The wildly popular Rock Band 2 video game lets you parlay your boring workaday self into a virtual lead guitarist, drummer, bassist, or vocalist on an Xbox 360, PlayStation, or Wii. On the Xbox, you can fashion your “avatar” to look just as you wish, right down to haircut, physique, clothes, gear and tattoos.
Now go to http://www.rockband.com/merch. Upload your avatar, pick a pose, click purchase, and you’ll receive a 6-inch figurine made of hard composite material that looks just how you looked the last time you played the game – complete with flying hair.
Z Corporation of Burlington, Mass., USA, is the company fabricating the figures using its 3D printers, which happen to be the only ones in the world that can simultaneously print in multiple colors. A 3D printer creates physical objects from 3D data files much as a document
printer creates business letters from word-processing files.
Z Corporation is performing the same 3D figure printing service for fans of Spore. To create a Spore Sculpture, players design their creature using the Spore Creature Creator (downloadable from www.spore.com), selecting from hundreds of flexible drag-and-drop body parts and a virtually infinite number of possible configurations. They can also digitally paint any pattern they like. Once the creatures are complete, players upload their digital creations to www.sporesculptor.com and place their order.
“For the player, bringing the virtual into three physical dimensions helps make the fantasy real and provides a real world outlet for expressing their passion,” says John M. Kawola, Z Corporation CEO. “For the companies behind these games – Electronic Arts, Harmonix and MTV Games – bringing avatars into three dimensions deepens the relationship between the player and the game and enhances the culture and community around them.”
Z Corporation’s biggest market for 3D printers is manufacturing organizations that need lots of prototypes, but entertainment is a growing market along with architecture, civil engineering, reverse engineering, geographic information systems (GIS) and medicine. Z Corporation 3D printing and scanning technology also show up as forensic tools on crime shows like “CSI” or inventors’ shows like “Prototype This!”
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