Sunday was a lazy day here in JJ HQ, but the perfect time to crack out some models and keep the skills sharp. I targeted something somewhat simple that I could complete in a day.

Dune Awakening is Funcom's newest MMORPG, due to launch in June (See what they did there?). I was fortunate enough to take part in the public beta, and of course, before it ended, I was sure to take some shots of all the fun weapons and tools in the game, as of course, the cosplay community always needs options!

I promise it's not as morbid as it sounds ... ok maybe it is 

"A crude device for extracting blood from corpses and into a Blood Sack. Blood can be processed into water with a Blood Purifier at a base. It is rumored that the Fremen have perfected a field version of this device."

Starting off, I began with the Grip, as a base,e this would allow me to trace the in-game asset and begin to set up my scales and reference images inside Solidworks

So the thing about this type of reverse engineering/art process you really don't constrain a lot until you fix details, I know I know shock horror.. but in fact constraining the design does exactly what it says on the tin and when were dealing with feeling rather than solid dimensions very much this is the way to go in my process. Things get firmed up and locked down as the process evolves. If the model is particularly complex, I might have a speed run where nothing is constrained, just a mechanism to explore modelling strategies quickly to see what works and where the roadblocks will be.

When I'm doing this type of trace-over work, I lock things down with the Fix command more often than not. It's not sacrilegious if you get the desired output, and we first started working with Solidworks because of the freedom the software offers to model in numerous ways.

In this first phase, I focused on the only functional part: a moving trigger. Later on, I might adapt the project to include electronics, but for now, a moving trigger will be enough. With sound effects provided by my mouth "Whzzzz Whzzzz Whzzzzz Whzzz....!"

As a point of order I tend to work in chunks I wrap all the features up into folders before I move on & if I need to work on a part again I can move the timeline back up to what feature set and work on it again (sometimes breaking down stream but for the most part it works out fine!

As I approached the end of the modelling process, I always spent a little time working on the DFM side in this case the result will be FDM, so I took time to clean up any areas of tolerance-wise for fit that needed adjusting or making sure the need for support is minimal, it makes a huge difference in production for the end user if they don't have to fettle every part because you didn't consider printer tollerances or paint thickness.

The whole process took approximately 9 hours and we are left with quite a robust model that is currently having a proto printed as we speak! I'll share the results here when we are done!

one final little thing I want to share is we recently started using macro's for exporting as a lot of our modeling for these projects is multi-body parts vs assemblies (especially when there are a lot of interacting surfaces and hand adjusted details, if we move forward into a larger scale production outside of 3d print i'd spend the time breaking them out and make an assembly but this process has served me well for over a decade so why break a good thing haha!

a lovely user on Reddit put together this script years ago and someone recently updated it for 2025! - 

it takes each part one by one and saves them out as an STL in the format - "[SLDPRT File name] - [Part Name].STL"

what would often by a 3-5 min job selecting them one by one naming them scrolling to the bottom to find STL .. clicking This body only ... zzzZZZzz is now replaced with a near 10 second output time .. AMAZING!!

Some final renders from Keyshot of the finished model as well as some overlays on the screen caps we used as refrence