How To Give Your 3D Prints A Battle Damaged Metal Finish!

For this tutorial I decided I wanted to recreate the helmet from the latest Batman movie, so I’m going to make a Metal finish on my print. a quick search on Thingiverse brought up the perfect result, You can download the file for yourself HERE.

A list of the materials used in this tutorial:

Voltivo Excelfil Signal Orange PLA

Various grits of wet and dry sandpaper

Teknik 2 in 1 filler primer

Vallejo Surface Primer

Alclad II Metal paint

Montana Gold Matte acrylic varnish

Vallejo Acrylic Paint

I sliced the STL and printed it on my Wanhao Duplicator I3 at a 0.1mm layer height and 20mm/s print speed to get the quality as good as I could, the better the print now, the less cleanup later on.

After printing I then went onto the finishing, a few seconds removing the raft and supports and it was straight into sanding, for this I used various grades of wet and dry sandpaper, starting with a rougher grit and bringing it up to a 600 using lots of water to make the surface nice and smooth, once complete the part was dried with a paper towel and was ready for primer.

For primer I went with a 2 in 1 filler primer that does wonders for filling in those small striations caused by the printing process, a few medium to heavy coats or this primer leaving a few minutes in between really helps to level out the surface and get it ready for painting.

Before paint I decided to add a little battle damage which I made using a scalpel to give the metal a dented gauged kind of look using the movie screen grabs and reference for placement.

For the painting I chose to use a real metal paint called Alcad II, this is an Airbrush only paint as its so thin it can’t be applied by brush. In order to apply this it requires a black primer undercoat which was the Black Surface Primer from Vallejo and was applied by airbrush. This doesn’t require an expensive airbrush as fine detail is not needed so any cheap Ebay brush will do just fine.

With the primer down the metal paint is sprayed in very thin light coats until the perfect level of colour shows through, with this being a realistic metal finish I wanted to bring the shine down so proceeded to top coat it all with a few light coats of Montana Gold Acrylic Varnish.

Finally I used some silver acrylic paint and a dry brushing technique where the paint is wiped onto a paper towel until its almost all gone and then the edges and higher spots of the model are brushed over leaving a light scuffed kind of effect.

Overall this was a piece that I really enjoyed finishing and am pleased with the results, The black undercoat gave the metal finish a nice deep colour which I think matched the screen used prop fairly well.

If you try this technique out for yourself make sure to leave a comment below telling me how you got on or tweet me a photo over at @evanmodel3d on twitter.

Check out the full video on my channel below (please excuse the old video and poor camera work) and if you want to see more tutorials like this make sure to hit subscribe!

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