Repper's delight

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Inspiration

The first thing to do is to find a good picture of Magritte's original painting.
I could have open one of my art book but thanks to some web search it's easy to find a good reference picture in just a few seconds.

Planning

Meshmixer's main feature is to mix meshes.
And this feature makes it a unique 3D app : I know no other app that offers such a feature.

That said, I needed to find 3 main "ingredients" :

• a head
• a female body
• some hair

For the head I already had an open-source model but I don't remember where I downloaded it from... But any good female face should do for this project.
And for the body and hairs I simply searched Thingiverse and decided I will use :

• this mesh for the body
• this mesh for the hairs

The base mesh

The base mesh is the female head I allready had from which I defeatured all the face attributes :

• eyes
• nose
• mouth
• ears

Defeaturing the base mesh

This base mesh I then exported as OBJ for a future use in Meshmixer.

The "body face" mesh

For the new "body face" attributes I simply deleted everything from the Pink panther body mesh except the front part of it (showed in blue) and exported it as another OBJ.

The "body-face" mesh

The hair mesh

For the making of the hair I simply deleted everything from the Beethoven's bust except its hairs (showed in blue). Again I exported the result as OBJ.

The hair mesh

Mixing the meshes

This is done within Meshmixer.
But before I roughly aligned my 3 different "ingredients" just to check they could do the job.

Rough alignement done for checking purpose

Then I first imported the OBJ "body face" mesh into Meshmixer and converted it into a Meshmixer part.
I then imported the defeatured head base mesh and drag-dropped the "body face" part on it. After a bit of tweaking (scale/rotate/bulge) I ended up with this :

Mixing meshes with Meshmixer

This intermediate result is then again exported back into a new OBJ file.

Adding the hairs

The previously exported OBJ and the OBJ hair mesh are then imported in SketchUp.
I then deleted all unnecessary faces (back of the head), aligned the hair and connected the shells together.
The result is again exported as a new temporary OBJ file for further sculpting in Sculptris.

Shells are connected into a single mesh

Final sculpting

I then imported this last temporary OBJ in Sculptris and sculpted some details that will make it look closer to Magritte's original artwork.
Here is the result :

Details added in Sculptris

This final mesh is then exported from Sculptris and decimated for 3D printing.

Decimated version ready for printing

Texturing

Just to push the fun a bit further I decided to texture it.
To do so I just reused the photo of the original painting as a texture.


Textured mesh

3D Printing

I haven't tried to print it yet because I didn't have time. But when it will be done I will post a photo of the sculpture here.
But you can print one for yourself if you want...

Edited : I finally printed it yesterday evening. But unfortunately the print failed at about 90% completion due to a bad choice in Kisslicer's parameters. My fault...
So this morning I printed the missing top part.

Incomplete print and missing top part

The print is hollow

Having two parts to glue together, and the main part being hollow, I decided it might be a good idea to fill it with plaster to make it heavier before to glue the top part.
So I prepared some quiet liquid plaster and poured it into the bottom hollow part. I also added two screws to the top part that will help holding it in place when the plaster will harden.

Bottom part filled with plaster and top part with added screws on

The sculpture is then closed with its top part

The excess of water in the plaster starts to "sweat" - "No woman no cry !"

The sculpture is "heavy" which offers a good "feeling" and it can stand by itself.
So I'm very happy with the result.

Now I have to wait for it to dry (which might take a long time regarding it's air tight) before cleaning it with a little bit of sanding and offering it to my friend Dan.
Честито рожден ден, Дан !

After some sanding, her lobotomy scar is now hardly visible

Print one for yourself !

I hope you like it.
If you do, you can print it for yourself : just download it from Thingiverse.

Happy printing !