Wow its been a long time since I've posted!
I went home for Christmas. This included Portland at my brothers place and then my home town in California. Leading up to Christmas I worked on a piece for my brother/wife/daughter. My brothers wife is pregnant and so I sculpted up a piece and had it printed by Offload Studios. You can see it here:
Apple Sculpt and PrintIt was very fragile and came in pieces. 2 Leaves and the Apple. I had to hollow out the apple and separate the pieces. When I got it I had to take it with me on the plane in a box covered in "Fragile" logos. It looked.... bad. A lady actually switched seats on one of the flights. But I wasn't going to let anybody touch it.
We had to assemble it with glue. It does stand on its own with out any help, which is nice.
The print process was pretty grueling and taxed my machine heavily. Hollowing it out after the fact was hard to do. The big thing I wanted to do was have high res texture maps baked into it at print which Offload does. That process was tough and I think UV Master for Zbrush helped save me, even though the hand-paint-seams function seemed totally broken. In the end the final result was great. The piece feels solid and has a "grain" to it that really ads to it.