How to Scale 3D Printed Armor!

so you're finally doing it it's time to start 3D printing your own armor or cosplay and as crazy as it sounds you actually want it to fit you but instead of ending up with something like this you end up with something like this what went wrong let's talk about it [Applause] [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] hey guys welcome to my channel my name is Frank and today we're going to be going over a multitude of methods on scaling 3D printed armor and cosplay now I know you see Iron Man suits here but this doesn't just apply to Iron Man this can be for Halo meal linear armor this can be for anything that you want to 3D print and attach to your body in some type of costume or cosplay or maybe even some types of like Prosthetics or braces you can actually apply this to a lot of things now in this video I'm going to be covering a variety of methods on scaling and taking accurate measurements in different ways to get the armor to fit you before and after you print it because nobody wants to waste materials nobody wants to go through the trial and error of printing something and it doesn't fit and you have to print it again and you're not really sure what you did wrong now before we get into that I do want to preface it with there is no 100 Surefire way to do any of this the main reason being everybody's shaped differently and I want to emphasize that in the beginning just because you see some armor looking beautiful on one person the scale and size and shape of that suit might look completely different on somebody else we are all not built like superheroes we all don't look like Chris Evans with the big crazy V shape and we're not CGI like uh you know Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man so I do want you guys to temper your expectations a little bit because you might not have the ideal body shape that you're thinking or seeing that you want to replicate but that's okay cosplay is for anybody and if you're making armor and you're having fun with it nobody's gonna care and if they do they don't belong in the community anyway so please take all of that with a grain of salt strap in I'm going to show you a bunch of different little methods to hopefully save you some time and material and frustration on scaling your armor now I'm going to be covering five separate methods throughout this video with a couple little bonus tips and tricks at the end first is going to be a trial and error literally printing things to see if it fits next up is physical measuring devices like calipers and tape measures you're going to be taking measurements of your body and comparing them to you know what's on the computer and the measurements you're seeing in the program next up is a method I'm really fond of it's called test rings and you're going to physically print out different parts of the model just to see if they fit your body without having to print the entire thing next up is a really cool program called armorsmith and it actually lets you make a 3D avatar of your body and you can scale the armor to that to hopefully get it in the rough area so you know it fits you and finally it's physical 3D scans of your body I don't think there's a more accurate way to do this than getting an actual size and shape of well how you're shaped so first up trial and error now this is by far the riskiest and most problematic way you could print in scale armor how do I know because that's exactly what I did to my first 3D printed Iron Man suit the mark 85 here and it's kind of what I did to the mark 39 over there with some slightly better results this is a terrible idea however I did get Super Lucky with my own body shape and type and like I said before this isn't always going to apply I happen to know after research and looking at other models and talking to other people who have printed full Iron Man suits from do3d that they're scaled to about a six foot tall person with roughly a 32 to 34 inch waist and really long legs I only have like one of those things I'm five foot eight and you can already tell that this suit's standing on the armor stand is taller than me I printed everything out at a hundred percent scale now I just said a really specific thing 100 scale but what does that mean 100 scale to who let's talk about 3D model scale first now through this video I'm going to assume you already know how to 3D print you've gone through the trials and errors you've dialed in your machine you've made a couple small things even maybe some Iron Man helmets and you've scaled them to your head that's a great video to go check out by the way but now you want to move on to armor well when you drop a 3D file into a program like Cura or mesh mixer or blender or wherever it's going to have its own scale usually this is a Moon Knight helmet by Nico Industries and when I drop this into Cura it was huge I had to scale this down to nearly 80 percent of its size instead of the hundred percent because if this was 100 percent instead of being about the size of my head it probably would have been about that big it would have been way too big and I would have looked like a bobble head so I had to scale this down from its original 3D model size but now we have something like this broken Captain America shield here when I downloaded this file off of thingyverse I had to scale it up four thousand percent the file on the computer was Tiny it was still there it was a decent model but it was small and I had to use Kira to look at the measurements take physical measurements of the model and then I had to translate that to a percentage but I had to blow this up to four thousand percent scale just to print it at well it's normal size so not all 3D models are created equal and even