Software For Designing 3d Prints

[Marybelle Bailey]

Hieveryone, I've been posting some prints for custom minifig stickers/decals recently, and several people have asked how I make my images. I use Adobe Illustrator and I thought I'd make a tutorial detailing the process.

Firstly, Illustrator is a professional grade product, so it's packed full of features that can get a bit overwhelming at first. I will really only be focusing on the tools and methods I use in making minifig decals, but it's quite easy to get very clean and precise results with a little practice. It's also worth noting that Illustrator is quite expensive! They used to release free trial versions - you may want to look into sourcing one before you commit to any purchases.

Just quickly, you can hold the space bar to turn on the drag tool. Space + control for the zoom in tool, and space + control + alt for the zoom out. I find this the quickest way to move in and around the images.

2. Now because we're drawing something very small, we need to be very precise about our measurements. Press ctrl+R to toggle the display of rulers across the top and left side of the page. If you've defaulted to inches, you'll need to go to "Edit > Preferences > Units & Display Performance" and change the general units to millimetres.

3. Click and hold on the ruler at the top of the page, and drag down to drop a horizontal guide. Just drop it somewhere near the top. Do the same with the vertical ruler. These guides will form the edges of our torso design.

4. Now zoom in to the position where the two guides intersect. Zoom in all the way, so the magnifier cursor no longer has a "+" sign in it! Place your cursor in the little white square where the two rulers meet, and click and drag to the precise point where the two guides intersect. This will reassign the "zero point" of both horizontal and vertical rulers. If you don't get it quite right, just repeat until you do.

5. Zooming out to a more comfortable level, we're now going to drag out another horizontal guide, and another vertical guide. Only this time we're going to position them exactly. A minifig is 15.44mm wide at the waist, and 12.77mm high (excluding the neck post), so our new guides need to reflect that. I personally like to use 16mm and 13mm, as the overlap is minuscule, but gives a little wiggle room when applying the decals/stickers.

6. Now comes the fun part! I'm going to reproduce the forestman design from series 1 of the Collectable Minifigure range. So I find an image online and copy it, then paste it into Illustrator. This is the result:

7. Way too big of course, but that's fine. We zoom out until we can see the edges of the image. Click on the image object to highlight it, then click and drag on one of the corners to resize it. Hold shift to constrain the proportions.

8. You'll need to do this a few times to get the position just right, but we're aiming for the printed surface of the figure to line up with our guides. If the image you're using isn't exactly straight, hover the mouse cursor around the corners of the image until it turns into a curved arrow. Click and hold to rotate. Here's the end result:

11. Most objects drawn in Illustrator have two colours assigned to them, a "stroke" which is the colour of the linework, and a "fill" which is the colour inside the lines. At the bottom of the vertical tool bar are the current colours you have for both fill and stroke. Fill is the upper left, stroke the lower right. Click to select fill, click to select the "none" option beneath it. Then double-click the stroke to both select it and bring up a colour palate. I use a bright blue or pink to start with, just so I can easily keep track of it. Now select the pen tool (P) and we're ready to draw.

12. OK, now we start drawing some lines. Zoom in a bit if you need to, and click on the guide intersection at the bottom left corner. Then move up the line of the torso, just 0.75mm short of the top. Click and hold here, to drag some handles out from the point. A line between two points with no handles will be perfectly straight, but a point with handles will cause the line to form curves. You'll want to make sure the bottom handle is in line with the line, and the upper handle reaches nearly to the top guide. Now move across the guide to the 13.1mm mark, and click and drag here to create another point with handles of the same size, but this time running across the horizontal guide. (Hold shift here if you need to constrain.) Your results should look much like this:

13. Use the selection tool (V), and our linework is now an object. The object will appear to be already selected, but it's actually only the last point which is selected here. Make sure to click somewhere else to deselect the object, then click on it again to select. If we were using the other arrow tool, the "direct selection tool" (A), we would be highlighting only the individual points.

