3D workflow guide: From organic toy design to a manufacturing-ready model

Today’s toy aisles offer a genuine shape galore. From hyper-realistic representations of any animal you can imagine, to formidable and funky cartoon heroes conjured up by the most creative minds.

The overwhelming majority of the toys are made of plastic. The process of shaping this material into a miniature character consists of two basic steps: design and manufacture.

Designing such objects is challenging in its own right, but the manufacturing stage introduces a whole new set of factors that will have a defining influence on the look of the 3D model.

The most common method for mass manufacturing is plastic injection molding. The big hurdle here is turning an organic 3D design, with all the fine details and fluid lines, into a manufacturable model, while keeping the intent of the designer.

The approach starts by taking a 3D model and breaking it down into parts that can be reassembled. Those components are later converted into molds for plastic injection. In this process, the software’s capabilities are the key factor for efficiency. Software can be the difference between a multi-step workflow, spanning various solutions and departments with all the related technical and managerial headaches, or a single environment with full control over the outcome.

In this guide, we break down the workflow used to manufacture organic toy designs at scale, quickly. The process we outline is used by household names in the toy industry to create figurines and objects that delight kids and adults alike.

The digital workflow for toy manufacturing

1. 3D toy design

A design is the starting point of all toymaking projects. It could come in the shape of a sketch, a 3D scan, a CAD model or an existing design of an item you want to make. At this stage it’s important to consider how your design will be manufactured and the scale of the final toy.

Imagine the toy is based on a real-life object such as a vehicle. The fastest way to start designing it is by laser scanning the full-size vehicle. You capture its shape with a 3D scanner, load the point cloud data or the mesh into a 3D modeling software and start playing with the shape and design.

Toys based on real objects can be created by 3D scanning the original and altering the shape in organic 3D modeling software.

The next step may be to shrink the object down to four inches but keep the soul of that design intact. This means the features and finer details that allow us to recognize a car as a Chimaera or a Tesla need to be identifiable even though the vehicle is small.

A perfect example is a door shutline, the place where two panels come together. Measuring only 5 millimeters in width at full scale, it can disappear when the car is scaled down to the size of a toy.

To make the shutline of a toy visible, a designer needs to exaggerate its size. The same approach needs to be applied to other features, like the windows and the headlights, that are most recognizable.

2. Breaking the model into distinct components

Once the finer features have been finalized, you start thinking about manufacturability. Two considerations are critical in this respect: ease of manufacture and cost-effectiveness.

Injection molding is very attractive because it allows manufacturers to quickly make large quantities of toys at a relatively low cost. However, it requires a few additional steps when preparing the 3D model for manufacture.

Complex models often cannot be used as-is. Instead, they need to be broken up into components that can be molded. The resulting pieces will be used as a basis for the mold tool.

This process can be challenging for organic 3D shapes which are already difficult to model in traditional CAD software. You can simplify the process by using a 3D design software built to handle such models and includes specialized tools for the task.

If your software doesn’t have tools for breaking up the model, you may have to move your project from one solution to the next as the process progresses.

Preparing a raptor toy model for injection molding in Oqton Freeform

Oqton Freeform has a set of tools, like Patch, that enable you to carry out this process efficiently. Below you see how Patch can be used to trim off the leg, for example.

After breaking the model into pieces, assembly features need to be added to each piece that will allow us to put the toy together.

3. Design considerations for manufacturing

After breaking the model into components, you need to make sure each component can be manufactured. For injection molding, this is where the following factors become important:

• Shell thickness
• Orientation to determine the optimum mold release direction
• Split line design
• Draft analysis and removing undercuts

The challenge is to make the individual pieces manufacturable while keeping the original intent of the designer. A key factor here is having software that gives artistic freedom combined with engineering control, which means having tools for measuring and analyzing thickness, draft, undercuts and design split lines.

4. Mold design

When the components are ready, you lay them out in a mold and design the shut-off surfaces. Generally, mold tool bases are standardized and designed in CAD software such as SolidWorks. Since mesh is typically used for the organic components and CAD surfaces or solids for the mold base and shut-off surfaces, you’ll need a solution that combines different model representations.

Freeform is a multi-representational modeler that supports voxels, mesh, Sub-D, solids, and surfaces. As such it’s a great choice for designing molds for toys.

The first step is to import the mold base from the CAD system. Then you arrange the pieces into the mold. This is often a combination of technical influences – such as making sure shut-off surfaces do not vary too much between neighboring components – as well as aesthetic choices.

Once the pieces are arranged in the mold, it’s time to design the shut-off surfaces. You need to think about machining and molding limitations here. The surfaces should be smooth so they’re easier to machine, with as little vertical variation as possible, while avoiding standing steel that may impact the life of the mold tool. Freeform gives you the ability to easily work between surfaces and meshes, so designing the optimum shut-off surfaces is easy.

5. Machining the mold

Now for the actual fabrication! Because molds are machined, the design files need to be converted into a format compatible with the CAM software used to operate the machine.

Traditionally, CAM systems use CAD surfaces and solids. However, a mold for organic models is a hybrid between surfaces, solids, and meshes. The complex organic parts of the design are kept as meshes while the rest of the mold is kept as surfaces and solids. Freeform will export the model to the CAM system retaining all the details needed for manufacture.

If your CAM system allows you to machine from an STL, you can easily export that format from Freeform alongside the more typical CAD surfaces and solids. Machinists may balk at the thought of this because of limitations in the past with CAM software, but that’s no longer the case. The majority of CAM systems today allow you to accurately machine models from meshes and CAD surfaces and solids without any risk of mistakes.

On the other hand, if your CAM solution doesn’t support STLs, you can convert the mesh into a NURBS surface in Freeform. If you’re using a different 3D modeling solution, you’ll have to find another piece of software, like Geomagic Wrap or Geomagic Design X, to obtain the NURBS surfaces.

Once the mold tool has been designed and manufactured, you hand off the physical mold tool to the production line for making the actual toys the customer purchases.

Mold for a plastic toy raptor created with Oqton Freeform

Why software makes the difference

This design and manufacturing process is by and large the same no matter the toy you’re making. However, the ability to capture the original intent of the designer and the efficiency of the approach can vary considerably depending on the software.

There are remarkable solutions for organic 3D design on the market today, but only a few allow you to prepare the designs for manufacture. No surprise then that some toy designers hand over the job of breaking up the character into components to a production facility.

The downside of outsourcing is that you lose control of the design. Your manufacturer may change features that you deem essential. This is usually discovered only upon delivery, and you need to create a new iteration.

Other toy makers opt for an approach that gives them more control, where most of design for manufacture is handled by the initial modeler. Once the modeler has ensured the design is manufacturable, they send it to a factory safe in the knowledge that, bar small tweaks, their design won’t be drastically altered.

In short, there are many pieces of software you can use to design a toy, but only a few that include the entire toolbox for design and manufacture. A unified 3D modeling tool can help you ensure better control of the design, reduce iteration cycles, minimize costs, and bring better products to market.

Oqton Freeform is the most comprehensive design software for any organic model. Designers use it to model traditionally handcrafted sculptural or fluid forms that would be difficult or even impossible in traditional CAD. If you’d like to try Freeform today, contact our team.