How We Did It (Kinda Technical)

This is Anni 2023, “The Annihilator Remastered 2023” Resin Limited Edition as a digitally remastered sculpture of my CM Artist’s Copy from the original 2009 V1 limited edition. I spent several months enhancing the 2021 original digital metrology scan of my CM Artist’s Copy to take my sculpture to the next level. I thought the original scan would provide enough mesh, but soon I realized I couldn’t sculpt fine details. I switched from triangles to quad vertices, but still, it wasn’t working, So, back to triangles and Larry pushed the limits of Blender and our computer by remeshing the resolution from 4 million verticies to nearly 90 million. Talk about getting some breathing room. Wow! This allowed me to sculpt fine details I just wasn’t able to get before. Larry was concerned that Blender, the sculpting software and Lychee, the program used to create the printing supports and slicing the model into 5,440 layers, might not be able to handle Anni 2023’s huge file size. Blender did fine but Lychee gave a 500 megabyte warning. Larry just ignored the warning by first loading Anni 2023 in GOM software where he was able to optimize and an enhanced definition STL down to a 40 million vertice mesh. The final Anni 2023’s file size was still a ridiculous 5 gigabyte. Then Larry loaded it into Lychee. Guess what? Believe it or not, after 15 minutes of loading, there he was, on the Lychee workspace screen! He fully loaded and it only used 70 gigabytes of ram of the 256gb available! This whole process has been achieved over a period of months of computer tweaking and workflow redefining to develop but in the end, Anni 2023 was so worth the time and effort in the long run. (The photo shows the first test print of Anni2 in traditional. As you can see, we need to increase the size of the mane supports where the under sized ones failed. He took just over 47 hours to print, about two layers per minute.)

Lessons Learned

What Larry and I have learned from this process has made this sculpture the most complicated resin I’ve ever sculpted. I am training my eyes to spot areas which needed additional mesh subdivision and  resculpting to make these models look even more lifelike and ‘The Annihilator Remastered 2023’ is the culmination of this effort. After having to basically resculpt the model several times as I kept increasing the number of vertices and getting away from quads, he has turned into something truly awesome! I spared no expense adding insane detail as you will soon see. The Annihilator is the first sculpture I have ever added taste buds to the tongue! Imagine that! It may be impossible to see on the SM and MM but you can see them on the Venti (shown as a finished 3D print resin on the black background photos above. Yes, these are photos, not digital 3D renders!) With a flashlight and magnifying lens, you can see the entire inside of his mouth, including canines, wolf teeth, molars, uvula and soft palate. If you look closely, you will see the hypsodont patterns in his teeth. I did have to foreshorten the molars some or it would be impossible to tool, sand or paint them but they turned out so amazing that I don’t think anyone could tell the difference. Here is a photo of the inside of the mouth from the actual traditional scale resin but have included the digital renderings for reference, gray background gallery photos above. For scale, there is also a photo for the original Annihilator 1:8.3 scale next to 3D printed 1:9 scale at 15.2hh.