14. Now select the reflect tool (O). Position the cursor directly on top of the 8mm guide, hold alt, and click. A new dialogue box will pop up, allowing us to indicate the precise details we wish. Select vertical, and hit copy. We should now have two identical line objects. If you only have one line with a crazy loop at the top, you've probably accidentally reflected the point rather than the object as a whole. Just ctrl+Z to undo, and repeat step 13.

15. OK, now we're going to fuse these two objects together. Use the direct selection tool (A), and highlight the bottom point of the left object, then hold shift to select the same point on the right object. You can also achieve the same result by drawing a box around both points, as long as you don't draw it high enough to accidentally select any of the other points. Either way, you can now press ctrl+J to join the two points. Then go select the top two points, and join them too. You should see this:

18. Now comes the point where our projects will probably diverge. If you're replicating another design, you'll obviously be drawing those elements. But either way, use the pen tool like before to draw lines, dragging to create handles when you need curves. You can use the rectangle (M) and ellipse tools (L) when need be, and the same scaling, reflecting and rotating tools we used earlier. Use the direct selection tool (A) to adjust the position of the points and handles so they're just right.

I usually use several different layers to keep elements separate, and to help keep foreground elements separate from background ones. You can also use "object > arrange" to move objects forward and backwards in relation to each other, but only within layers. You can also press ctrl+G and ctrl+shift+G to group and ungroup objects for convenience.

For instance, the forestman's sleeves are tan so I'll colour the collar to match. So I select the two objects that form the collar, and use the colour window (F6) to enter 14,21,47,0. Then I'll repeat the process with the dark green section, with the values 100,58,100,33. The belt buckles aren't meant to match any other part of the figure, so I'll feel free to use whatever colours I like here, just trying to find a brassy look that feels right. The belts I'll match with reddish brown, as his quiver and bow came in that colour:

20. The final step I take is to create a crop mask; a white box with a hole in it the exact shape of the torso. This means that any overhanging objects (the belts and collars here) are masked to look nice and presentable.

Create a new layer on top of all the others and draw a large white box in it. The box needs to be large enough to obscure all your other objects (with the exception of the image we used to trace.) Now hide this layer and unlock layer 2. Highlight the blue outline we made earlier on, and holding shift and alt, I press the left arrow key. This duplicates the object as it moves it. The original outline I can now fill with green and stroke to "none", and the new object I will move to the masking layer.

21. To move a selected object between layers, first highlight it then go look at your layers window. There will be a little coloured square in the layer, off to the right. This represents the selected objects in the layer. Simply drag it up to the masking layer.

22. Hide layer 2, and unhide the mask layer. Select the torso shape and hold shift then press the right arrow key. This will move the object back to the exact same location as before, but keep it on the current layer. Press ctrl+shift+] to ensure that the torso shape is in front of the white box.

23. Now hold shift and click the white box so both it and the torso shape are selected at the same time. Bring up the pathfinder window with ctrl+shift+F9. Hold alt and click on the second "shape mode".

This will subtract the shape of the object in front (the torso shape), from the shape of the object behind (the box). Think of it as using a cookie cutter, and the dough left behind once the cookie shape has been removed is what we see here. You may find that you need to reassign the fill colour of the new shape, and set its stroke back to none.

24. The only thing left to do now is to export the finished product. Go to "view > guides > hide guides", or alternatively press ctrl+; to do the same. Then delete layer 1, as we no longer need it. Then go to "file > export" to save it in your preferred file format. Don't forget that a bitmap is uncompressed, and I'd recommend saving a copy in a lossless format to preserve the quality. I up the resolution to 600dpi in the export stage.

And now we can do a bunch of recolours very easily! And it's very easy to add your own flavour to things, think of other elements to add/remove. For medieval characters, think about adding pouches, potions or daggers to their belts, or a talisman around the neck. If it's a peasant perhaps add patches where their clothes have been mended, or splotches of mud. Or blood? Add creases where you want to indicate folds in the fabric. Mix and match between your characters, lots of the elements in my designs I reuse on others. Just copy them across, rotate/resize/recolour as needed.

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