. It works better this way because the cap squishes down his hair around the edges. I'm pretty sure Butterfield didn't shave his head for the role and the cap is just perched on a normal head of hair.

Since the same guy who made the Monk's head has also made a Hartnell, I am probably going to give this one swappable heads like the Noah figure so you can have a monk's robes 1st Doctor as well. Perhaps I'll even give him a pointy stick accessory.

[Drewski1981]

Oooh, if you're doing faces now, any chance of a Nemesis statue?

[3DPrintingDoctorWho]

Oooh, if you're doing faces now, any chance of a Nemesis statue?

It's not me, but if David decides to make one, I'll certainly do my best to cobble together a body. He's mainly focusing on stuff from the 60's though.

His latest creations are Tobias Vaughan, Mavic Chen (which with some slight modification could also be Milo Clancy from The Space Pirates), Salamander, and he's currently working on Tloxtl from The Aztecs and Vicki.

The next remix figures I work on after the Callieach will probably be Nyder from Genesis of the Daleks (since I already have a head) and Vicki from either The Rescue or The Space Museum, both of which have extremely simple costumes. I've also been talked into doing a glass embryo dalek from Revelation of the Daleks adapted from the existing Renegade Dalek model, since there's a new brand of flexible resin called Superflex which has just hit the market which is about $10 cheaper than Tenacious, perfectly clear, and potentially more flexible, and I need something that can really put it through it's paces.

[Drewski1981]

Do it! Do it!

[3DPrintingDoctorWho]

REMIX003 - The Meddling Monk and TARDIS
is now up on Google Drive and ready for test printing. (Though just the Monk himself at this moment, I should be adding his TARDIS and a few accessories tomorrow, and I'll adapt David Turner's Hartnell head to be a swappable extra as soon as the files are available.) If anybody can't wait and desperately needs to be the very first person on the block to try printing it, here's the beta Google Drive link:

Beta link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rSz_tE ... NKMvmhwC2Q

Otherwise, I should probably know how well all the bits fit together by Wednesday or Thursday.

I'm not quite sure how, but somehow the final assembled figure ended up being a little on the small side, so I had to scale it up by 10.5% to make it the same height as a 5.5" scale Hartnell figure. This size difference means the joints might be a little looser than ideal, but fortunately, this figure has pretty simple joints, and even if his hips and elbows are a little loose, he should still stand mostly straight because of the robe. I think the only place where this might be a problem is when it comes to keeping the head(s) on the neck peg.

Tomorrow, I'm going to spend a bit of time working on the deluxe version of Jeffrey Fink's Monk's TARDIS, which shouldn't take long, as I'll just be adding some stone texturing and cracks to the outside to make it look a bit more like ancient weathered stone. Sadly, the altar is so shallow there's no way I can fit a miniature TARDIS console inside (not even just printing half of it.) So instead, I'll knock together a pre-sized image that you can print out as a sticker or glue to the back wall.

While the Monk's TARDIS is narrow, it's still too big to fit on the build plate at the same time as The Monk, so test printing on that half of the design will have to hold off until next week, but it's so simple mechanically, and nearly identical to what I did for the Master's Claws of Axos TARDIS that there's no reason why it shouldn't print correctly on the first try.

[3DPrintingDoctorWho]

The Google Drive link for The Meddling Monk set has been updated to include his TARDIS and three accessories.

I couldn't find a high enough quality picture for the shrunken console room insert to show it from the proper reverse angle view of being outside looking in, so I had to cheat and use a shot of one of the side walls. If somebody else has something better that's at least 1000+ pixels across, and a straight on view with no actors in the shot, let me know, but I'm not too worried since you'll pretty much just be seeing the console in the very center of the picture when you open the doors.

The insert can be printed on sticker paper or on cardstock or photo paper, and is designed to cover the entire back interior wall of the altar, so it should be quite easy to place. I made the edges shadowy, so if you paint the interior black, it should fade into the surroundings quite nicely.

I don't know how well the sunglasses will work as a separate item. I resized them for his head (they need to be very slightly smaller for the sides to grip) but these were extremely difficult to dial in for Capaldi, so all I can do is guess. I probably won't test print them until the next time I have to print something out of black, and who knows when that will be. If anybody doesn't feel like trying to print them as a separate piece, you can also fuse them directly to the existing head, and just print a second version if you want to make a Dalek's Master Plan version.

[3DPrintingDoctorWho]

It's Silurian Day! And because I can't let Al Dewar have all the fun, guess what I've been working on this evening:



I can't take all of the credit for this one.... Or even most of the credit. Back in 2019 one of the first objects I used to test my 3D scanner was an Eaglemoss Silurian figure. The results were disappointingly low quality and nowhere near precise enough to simply pop in a figurine and spit out a fully printable 5.5" scale figure, but I kept it around because the basic body shape was sound and I figured with enough clean-up I might one day be able to use it as a base model for something better.



My sculpting skills have improved a lot since then, and since I recently learned some new tricks in Meshmixer, most notably, how to make and import my own texture stencils, and because everybody (myself included) is absolutely agog at the new Character Online exclusive Warriors of the Deep set released this morning, I decided to give it a shot and take a stab at rescuplting him... and after about 6 hours, I'm pretty impressed with the results.

Note, it's still very far from done, but it is definitely recognizable as a Pertwee-era Silurian, even without all the fine detail texturing in place (which aside from what I tested out on the body to prove it works, needs to be the absolute last step in the process, even after articulation.) While it's not quite as complicated as sculpting human facial features, this was still one of the most complex and intricate costumes of the 70's and there is a ton of surface detail that needs to be reproduced, especially on the head. But with the 3D scan as a blueprint, and my newfound ability to use stencils (which beats the hell out of trying to sculpt every single scale by hand) this is coming along way quicker than I could have hoped for when I first started out three years ago.

And it means I should be able to use the same techniques to build a Terileptil down the road. (Which aside from the frilly gills is going to be a way easier sculpt overall)

[Drewski1981]

Any recommendations on a 3D printer for a really smooth finish? I still can't decide what model to go for.