Getting inside Roots Manuva's head
The artwork for Roots Manuva's latest album depended on 3D printing by Metropolitan Works
Metropolitan Works helped produce the artwork for the latest album released by leading British hip hop artist, Roots Manuva. Designed by graphic design duo Oscar & Ewan, the album – Slime and Reason – was released in August 2008 and features a head and shoulders image of the artist showing the top of his head missing and the contents filled with green ‘ slime’ .
By definition 3D printing is an extremely versatile and rapid process accommodating geometry of varying complexity in hundreds of different applications, and supporting many types of materials.
Ed Alves, the organisation’s technical manager. “We differ from most rapid manufacturing bureaus in that our employees come from creative rather than industrial backgrounds. For example, say a sculptor comes in with a rough clay model. We first perform a 3D scan to produce an STL file, which is followed by a certain amount of CAD work to stitch together any missing data before exporting a solid file to the 3D printer. From here, Metropolitan Works open the file in ZPrint, the desktop interface for Z Corporation’s 3D printers.
“Set-up for each job is really fast and takes no more than 10 minutes,” says Alves. Printing is really quick. A modest size model can be produced in 3-4 hours; a larger model will take 4-6 hours; while a full build can be just 12-13 hours. Naturally most of the artists who come here are pretty impressed as the process is extremely fast and low cost in comparison to traditional model making or other rapid prototyping processes.”
Images for this article - click to enlarge
Unless otherwise stated, all images copyright © Mercator Media 2012. This does not exclude the owner's assertion of copyright over the material.
