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3DPRINTUK
Christian Eriksen 3D Print
3DPRINTUK, EA Sports and Madame Tussauds combine to make a 3D printed head of the Dane.
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Goodison
After some adjustments, here is my file of Goodison for printing
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Blender version of Goodison
Imported directly from FIFA 15
For a while, during my ThingiThursday blogs I’ve had this idea of exporting a file from the popular EA Sports football/soccer game FIFA 14 and 3D printing the model. The model in particular I was looking for was Goodison Park, home of the School of Science, home of the greatest team in the world… ok enough eulogising. It had struck me that should one be able to export the 3D model from the game into Blender, then using the new 3D printing tools in the software platform one should be able to construct a 3D printable file that one could have to show off in front of his friends.
I stumbled across a young man by the name of Greg Waste who’d developed a nifty bit of code for importing his own 3D models of trophies and other assets he’d designed on Blender back into the game. Greg’s blog, coincidentally, had focussed on exporting Goodison Park out of the game and is worth taking the time to read through his dedicated process.
I, unlike Greg, am not as gifted in the ways of Blender and instead lazily got in touch with Greg to see if he could supply me with the relevant files, that he did and I was able to get something that resembled Goodison exported to an stl file from Blender.
However, what with the complex nature of football stadia architecture and in particular Archibald Leith’s over a century old design, meant the file failed on printing. I had attempted to clean the file up with my limited 3D modelling experience using Tinkercad and the likes however, I really rather struggled getting anything that was in anyway half printable and just have not had the time to dedicate to the project.
It did strike me that for EA, the 3D printability of ever improving 3D scans of players and stadia could be a rather lucrative revenue stream, imagine being able to print physical trophies for tournaments with friends directly from the game, or printing your heroes in full, considering people pay a fortune for the virtual Messis and Ronaldos in Ultimate Team, what would they pay for physical versions?
So with the imminent release of FIFA 15 and the ramping up of EA’s considerable marketing power it seems this idea is not so far off as London-based 3D Printing bureau, 3DPRINTUK release some pictures on their social media channels of a project they have been working on with EA.
3DPRINTUK have printed life-size heads of four Premier League players in their Nylon SLS on their EOS Formiga machines, the heads were then sent to to be painted by considerable experts in achieving lifelike likeness.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
The first player to be revealed is Tottenham Hotspur’s Danish player Christian Eriksen, with the other three being kept as a secret. It is interesting to see EA dipping their toe in the 3D printed waters and the belief of the likes of Alice Taylor at MAKIES that children want their digital worlds to become physical may have taken another step to the truth.
