When I meet guys who grew up with He-Man and GI Joe and tell them about 3D printers, the conversation quickly turns to how cool it would be to have your head printed on an action figure body. A couple companies are using ZCorp 3D printers to commercialize custom action figures. FigurePrints produces customized World of WarCraft statues and ZPrints produces Spore and RockBand figures based on your designs.
To benchmark the custom action figure market I compared a customized figure from each service to the closest model available at retail.
ZPrints Vs. Johnny Cash
The Johnny Cash figure on the left rings in at $19.99 while the Zprint Rock Band BandMate (Scandanavian Death Metal Edition) to the right costs $90 with shipping. The price difference is steep, but the value of having YOUR character manufactured is hard to quantify. As you can see, the 3D printed figure is a couple inches shorter and has a slightly gritty txture, but is otherwise impressive looking (see the slideshow for more detail).
3D Printers are capable of producing amazing shapes that would be impossible to cost effectively replicate with traditional injection molding and its limitations. The 3D printer is capable of reproducing tiny details like folds in fabric and fingers with great accuracy and definition. The cost and sandy finish may turn people off, but the customized Rock Band characters are well worth it for the video game or 3D printer enthusiast.
The Flickr gallery highlights the capabilities of the 3D printer nicely.
This video demonstrates the manufacturing process:
FigurePrints Rogue vs. World of WarCraft Mage
FigurePrints use the same 3D printers as the RockBand models so the textures and capabilities are the same. The customized World of WarCraft figure costs $150 vs. $18.99 for the mass market counterpart. The nearly 10X price difference can be off putting given the limitations of the technology. However, FigurePrints has done a tremendous job with the user experience. They make it easy and fun to pose the character, try on different gear, put it in different environment and experiment in the design phase. They also took great care designing the packaging. Each FigurePrint comes in a protective glass dome mounted on a wooden base and feels like a high quality product.
The 3d printed statue is actually more poseable than the “action figure”. The toy on the right is permanently frozen in that stance with no articulation. The figure on the left is also immovable, but in the design phase you can choose from dozens of poses ranging from fierce battle stances to humorous expressions.
More images of the FigurePrint:
“When Can I Have My Head On Bobba Fett’s Body?”
Mattel and Hasbro can rest easy for a while. Customized action figures are an exciting development and the customized shopping experience is a great deal of fun, but there will need to be a good deal of improvement in 3D printer technology before they are a mainstream option.
3D printers are great at form, texture, not so much
Currently 3D printers are great at producing highly customized shapes. They are not great at surface finish or in handling subtle designs on small surfaces e.g. human faces on a 6″ statue.
This is not a problem unique to ZCorp. Every 3D printer leaves tell tale signs of “additive fabrication” manifesting as a gritty finish, stritations on a model, or a “wood grain texture”.
Scale is very important
The bigger the sculpture, the better job the 3D printer can do. If you look at the FigurePrints gallery you will notice that the larger figures look nicer. 3D printing technology uses a modified “dots per inch” metric like traditional printers. Unfortunately, we are used to pristine plastic surfaces so even a 600DPI finish produced with a Zcorp machine seems rough.
Zcorp printers are able to compensate by using color to “hint” textures. Notice the sword handle on the left. The grip texture is not physically modeled, but rather grapically represented. Contrast that with the figure on the right where lines are actually carved into the surface. It is a small detail, but makes a significant difference in perception.
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