if you get models from the same maker or modeler they might not be scaled accurately to each other if you download a full armor set the helmet might be a little bit bigger and then the chest might be a little bit smaller so just consider that just because you scaled the helmet up to fit your head that doesn't mean you're going to go and scale the chest up the same proportion so let's get back to test firing and kind of trial and error guessing but after everything was printed and I began to fit it to my body I had to do a lot of trimming post printing this included using things like dremels and hot wires and literal hacksaws to remove parts of the armor so things didn't pinch and bind and rub and you know get uncomfortable that's not to say this can't bear some fruit though though I printed this suit at 100 scale including d03 the helmets I now know that the do3d files typically fit me at 100 scale this was printed at 100 scale and well I can just kind of put it on and now I am familiar with the Baseline that do3d provides with their Iron Man suits since I knew I only had to adjust the legs on the mark 85 the upper body the Torso the arms everything fit me pretty nicely except the legs I was able to go and do the same thing to the mark 39 and truth be told I had to do the same thing I printed everything at 100 scale and I only had to go and trim the legs because the upper body torso backpack arms everything fit me now again I got very lucky this way and I wouldn't recommend it to anybody so let's talk about the next method actually measuring your body a little bit and comparing it to the computer this method is kind of just an advanced version of that trial and error because it's going to be a little hard to get accurate measurements depending on the armor or cosplay you're trying to print you can use things like calipers to get nice precise measurements of like your wrist so in this case my wrist is roughly 59 millimeters now if I go and drop a model that I want to print into something like mesh mixer as long as it has some type of measuring tool if I select them model go to analysis and go up to measure it actually gives me a nice little line in the X Y or Z Direction and in this case I want to measure the width of my wrist so I need to pick the y direction up and down and you click anywhere in the model and this is the surface to surface so I can drag this line down but I want to get it to the tip of the wrist right about here and then that line goes all the way down through the model to basically show the width of that opening now I can move the model around using edit and transform I can manipulate the line I can do the XYZ but basically it's telling me it's about 90 millimeters side to side well if I go and open up the caliper to 90 millimeters then I know that my wrist is going to fit through there but don't just consider the part you're measuring how am I going to get my hand actually through the forearm basically what I'm getting at is after you print the part if you can't actually fit through it then well it's not really worth it so you want to make sure when you're looking at the parts in the armor you're trying to put on how are you also going to be wearing them are they split up into multiple Parts what other body parts need to get through them in order for you to wear it and how are you measuring and comparing it now this is going to get a little tricky when you're dealing with like you know chest size and shoulder size and waist you're going to have to measure a lot bigger but if you put in the time to it you can definitely get a rough ballpark on if this thing is going to fit you or not heck even breaking out a full tape measure isn't a bad idea also instead of using tiny little handheld calipers you can go and download one of these awesome cosplay calipers and definitely check out Uncle Jesse's video on this method it's just it just adds to the whole pool of tools that you're going to use to scale and make armor but now let's talk about my personal favorite method test Rings now this is a really handy method I like to use to give you a rough estimate that I think is better than just doing physical measurements and trying to figure out if they work in the program however it is going to burn a little bit of 3D printing material because you're gonna have to print something out now if I don't want to go and print this entire forearm well I don't have to I need to know really two things can my hand fit through both openings well this is the smallest part and I know my wrist is smaller than my forearm so as long as I can get my hand through this opening I know that my hand theoretically should fit let me show you real quick how to cut a test ring out of something like a forearm you're going to drop it in a mesh mixer go over to edit and select playing cut it's going to give you a nice 3D plane that you can now move around with all of these arrows and tools and I'm going to move it about here move it down to the wrist and then I'm just going to cut that and there's just a perfect little cross section of the wrist and I can cut this down as much as I want I can make it thinner I can make it longer that's totally fine and up to you but just go over to export and then you can just save it as an STL export it and just like that I have a nice little test ring I can print out just to see if I can actually even fit my hand through it well now I know that okay my hand can fit through that so if my hand can fit through this opening right here at the end well then I can get my hand through it and the armor will fit slicing out test strings can also be a great way to check larger pieces of armor this is a test ring from a helmet and I know this helmet is going to fit me now because