How to pose a Blender model to get it ready for 3d printing. 

Thank you for the good feedback!

Thank you for you kind comments. I have a video with four ways of making clothes in Blender but I will probably have some more later :)

Fair enough!

I have to admit I do not know about the proxy rig in ZBrush. In the situation you are in I would look at either using the decimate modifier to reduce the polygons or possibly re-meshing. Quad remesher is great at that kind of thing but is not free.

@@notverygoodguy Thanks for your quick response. I genuinely appreciate it. I've tried the decimate modifier and I also have QR. At a certain point the detail is lost and not worth printing.

@@dgreenspino Did you try the vertex painting option with QR to get detail where you want it? Your other alternatives are to use the pose brush method of posing your character which MIGHT work better or you are looking are retopology :(

@@notverygoodguy I did try the vertex painting option with QR. Several times. And I tried the pose option too. I really appreciate your responses because it makes me realize that I've done all the things I should have done. I found a little addon that I need to test that if I understand it correctly acts like the proxy pose in ZBrush. If it works and you're interested I'll let you know.

@@dgreenspino Thanks, I'd be interested to learn about it.

I hadn't noticed this before but having a look at the mb-lab model (from both mb-lab and charmorph) one way to remove the eyelashes would be to go into edit mode and select one of the faces on one of the eyelashes. Then go Select->Select Similar->Material. This will select all the eyelash faces. Then you can just remove them with x and delete. This seems to work.

@@notverygoodguy Thanks for the feedback and sorry for my late reply. I tested as proposed and it seems to work quite nicely. Thanks a lot.

@@Angelus1981 Glad to hear it and thank you for the update!

I did actually print this model fine but I have never sent one of these to a third party print shop. Actually, if printing this yourself, you often find that you don't need to go as far as I do here and the slicer will often fix things itself. The issues you may see here are that the model is using underwear created by charmorph and that is not very 3d printer friendly and it needs stitching up afterwards. I think I missed a bit :) A good example of what I think you are talking about here is if you have a generated model with mouth parts and teeth. These can be difficult to remove. I genenerally select as many vertices of the model that I need to expose the internal bits I want to remove and hide them. That way you can sent about removing the bits you don't want. I would add that although I mention it in this video, I never use the 3d print ad on as don't find it particularly helpful.

@@notverygoodguy Thanks for your reply.... I guess the answer is a no then. The underwear would be an issue, but I would solidify and use the union boolean. Although, in reality, you probably wouldn't use it! The overlap between the legs, or any geometry that gets inside itself is a trickier issue. I have found it very boring to fix and often resort to ripping out vertices and joining the gaps manually. It is true, as you say, that most slicers are pretty robust at handling that sort of thing.... however, the same file sent to jlcpcb for evaluation would come back with a list of errors. Ever since, although I print most things at home now, i've found it difficult to kick the slightly masochistic habit of reducing each model part to single manifold mesh.

@@michaelhartup235 The underwear is definitely an issue with charmorph characters as for some reason they are generated with nothing under them and you get a model with huge holes in it :D. I only use the underwear model for youtube as a result. Sculpting is often a good way to handle geometry that is inside the model. The smooth brush can often solve the issue. Another technique is to just select the outside surface and separate it. Any resulting holes can usually be easily filled in.

@@notverygoodguy Oh, crickey - i didn't realise tthere was nothing underneath. I can't think of a use for that. yes, you can sculpt it out if but only it's on the same surface. I was hoping there was a magic solution where parts of the model cross themselves. I also come across giant lumps of geometry inside STLs from game rips. I guess they mostly print OK, I should just let the slicer work it out. BTW thanks for the tip about changing the face geometry colours. I have spent a lot of time editing in bright blue.

@@michaelhartup235 I have no idea why that face orientation set up isn't the default :)

To be fair, she does have underwear :) My next video in this series will be about adding clothes though it will likely be after Christmas now.

Do you have it enabled in setting? It comes by default with Blender but is not turned on. I'd be grateful of you could let me know if this helps.