Printing all the moneys...

The nice thing with using Aspire with 3d printing is it will triangulate and output a clean, watertight mesh, and 3d printers love a watertight mesh!

The surface deviation from the original model to stl format is very accurate!

The coins printed very well, and the support structure under the coin were a breeze to snap off and clean up. I much prefer the SLA 3d prints versus the FDM extruded type of 3d printing. Less cleanup, and better resolution!

We painted the coins out with several thin coats of gloss black, and when the time was right, we buffed silver powder onto them, making them read brighter than paint alone could achieve! Unfortunately, we couldn't leave them that polished looking, we needed to weather them considerably due to the "supposed" age of them. So all the coins got a glaze coat of a dirty brown, then wiped off to reveal the tarnished silver underneath.

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In the end, they looked great! I have no idea what film this is for, but I'll be studying every new Wallace Shawn film closely!
8)
JWO

A License to Print Money! Mu-HA HA......

Well, we don't actually have a license, but we're printing money anyway! Try and stop us Canadian Mint, in your face!
A little over the top for Tuesday, but that's how I roll.
We got a call to create 4 old silver coins with the actor Wallace Shawn's face on them.
These are just single sided, only heads.

The art department supplied us with this image they wanted on the coin, as well as some really old coin reference images.

The first step was to crop out the background noise, so I'd have a clean reference image. I thought about modelling the head in full 3d, but as the coin was only 1.5" in diameter, that seemed like a waste of time for this

The model was solely created in Aspire, and underwent a few changes before agreeing on this version. I did some sculpting in Aspire to add a bit more dimension than Aspire had originally created it with. We are 3d printing these on the Form1 sla 3d printer, due to it's seriously high resolution, and the models small size! Due to the size, I actually had to over-emphasize the features a little to be sure they would read on a close up shot. We actually printed 3 of the coins, but production decided they wanted to add a hint of shoulders to Mr. Shawn's head profile.

 So with a little bit of tweaking, this would be the hero coin!
What a great time we live in to be able to have so many ways of fabrication at all of our fingertips!
8)
JWO