Customized belt buckle model made for 3D printing to be manufactured in silver with gold plating. The buckle weights 200 grams of silver in real life.
The size is around 11x8 centimeters.
Created in Blender 4.4
At one point the Blender file reached 10.8 GB (yes many hi res feathers, oopsi)
The final complete STL file is 97 MB after several decimations.
The buckle is not merely decorative, it is made to be used
I don’t know how you did engraved metal but I want to learn that so bad so I can recreate old Japanese jewelry, some of which has an amazing amount of engraved metal work.
About the engravings: instead of engravings, they are raised geometry. In real life, you would use nice sharp jewelry gravers to make the engravings, and that’s one of the most admirable craftsmanship there is. Replicating that in 3D would be making hundreds of booleans to replicate the process. But in fact in 3D, you can inverse the process. Instead of engraving, you can create the resulting grooves resulting from the engraving, avoiding all the booleans and getting the exact same visual result, and fit for 3d printing and manufacturing.
Oh wow… Thank you for explaining it! Sorry, so how would you do the engravings exactly? Did you paint them onto a normal map made in blender? :o (I’m assuming that is a thing that can be done XD)
Then the mesh gets optimized for 3D printing and because it gets resin printed, the file starts super heavy at a very high resolution (6 GB STL). That means decimating geometry above 40 million faces, and from there decimating without killing all the details. Resin 3D printing nowadays has resolutions around 13320 x 5120 pixels and a pixel size of 16.8 x 24.8 μm, decimating too heavily gets very quickly noticable.
Well, I’d never wear anything like this in real life, but that is one hell of a modelling work.
