Transcript:
When I bring up the topic of army man, all my friends say, I’m obsessed with it. They always say. Why would you need that? Much army. Men, they’re just little plastic toys, But I don’t really care about the toy factor of army men. I just use them for filmmaking and what I am obsessed with is filmmaking. I mentioned this in my where to get Army men video. All I really care about is opposes, but if you’re never filmed with army men, you probably won’t understand poses for army. Men allow you to make better films, unlike in movies where the actors can do. Basically, whatever they want. Army men are just stuck to one single pose so now. If you want to make a film, you got to rely on the company’s designs on the soldier and that’s. Why in my other video? I bought nine hundred army men. All I really wanted. Were the poses all the different poses are really good for filmmaking so once. I got back to school and somehow gotten into 3d modeling class. Guess what I wanted to print. First 3d printing army men was an idea I got a while ago, and my friends and family were like. Why would you have to make even more of them? But 3d modeling allows you to design any type of army man? Posey won. The possibilities are endless. You can even make a drunk soldier if you want and that’s what I even did so today I’ll be showing you how to make your own custom army men. And even if you don’t care about this stuff, I still have the 3d model links for download in the description below. Let’s get into the video. [MUSIC] The first step for making custom armament is the models. If you want to get some free army man models, there are some at Thingiverse. There are some other models, but they cost like three dollars each, which is really not worth it. But in all I could find is about only five 3d models of toy soldiers on the internet, and one other guy has also made a video on printing armament. I really don’t know what this intro is. [MUSIC] But it’s a pretty bad video because it’s just a 10-minute time-lapse of army men printing so models of army men are really limited. But you might be saying, why don’t you just make your own models, but once you get into 3d modeling and how to make 3d models, it’s actually really hard. It’s almost impossible for you to make an army man model. That’s why most of the models on Tinkercad are actually just 3d scans of the object, and here’s my horrible attempt on making a toy soldier in 360 fusion. It’s it’s impossible and this is what I was working on for three weeks in my 3d modelling class. This horrible monstrosity. But then my teacher introduced us to Tinker Cat and my 3d modeling teacher is pretty stupid first. He shows us the hardest program to use 360 fusion. He doesn’t really teach us how to use it. He just gives it to us and then he gives us a easier program, which it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense. What, but one day during class? I realized I don’t need this 360 fusion. I have the simplest program in the world. My idea was that I could just get a existing 3d model of a toy soldier. Cut his limbs off and repeat them together and blend them together, so it looks like he’s doing something else, and it works really well. I basically taught myself how to use Tinkercad all by myself. The teacher doesn’t do, Jack. I swear that 3d modeling teacher. I mean, he lets us print. Basically, whatever we want, but it’s not really a teacher, so let’s get started first off. If you didn’t know, Tinker cut is free so basically, you just have to make an account and you can basically go ham, so that’s good as I said, you can get files from the Thingiverse and there’s five armymen files. I found on that site, but I only use two of them. This one and this sniper one. Actually, I don’t really use a sniper at all. So I only use this gurney. The rest are a different story. These two are 3d scans, and that means they’re really high quality, but I can’t import them into ticker cut because they’re just too high quality. These Nazi soldiers seem pretty promising, but I can’t even open the file, so I don’t. I don’t understand, But this Grenadier is basically all you need to make every type of soldier. You want to make your own custom models? You need to know how thinker cad works. I suggest you look up a short tutorial or something first, but first off, you want to download the Grenadier file on Thingiverse? The link is in the description below. Once you’ve downloaded that you can import it like this. Once you imported it now, you have infinite soldiers. Basically, you first want to start off by cutting off all of the soldier’s limbs and while recording this? I think my family thinks I’m insane, but yeah, cut off all the arms, all the legs and the head. This allows you to reposition basically everything to slice off the limbs. All you have to do is clone the soldier you can use either Ctrl D to duplicate or Ctrl C and V to copy and paste. Once you have two soldiers. All you have to do is use the holes to remove parts of the soldier. You just got this block and put it over what you want to remove on the soldier in this case, It’s this single arm. I’ll stretch this cube and rotate it until it covers everything, but the arm then I go up here and group it. This removes the rest of the object, and now you just have an army. Then you’ll repeat this for basically everything, and that’s why in my original project, I have just limbs everywhere. You want to make sure every time you build a new soldier? You just copy parts from these banks. I guess, because if you use the original object, you’re gonna have to get more arms, so I just suggest copy pasting. Now you can just do basically whatever you want. It’s pretty simple for this. Let’s just make a simple soldier. First thing I do is I get the main body, then I just stick on the arms and whatever position I want. If you want to make this straight arm bended, you’re gonna have to cut off half of the arms and reposition them. Then you can add a circle in the middle to blend it together, and after that you can group it together and you have a new arm now for the fun part. If you want to add arms or any other objects, just go thinking versus search