Figurant
scale figures you can 3D-print
Custom scale figures to 3D-print for your models. Pose one from a preset (standing, walking, sitting, waving, pointing, arms folded, on the phone, in a wheelchair), from a photo of yourself — a pose model runs in this browser, the photo never uploads and its face is never kept — or from a phone 3D scan (GLB, OBJ, PLY, STL, 3DM). Then pose it by hand: turn a joint's dials, or switch on Drag joints and drag a hand, elbow, foot, knee or the head right on the figure. Pick an age for a child's proportions (a bigger head and shorter legs, from growth charts), and seat a sitting figure on a block or in a wheelchair fitted to it. Or make a crowd: up to 24 different people, heights drawn from the CDC growth charts, laid out on one plate that fits a Bambu bed. Every figure is built for YOUR printer — any limb thinner than the nozzle can hold at that scale is thickened to it, and the read-back names which — and a mesh reducer takes it low-poly without cutting below printable. The Manifold kernel checks each figure is one closed solid; export the watertight STL at the model scale, or a Rhino .3dm full size as editable surfaces or the print mesh. Client-side; nothing uploads, no sign-in.
Nothing uploads. Your photo is read by a pose model running in this browser (MediaPipe, served from this site); only the body’s pose is kept — never the face, never the picture. A scan is read here too.
standing at ease, arms at the sides — the plain scale figure
Levels a planted foot, so it stands; a lifted foot (mid-stride) keeps its angle.
Orange handles on the hands, elbows, feet, knees, head and chest: drag one and its limb follows, turning the dials below. Drag anywhere else to turn the view.
Left and right are the figure's own — facing you, its right arm is on your left. Or click a limb on the figure.
Every dial at 0 is the pose as it came.
Each dial turns about the body’s own axes; the torso carries the head and both arms with it. Elbows and knees bend in the plane the pose already bends them in, 0°–160° in all.
An adult's proportions at any height. A child's age gives a child's head and legs, from growth charts.
Widths, depths and girths from the 2012 U.S. Army Anthropometric Survey (ANSUR II): the means of 4,082 men and 1,986 women, each as a fraction of the person's height. A woman's hips measure wider and her shoulders narrower; the average is the mean of the two.
Every bone length comes from this and the anthropometric table; the photo gives only directions.
A 5′-7″ person is 0.70 in (17.7 mm) at 1/8″ = 1′-0″.
Bambu Studio lays 0.42 mm lines; a limb under ~1 mm is two perimeters with no core and snaps when the supports come off.
0.039 in (1.0 mm). Any limb thinner than this at the model scale is thickened to it — the read-back names which.
A disc under the feet, 1 mm thick, wide enough not to tip.
Low-poly: collapses edges by quadric error (Garland–Heckbert), never into the printable body.
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Read-back
- A 5′-7″ figure, standing at ease, arms at the sides — the plain scale figure, at 1/8″ = 1′-0″.
- An average adult's breadths, depths and girths: the ANSUR II means, as fractions of height.
- Printer: Bambu — 0.4 mm nozzle (stock); the thinnest limb is 0.039 in (1.0 mm).
- Print several at once if you can (in Bambu Studio: right-click, Clone) — each tiny layer then cools while the nozzle is on the others, instead of the printer slowing right down to wait.
How the figure is made
- The body
- About twenty parts on a skeleton whose bone LENGTHS are Drillis & Contini’s fractions of the typed height and whose DIRECTIONS come from the pose. Each limb and the trunk is a loft through measured cross-sections — the widths, depths and girths of the 2012 U.S. Army survey (ANSUR II) as fractions of stature, for a man, a woman or their average — and the head is three ellipsoids. The parts of a limb meet on one shared section; limbs and trunk are blended with a polynomial smooth-minimum at least the printer’s minimum gap wide, so a hand near a hip fuses instead of leaving a web too thin to print.
- Printable by construction
- Every section is clamped to half the thinnest limb before meshing, so nothing thinner than the printer holds is ever made. The field is meshed by marching cubes that follow the surface out from a seed inside each part (continuation), then the Manifold kernel refuses anything that is not one closed shell and unions the base and seat on.
- The mesh reducer
- Garland–Heckbert quadric edge collapse with a fold guard and the link condition, aiming at a triangle count between the full mesh and 250; a collapse that would put a vertex, or a face, inside the body built without the reducer’s extra girth is refused — so low-poly never goes thinner than printable.
- Posed by hand, a child, a wheelchair, a crowd
- Each pose dial is a rotation about the body’s own axes (Rodrigues’ formula), the torso carrying the head and arms; elbows and knees bend in their own plane, 0°–160°. A dragged joint is solved back into its own dials: a hand or foot bends its elbow or knee to the reach (bisection); an arm’s elbow then goes low on the circle it can swing round (a pole, as in two-bone IK) and the shoulder’s turns are undone exactly; a leg is aimed by damped least squares. A child’s head follows head-circumference medians (WHO under four, UK 1990 from four) and its legs the sitting-height ratio (Fredriks et al. 2005); an age sets the CDC 2000 median height. The wheelchair is fitted to the person — 24 in wheels at an adult’s size — and checked against the ADA’s 30 × 48 in clear floor space (2010 Standards §305.3). A crowd’s heights are drawn by the LMS method from the CDC 2000 stature tables, every draw from one seed.
- The numbers
- Height and disc from the kernel’s bounding box; grams are the kernel’s volume × 1.24 g/cm³ (PLA, 100 % infill); the support line counts faces steeper than 45° facing down, above the soles.