I can get it past my ears yes it's going to be a little pinched I might want to scale it up just a little bit but depending on where you cut out I know this is going to fit this is actually a test ring from a Mark 85 Iron Man helmet but again when thinking about how you're gonna put the piece on and the opening at the bottom is much smaller than the actual diameter or the circumference of the helmet even though that ring is going to fit I still can't get my head into the helmet and you need to consider this when dealing with bigger pieces of Cosplay and armor chest plates and thighs and shins what's also great about 3D printed plastic is you can heat it up and warp it I've done this on a multitude of different prints and projects all you have to do is take a blow dryer or a heat gun or really maybe even just a warm day and you can actually stretch and bend the plastic when it's a little bit warm and pliable well just put your arm through and move your wrist around you can open up and warp the plastic just because it's done printing doesn't mean you're done being able to modify it now using test strings can get a little bit more complicated when you're dealing with you know AB armor or chest armor this is actually a cross section to the ab section the front and back waist of my Mark 85. I scaled it down to 90 this way I could actually fit it on one of my medium sized printers and then I just cut a side of it open now if I can't get this around my waist all the way to the point where it touches and I definitely can't that's really uncomfortable I immediately know that a 90 scale you know AB waist area for that Mark 85 just isn't gonna fit me properly so you definitely want to be careful with uh scaling things down and testing them like that also another big thing you need to consider when printing out and testing and scaling armor is how do all the pieces connect to the other pieces on the suit if I scale the helmet up to fit my head I don't really need to worry about scaling the chest up or down to fit my head that doesn't really make sense however the chest here does connect directly to the backpack now if I scale the chest up 120 percent now I need to scale the backpack up that same proportion or else it's not going to lock and fit and align together or say I shrink the chest and the backpack down I make the really small and skinny but then I forget to scale the ABS the waist part down too well now the waist is going to be too big and it's not going to fit under the chest so always think about how things are interacting with each other I can scale the arms up or down it's not really going to affect the body I can make the legs longer or shorter that's not going to affect the helmet so some things just don't correlate at all but you have to make sure you consider that something's due here's an example of dropping all of those parts into mesh mixer and seeing how they align as long as you get them lined up and the model has that memory in it and a lot of 3D models do you can just drop the parts in one after another and they'll kind of Auto align and even if they don't you can always go up here to transform and you can move them around and make sure they line up properly but you can tell by the tight fitment and the seams and how everything lines up that if I start scaling things all wonky this suit is going to start to look kind of odd and not locked together properly okay so we've talked about hip firing we've talked about doing a little bit of measuring and that was talking about test strings let's start doing things that are a little bit more accurate there's a really awesome program out there called armorsmith by the armored garage and it's made for scaling and manipulating 3D armor for cosplay it's really awesome now there are a lot of people who swear by this program but you're only going to get out as much work as you put into it it's not going to do all the work for you but for 30 bucks it's pretty awesome for what you get when you first load up the program you're going to be presented with a 3D avatar and if you right click you'll start to get a lot of different options for scaling and manipulating you're going to see a bunch of measurements this is you you're gonna go and take measurements of your own body and input them like your head circumference 23 inches that's roughly the circumference of my head I have a big head I know deal with it but this is what you're gonna do you're gonna go around and measure your body and input them into the program and then it's going to save your avatar take your time like I said The more work and time you spend on this step to get the most accurate Avatar you can the better and easier it's going to be to go and then scale your armor this is including things like shouldered with bicep circumference and width forearm length leg length you're going to want to be as accurate as possible but also consider you want to leave a little bit of wiggle room I don't want the helmet squeezing my brain at 23 inches maybe I'll bump it up to like 24 maybe even 25 to account for electronics I don't want the waste to be hugging me and squeezing the life out of me all the time so maybe scale it up just a little bit make your avatar maybe just a little bit bigger than you might need to edit the sizes you'll see down here the Avatar model and then if you just start reading everything head circumference okay so we're gonna bump this up to I don't know 25 inches and it's going to grow that your grow the shape of your head if you want to change it from centimeters or millimeters to inches go up to settings go to preferences measurements and then you can change it from Imperial to metric I like using Imperial because I'm American to each his own you can also change