it up, and this gives so many possibilities. You can search up a mini-gun or rifle. German guns. I don’t know you can also have other objects such as cups, plates, backpacks, it’s endless. All you have to do is download it and import it just like with the army man. Since I wanted to keep it simple. I just use this m1 garand gun. I just reposition it so that the arms and hands connect with the gun. You can basically make the soldier point the gun anywhere and sometimes with the arms, you might have a really bad transition where it just has a huge gap, and that’s the worst thing about making these models because filling in those gaps will make the soldier look a little unnatural, but sometimes you can do it with a sphere or two. When you printed the gaps might go away because the quality of the print won’t be that good, unless you’re using a good quality printer like those resin for juice either way, the printer might blend it together or you probably not see the gap at all after that I add on the legs and the head, The legs on the head usually don’t need that much blending because of how basic they are. Now you can add on like backpacks or other types of helmets or basically, whatever you want when you add it, all of those you can just group it, and now you’re all done your own custom Army man model. Now that we’re done making the models, it’s time to print it. [MUSIC] Before you bring your soldiers, you need to get your model ready. First thing is to add stands. Most toy soldiers have stands, which are just basically plates for them to stand on. You can just use the cylinder or the diamond, which I use, but most of the toy soldiers on printing right now. Which is this batch? Don’t have any stands. This is because these are custom tank commanders and tank commanders don’t eat stands because they just get in the way you don’t want to print individual soldiers. They’ll just waste a lot of time. That’s why you want to print multiple soldiers with one print, and you don’t always have to print soldiers. You can also print other items and props in the back as you can see. I’m printing some chairs with 3d printers. You can print a lot of good things for stop-motions, but I wouldn’t recommend printing tanks or bunkers or whole buildings. It’s just a waste of plastic. It’s better to use something else. You should only print soldiers or little props because they need a lot of detail, and you can’t really make them with cardboard. Another thing you might want to do is add custom supports. This is really easy! You just have to add little skinny columns. Wherever you think that there might be too much overhang. And here’s a really important step. If you go up here, there’s an arrange option. You want to select all your soldiers that you want to print and arrange them and click the bottom one. This makes all your soldiers standing on the same level so that they don’t float and if they do float, it might cause some trouble in printing. I forgot to mention this, but you also need a 3d printer, of course, And that’s probably gonna be the main problem in all of this. Somehow you have to have access to a 3d printer. If you have your own 3d printer good for you, you can do basically whatever you want, but if you’re like me and you don’t have a 3d printer, you’re gonna have to find other sources for me A 3d print things in my school, and I’m really lucky to have a class with 3d printers, But the problem is the damn teacher doesn’t. Let me print things with guns like what the hell he lets those damn goddamn 7th graders, print freaking fortnights, skins, rockets and V books. He doesn’t love him. Print enough Freaking just a toy soldier. So that’s why I’m printing toy soldiers without any guns and I just call them figurines. So then the teacher doesn’t get alarmed. If you want to print toy soldiers with guns, you’re probably gonna have to ask your friends. I have a few friends. I have a 3d printer, so I’ll be asking them soon to get the model ready to print. You Just have to convert it to an STL and slice it. I can’t really give you good details on how to slice and convert your file into a 3d printer because all 3d printers are different. Depending on your printer, it might have bad print quality. The print quality depends on the height of the layers. Usually 3d modeling printers. Let you change the layer, height the layer height. I suggest is 0.2 millimeters or 0.1 but anything below 1 millimeter is fine. Anything above 1 millimeter will make the soldier look like a potato. Now you can print it when it’s done printing. You should clean up the model. This means removing any plastic bits or supports. [MUSIC] But one big problem about 3d printers is that they leave this weird line pattern. Since the 3d printers print on lines and layers, you can see all the layers, which is really bad one way to fix. This is painting it, that’s why. I recommend you don’t really choose a color for your prints. Any color will do. It doesn’t really matter to paint your soldiers. I recommend you use some glossy paints. Most of the time. I paint my tanks with the acrylic paint, but that doesn’t really work on plastic too. Well, I mean, the acrylic paints still work, but they don’t really give that shine. Also glossy paints our weight thicker, so they cover up the lines more easily, but with acrylic paint, It’s a lot thinner, so I think you might have to use more layers. I’m painting this soldier with the green glossy paint. I got from Walmart. It might take a lot of layers once. You’re done painting it. It should look like this, here’s. A soldier painted with glossy paint and a soldier painted with acrylic. You can really see the difference. Also, this print failed. It became a mangled mess. And now you can go through the print. Your whole army. How are you using all these toy soldiers in my future videos and like? I said before you can have all these models in the description below, I’ll have the original Grenadier soldier and some of my own models and here’s a preview of all the soldiers that would be in the description below, but none of these guys have guns because I couldn’t print any with guns. So yeah, anyways, thank you all for watching [Music].