As of right now, the anniversary celebration of a game I started playing recently is coming up in a few weeks. You may or may not have heard of the mobile gacha game called "Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle." Every so often it spikes to top-grossing in the app store, and that's because of some hype event, or a new character introduced. This time's anniversary features two new Legendary Rarity (the highest rarity) units that have been hyped up for months: Gogeta Blue (left) and Vegito Blue (right).
As a fan of the Dragon Ball series, I decided to design and print some pendants of them for fun.
Finding Templates
I started off with the line drawings of each of them which I found from YouTube tutorials on how to draw these two.
Gogeta was an absolutely sick drawing by Yair Sasson Art here.
Vegito was a very clean line drawing by GuuhDrawing which you can find here.
Starting the Sketches
After settling on the two templates, I began to trace each template out on Fusion 360. It was a simple process but it was a little tedious. Each line from the template needed to be outlined in order for there to be an area to extrude. As you can see in the images above, each line is bordered so that there is a closed profile to be able to extrude.
Drawing the Aura
Although it sounded pretty easy, it actually took quite some work to make it look natural and random at the same time. Based off of the projections of the outlines of the faces, I used several splines to draw the curves of the aura, and moved the points until I was satisfied with what I had. After that I offset it outwards to create a profile, and readjusted once again.
Extruding and Coloring Everything
My plan was to print the pendant face down with the different colors being only a thin 0.2 mm (the height of the extruded material in order to print multiple colors. The final color switch would be printing the base of the model as well, which I made to be 5 mm. I learned this technique from this video by the YouTube channel Make Anything. This video shows how to print a phone case with a multi-color design using only a printer with only a single extruder. As you can see(barely) the side profile of each of the pendants is a very thin Baby Blue color, with the majority of the thickness being the 5 mm Aqua color which is the base and also the inner aura.
Test Print
Vegito was the first one I tested. At time I did not have the color for his skin I also did not have black for the outline. So I used the translucent glow in the dark filament for the skin, and a baby blue for the outline.
Version 1
These pictures above is how the first print turned out. For this first run, I actually did not print the black outline, so instead its just a kind of trench thing. I though it would be easier for me to trace out the outline with a skinny Sharpie marker. But as you can see on the image on the right, it didn't turn out very well, as the marker couldn't reach places, as the gap was too narrow. Another issue was the tolerance of how thin the printer could print. On the image on the left, you can clearly see that parts of Vegito's tufts' of hair are missing. There are also slight issue with the area that outlined the eyes. I ended up either widening the lines so that they showed up or removing the line altogether. For the face and skin color, it actually turned out alright, I used an alcohol marker to give it more color.
Version 2
As you can probably see, this second version turned out substantially better than the first. Instead of not printing the outline, I printed it in a different color (specifically the same baby blue as the outer aura). I did the same style with Gogeta, coloring the black part of his vest with black Sharpie.
Version 3
This is my latest and probably final version. After a couple weeks of waiting, I was finally able to get my hands on a beige colored filament which seemed to match Vegito and Gogeta's skin tone pretty well. Instead of using the white-transparent/glow-in-the-dark filament for the skin tone, I switched over to this beige color. It actually turned out better than I had expected.