the head the width the depth it gives you tons of options you can also go down here to the chest start playing with shoulder width chest for chest circumference bust back length shoulder length you can play with all of these different measurements and get your nice perfect Avatar the worst thing about this program is it's going to make you feel very uncomfortable with your body you're going to take measurements of things you didn't really ever think you were going to take measurements of you're going to input them into the computer and you might not like how it looks I absolutely hate how my avatar looks but it's going to help me scale some cosplay like I said not everybody's shaped like a superhero and um unfortunately this program reveals that now before we even start attaching armor to this you can actually go up and edit the pose so now I can click on certain parts of the Avatar and I can move it around yeah I can't do that but I can put the arm out I can bring the bicep closer to the side to see if armor interacts or intersects if anything's gonna hit that I don't want to I can bend the arms and make poses to see if things are going to move and Collide but after that it's as simple as dragging and dropping in armor pieces it's going to process it into the program you're going to see the bicep that I just dropped in over here I'm going to select attach and then I'm going to pick a point to attach it to so this is the left bicep now the biceps attached to that point right click it rotate and then start aligning it takes a little bit of getting used to on going back and forth through all the functions but once you get the hang of it you can really just start moving the armor around scaling it making sure it fits but now say you want to make the part bigger or smaller you can come over here select scale and you can scale uniform or non-uniform so let's do a uniform scale that's going to scale the XYZ all together in one I can make it bigger I can make it smaller it's only going to scale up and down in one way but if I want to go in non-uniform scale it now I can stretch and skew it I want to make it longer or I want to make it a little shorter I want to make it hug my arm a little bit more but I also at the same time want to make it wider this is called non-uniform scaling it's not scaling the XYZ All in One Direction this can get very complicated and tricky so you want to take your time with this but once you have a design that you like okay I want it to look like that for whatever reason now I can just right click it and I can export this exact model scale to how I want now this is going to go and Export that model exactly how I just scaled and modified it that's actually exactly what I did with this Mark 85 Forum I shrunk it down I widened it out I just kind of had fun with this to show that you know non-uniform scaling can leave you with some very odd things this would probably look cute on like a a dog maybe I don't know like maybe I can just get it up all the way I don't know you can drastically change the shape of a 3D file by scaling it or especially non-uniform scaling it these are the same parts and well they don't look like it anymore now you can also use armorsmith to scale obviously the entire armor and what I was talking about earlier don't just drop in the chest plate in the back but not consider how the ABS are gonna fit you're going to want to scale and skew everything together making sure everything still lines up there is a lot more that goes into armorsmith and I'm probably going to do a full tutorial dedicated only to it but I wanted to give you guys just a quick basis of it this is a very Advanced program and the more time you take to learn it well the more it's going to pay off in the end and once you measure and make your avatar you don't have to do that every time so put in a lot of work in the beginning and it's just it'll pay off in the end a program like armorsmith can save you a lot of headache and that coupled with all the other methods we've talked about so far can get you a better result in the end without having to waste a bunch of filament but let's talk about the final and I think the best way to scale armor 3D scanning while I've talked about handheld 3D scanners before honestly for the application we're trying to use them for here they're really expensive and honestly kind of Overkill now you can download 3D scanning apps directly to your phone and get measurements in like minutes and one of these apps actually happens to be today's sponsor scandypro scandypro is an awesome iPhone app that works with like the iPhone x and up and even iPad Pros newer than 2018. it utilizes a true depth sensor the little sensor on the front of your phone that lets you unlock it with your face and this way it's not using lidar if you guys remember in another video I did I wasn't able to scan dark surfaces like my dark hair but using the true depth sensor I can scan my entire head no problem getting a scan is as easy as opening the app hitting create scan aiming the phone at what you want to scan and hitting go now it gave me a lot of extra data that I don't need but now what I can do is drop this into a 3D modeling program and strip away all the stuff I don't need I don't need the color I don't need parts of my chest and body I just need the scan in my head and I can use that to scale armor cosplayer helmets and it's not just limited to scanning your head this is a very quick scan you can scan any part of your body you can get a friend to help you and scan you and import that data directly into your computer actually let's go ahead and send this to my computer right now so here's the file that I just scanned on my computer while it has a little bit of extra stuff