[Narrator] We're goin' back to Comic Con!

[Narrator] We've got a bunch of work ahead of us!

[Narrator] 1700 hours of building.

[Narrator] 4,000 hours.

Hope I works!

We are really excited about having Stratasys onboard.

They are one of the world leaders in 3D printing technology.

I've been at Stratasys for six years now,

and I've seen lots of different sizes,

lots of different geometries.

I've basically seen it all, but this is one of the biggest

that we've had the opportunity to be a part of.

3D printing used to be known as rapid-prototyping

which is a way to take a digital model, as done in Maya,

Zbrush, XXI, Rhino, any of those 3D modeling programs.

It's like product development.

You don't have to take it as a prototype,

and then mold it and cast it,

and go through that other process.

Additive manufacturing, is you're manufacturing the part.

You're growing this realistic final part

that just looks at each individual slice

and it prints out one layer, and then the bed

that it's sitting on, it's printing on,

drops down, and it prints another layer.

That's why they call it growing.

So right from the bed of the machine, and has a little bit

of sanding and finishing, and then painted,

and it's done.

The materials are strong enough to withstand

the forces and the temperature and all of the other

stuff that might be --

It is an organic creature, but a good percentage

of 'em, close to 35, 40 percent, is hard surface,

3D printable parts.

And so what we need is talk about the parts

that we're gonna send to Stratasys to grow.

So we wanna send the arm, all the chest pieces

and the fingers as soon as possible.

This is gonna be a lot of modeling work,

so we're gonna have to get this stuff goin'

and out of here as fast as possible.

We only have such a size tray,

that part that you can fit

in the biggest machines available.

It's about 35 inches by 24 inches by 35 inches

that we have to play with for the size of the part.

If we're gonna use a program called Materialise Magics,

to cut up the parts with keys,

to fit them on smaller machines, four machines finished,

that are smaller, we could put those parts together

and have a big part that's pretty much came off the 900.

So this is one of the samples

that we had gotten back from Stratasys.

I'm gonna open this up and take some of this coring out

just as a test to see how much lighter we can make it.

Early on when we were testing on finger digits

we were trying to see what other materials out there,

higher grade than ABS, that might benefit this project.

As time went on and resources started becoming used,

we had to hone in fast on the material

that would just work in every area that we needed to,

strength, heat resistance, just being able to be beat up.

For this project we chose to use our ABS-M30 material,

which is our lower-end thermoplastic material,

and the reason why we decided to use this material

is because it can be easily sanded,

so it can be primed and painted.

We also chose to use our 1300 spill-layer slice

in our Fortus production system,

and what this allowed us to do,

was to turn the parts around quite quickly.

[Jason] I'm reading this email, that just came from

Michael Block, on the total number of hours for our prints.

Well what is it?

Between 3500 and 4000 hours.

[Man] What?

Holy --

Between 3500 and 4,000 hours.

It's crazy! Wow.

Currently we have ten of our biggest systems,

building these parts nationwide,

our Fortus 900mc.

The 900mc is the biggest machine on the line

that can throw down ABS and other materials at that size.

35 inches, by 24 inches, by 35 inches, that's what we need.

We wanna get as large single piece volume parts

out as quickly as possible and a machine like that's

gonna handle it for us.

I think we got everything I wanted.

As soon as they came back,

we cleaned off this support material

and now they'll go to the model shop,

clean these things up, Bondo, sand, prep, fill,

think about attaching it in quarter sections for now,

and then possibly seeing what reinforcements

at the seams we're going to do and things like that.

I don't think 3D printing will ever replace

the human artists, themselves.

There's a lot that goes into the design prior to the build

and there's a lot that goes in after the build,

so it's another tool that the artist has,

as they create cool masterpieces.

This was definitely the biggest 3D printing project

that I and and the studio has ever taken on before

and there's no question about it,

we're taking on more and bigger next year.

When we first started this project,

we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

Originally, we had 15 hours of build time,

but towards the end, we were at 3,000 hours of build time.

It really showed the limits that we pushed ourselves,

being able to make a project like this happen.

It's a lot of hard work, a lot of team work

had gone into this, to make this creature come alive.

[Narrator] Check out the Wired Channel,

TheScene.com, for the entire Giant Creature Series.

(techno music)