Tips and tricks and general information about what it takes to make designer vinyl toys, resin toys, and art toys.
Shinbone’s been getting so much love and support lately that it’s time to give something back. If you like monsters or if you’re curious about how we sculpt toys, here’s a 3d model of a little critter to load up and take a close look…
The flexibility and speed of digital sculpting has an associated cost that sometimes surprises designers. Printing the sculpt can occasionally be perilously expensive. More!
Designers who are planning a toy occasionally wonder whether to produce their figure in resin or vinyl. Both materials are being used to make wonderful and attractive figures. Here are brief overviews of the materials. More!
Every step of the process of making a set of figures has options and choices that affect the cost. Possibly the best way to answer this question would be with a flowchart, but for now let’s pick one option and stick with it. Let’s consider…
You want to make a toy and you don’t know where to start? Simply put, have a strong original idea. It’s okay to be inspired, we’re all inspired by the fantastic work being made by the artists and designers that we love. But it’s harder…
Yes. We can produce a run of toys from a client’s existing 3d model. There may be a little tweaking involved, or a complete rebuild, depending on the condition of the supplied model. While models built for video games, film, cut-scenes, and print look similar,…
Who likes monsters? Who wants to get their hands on a nice juicy, drippy, lumpy freak named Skullbee? If you’re curious about the magic behind the mischief, grab yourself this file and take a peek. If you’d like to play with the character, go right…
You can send us pretty much any format – Maya, 3ds Max, Zbrush, Mudbox, Modo, and we’ll clean up and prep the model and make sure that it is watertight, scaled, articulated, cut up for manufacturing, etc. before sending to the printer. The files that…
Free monster 3d model? Absolutely, come and get the goober and mess him up. Feel free to print him on your rapid-prototyping machine, if you have one! Feel free to customize him or just take a peek behind the scenes to see how we put…
We can print a full color model, but we don’t recommend it. At the end of the day, you’ll only have a single piece, colored, for display and it won’t be reproducible. If you are interested in a full production run, painted, of your piece,…
How long does it take to make a run of vinyl toys? Short answer… a very long time. Let’s break it down and take a look at each stage, keeping in mind that the “design and ideation” portions are flexible, while the factory production portions…
For basic resin reproduction, we can do some fancy footwork and produce a piece with metal axles and resin wheels, but it is tricky and requires a fair amount of assembly. For larger production runs in ABS, we can engineer a fairly standard execution of…
I love “Celebrity X”, is it okay to make a Celebrity X toy? It’s great to have heroes and we all love this actor or that sports star or that other famous person who does that thing that is just so damn cool. In fact…
For resin, the minimum is extremely low, as low as 10 or 30 units. For vinyl, it is possible to sweet talk a factory into producing 500, but they would prefer to do no less than 1000, usually. A run of 500 will cost more,…
Sofubi, short for “soft vinyl,” is a type of plastic material used to create Japanese vinyl toys. These toys have captured the hearts of collectors worldwide due to their unique aesthetics and tactile appeal. One reason why we love Sofubi is their ability to be…
Yes and no. Time for math fun. The total cost of a “run” of toys is the combined result of complexity, size, material, packaging, and number of units. Let’s look at a run of resin figures as an example. There are “one time” costs such…
Well loved artists and designers with massive fan bases could see four figures come in from a successful run of toys. Inspired and talented designers who are just starting out might see “sushi money” come in from a successful run of toys. There’s a complex…
Short answer – rarely. But patching up the high poly game asset for print is not too difficult. Detailed high poly game models are used for a few reasons in the game development pipeline. For “next gen” titles, the high poly models are used for…
No, producing your own toys is not cost effective – but it is fun! There is a tremendous amount of enjoyment and satisfaction to be had if you’re a designer and you make, package and sell your own figures. Keep in mind, while interesting, it…
There are different rapid-prototyping technologies that print using a variety of processes and materials. The resolution, or the smallest possible detail, is dependent on the specific printer that is being used for generating the physical model. To try and give you some idea of how…