Interview with James W. Cain: Bringing a Game Character to Life with 3D Printing, from i.materialise:
When James W. Cain tweeted a picture of a 3D Printed sculpture portraying Ubin, a character from The Banner Saga, it simply blew our mind. As one of the comments so succinctly stated, “Beautiful work! Really impressed with quality of the printout. Looks so crisp”, it was easy to fall in love with this impressive piece of 3D Printed art. Recently, I had a chance to interview the designer himself and get the story behind this magnificent 3D Printed sculpture.
Expressing your inner fan
James W. Cain is an England-based graphic designer and illustrator but, as he explains, “I became interested in fan art only recently. Fan art is a good opportunity for fun projects that help me learn new techniques and software. It’s also great to connect with fellow fans of the subject and meet other artists.” This new sculpture certainly connected him and the 3D Printing enthusiast community. And surprisingly, he only started learning to design in 3D a year and a half ago! He explains, “the learning curve is quite steep but rewarding!” …
The delicate art of going 3D
Ubin from The Banner Saga is an old, wise character that’s lived for hundreds of years and serves as a narrator early on in the game. This character presented James with a real challenge. When asked which part was the most difficult to design, he answers “The horns! It’s always difficult to translate a 2D drawing into 3D, especially when heavily stylized as in the case of The Banner Saga. His beard in the 2D artwork is a good example and when it came to sculpting, I found it very tricky to represent faithfully. In the end I approached the sculpt as ‘my take’ on the character, and this was more fun!”
The sculpture was 3D Printed at i.materialise in prime gray. The smooth surface of this material was the best choice to capture the fine texture of Ubin’s horn, hair and beard….
Check out the rest of the interview here, and even more photos of his impressive work.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