that I don't need it was a very quick and dirty scan with a little bit of cleanup and or just a little bit of more time and focus you can end up with something that's a lot better and more detailed and then even with more cleanup you end up with an even better file now I am going to go and save and Export this head file and scan and now that's a direct scan of my head I will always have to put next to helmets that I can use to scale and make sure things that were going to fit me before I ever go and print them the this app is super easy to use guys in less than five minutes of work total I was able to scan my head import it to the computer do a little bit of cleanup and now I have a perfectly scaled model in my head that I can use for reference that's that's awesome if you guys are looking for an easier way to scale and measure yourself for cosplaying 3D printing please go check out scandypro I'm going to drop a link down below and of course it always helps support the channel thank you again scandypro for sponsoring this video and let's keep going now 3D scanning is really a mixed bag but if you can navigate through it it's going to give you the best possible results yeah armorsmith is great with just general measurements but head shapes can be different different proportions of your body really might be hard to plug into a program like that and if you can get one really good scan of your entire body or your entire arm that's it it's your arm that is your 3D model to have in the computer and scale and match armor to every time what you can also go and do is take 3D scans of yourself in different poses do a t-pose scan Bend your arms lift your arms up get a stool or a bench sit down on it this way you can get multiple scans and multiple poses you just need the basic geometry of your body it doesn't care that I might have a blemish here or some hair there it doesn't matter it just needs the shape of your body so I've gone and dropped a really rough 3D scan of my entire Mark 85 suit well waist up now again this doesn't need to be like perfect geometry and have all of the details but what it does show me is that if I go and drop in the same Mark 85 chest plate that I printed at 100 scale and I go over to move it I can actually align it almost perfectly with my 3D scan and it's pretty much exactly the same size obviously there's some Liberties given here but that's basically it it's scaled well exactly how I ended up printing it and I did a little bit warping and bending around the neck obviously but that's pretty much the same scale and shape now if this was my actual upper body or torso I'd be able to use that to compare if this armor piece is going to fit me if it's going to collide with my neck if it's going to come to down too far over my waist or stomach and this would give me a really good idea of how it's going to look now 3D scanning is probably the bougiest and most expensive way to go about scaling a you know armor and cosplay but I think if you do it properly and put the time into it it can yield even better results than armorsmith especially if you have a full 3D scan of yourself or a couple different varieties of 3D scans then this is going to realistically give you the best results possible and again all of these are just tools to add to your Arsenal you can use all of these techniques if you want and just plug and play them where they seem applicable I just didn't want to leave any methods unturned and if there's other methods you guys know about that I didn't cover please leave them in comments down below this can be kind of like a master guide to help people out oh hey I have this good 3D scanning app but this one worked better for my head and I really like the cosplay calipers start those Converse conversations down below and as I see resources pop up I'll add them to the description to help you guys out listen guys this stuff isn't easy I'm not gonna sit here and lie to you I know I got very lucky with how this armor ended up fitting me I got very lucky by the way do 3D modeled and scaled their files I got very lucky through my genetics and my not just natural body type it isn't going to be as easy for some people it's going to be rather difficult but I promise you if you take your time put in the work and learn learn from the mistakes that I'm sure a lot of you are going to make that's fine but once you start to learn and really nail it down it is so very worth it when you have an armor that just fits and hugs you perfectly it is amazing I do hope you guys found this video helpful I know it wasn't a perfect step-by-step tutorial on every single method I wanted to cover but I at least wanted to put a lot of the ideas in your mind I do plan to do a couple different videos about scaling I'm still going to do a dedicated armorsmith video and I'll probably do a dedicated video about 3D scanning and scaling but those are going to be a little bit farther down the road to make sure you don't miss out on them please consider subscribing to the channel and ring the notification Bell this way you can catch them when they come out and all the other videos I'm working on but that's gonna do it for this video guys thank you again scandypro for sponsoring this video guys please make sure you go check them out the link is down below and as always thank you so much for watching you guys have a good day [Music]

Channel: Frankly Built

Views: 69,689

Keywords: scaling armor, how to scale cosplay, how to size cosplay, how to scale 3d prints, how to i scale 3d prints, how do i make 3d prints fit me?, 3d print scaling, how to scal 3d printed cosplay, cosplay, armor, 3d printed cosplay

Id: X1aC2V-0otw

Length: 25min 2sec (1502 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022