STL files have been around for a while. It was originally developed as a bridge between CAD files and 3D Systems’ first 3D printers. It has become the standard format for 3D printing, but it’s increasingly seen as antiquated and limited. In reality, an STL file describes a shape and not much else. In addition,…
Have you ever wanted to actually interact with your 3D model? Sculpt its surface as if it was clay? Feel the response to bending your rubber do-hicky? How about have an snazzy-looking, aluminium 3D printer for less than $1000? Or, how about a low cost construction system without the need for specialty hardware? It may…
The Smithsonian. The Forbidden City of Beijing. You hear these names and perhaps you think of crowds of visitors and old, dusty relics. Oh, and getting completely lost (those museum maps are impossible.) Well, what else do these two places have in common? 3D scanning and 3D printing.
A team of scientists led by Professor Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow have developed 3D printed “reactionware” that can make particular chemicals based solely on the geometry of the design and the chemicals within the constituent printing materials.
Dirk Vander Kooij, winner of the 2011 Dutch Design Award, has developed a very elegant solution to all that trash sitting around. YES, you know where I’m going with this. Why should it be sitting around, when it could be doing something useful. Like being sat upon?
Hollywood seems to have a love/hate relationship with 3D Printing. And who doesn’t love/hate Hollywood? Daniel Terdiman at CNET wrote a piece called “Why Hollywood Loves 3D Printing.” Its a great piece about how 3D printing is speeding up the production process and improving prop-making.
Another step towards 3D printed electronics was taken recently – Stratasys and Optomec have been working together to develop a method whereby conductive material is deposited in a design. This has been the holy grail of 3D printing for a number of reasons.
Just when you thought 3D Systems was getting big and scary, the unexpected/expected happens. In an all-stock transaction, the merger of Israel-based Objet into Minnesota-based Stratasys, leaves the new entity with a $1.4 billion dollar equity value and a bigger slice of the market share.
3D Printing with Plastic? Pfft, whatever. Metal. Old hat. Bone? Get out of here! The number of materials being used and experimented on with 3D printers is getting out of hand – and actually, it’s quite remarkable.
You know what’s amazing about Crowdfunding? You’re not just buying something – you’re helping make it happen. If I had seen any of these projects on a blog or at a store I would say “Neat-o… Im glad someone made this.” And you know, I might buy it. Now I see these projects and I know…
How do you immortalize your loved one? Simple. You have them printed as a scrapyard miniature in glorious alumide or bronze. “You and Me” by Dr. Ulrich Schwanitz is a fresh Indigogo project in the beginning stages of funding. If you want to give that special person something unique, this would be it.
A few low-cost 3D scanners have come out recently – ReconstructMe, Matterport and 3Dfy. These start-ups have utilized the Kinect or a Kinect-like device to make an affordable solution for modelling actual spaces and products. I was ecstatic when Microsoft released the Kinect and then the development software. It’s such a powerful hardware/software combo. It…
Less than six months ago, My Robot Nation launched. Tuesday, April 10th, 3D Systems announces they have acquired them. My Robot Nation is the fabulous 3D customize and print Robot Factory – a web-based platform that allows you to choose and customize your very own robot collectible. Or in my case, allows you to go…
The moment when a 3D printer and a 3D scanner are combined into a single product… hasn’t happened, yet. But, we’re pretty sure there would be some positive returns for both the manufacturer and the consumer market. A great number of people would love to replicate the cups and spoons they already have instead of…
3D printers and designers have been doing some fancy footwork recently. The Smithsonian has put out a great article covering several new designs. Here’s my favourite, by Hoon Chung for the London College of Fashion.
Music and 3D printing, two things that are very close to my heart. Sheila Munro of Dropping Form Design is now selling her 3D printed flute in “Antique Bronze Glossy” through her Shapeways shop. Called a Shakuhachi Flute, it’s beautifully embroidered and grained. From the picture, it’s tough to even tell if it was 3D…
The Economist reported in its latest issue that US-based Gene Duplication Corporation had managed to 3D print an animal. Yes. We can now print Lassie.
I came across Eva Friedrich’s work last year and thought it was really thought provoking material. I’ve always had a fascination with Voronoi diagrams (I shamelessly attached a picture of a piece I will be printing with the DShape soon – made with Voronoi diagrams.) Here’s more about what they are, where you see them…
There’s a little site called Kickstarter. It has a lot of amazing crowdfunded projects on it and, like us, you may have a mild, vein-slapping addiction to it. If so, these are two that you’ll want to check out. One has exceeded its funding by leaps and bounds. The other is just about to break…
Instructables and Objet have joined forces to give you a challenge, the “Make it Real Challenge”. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to make a nice, user-friendly Instructable of how to make a virtual object a reality.
I admit it, I was completely enamoured with the Human Birdwings Video. If you haven’t seen it, this is a video of Floris Kaayk (AKA Jarno Smeets, or as I like to call him, Harvey Birdman) strapping on a convincing-looking set of wings and taking off. Turns out it was fake and proves an uncomfortable reality…
Designers of all strips and colours are producing a lot of interesting plastic-extruded work lately, especially where sound and 3D printing intersect. Here are a few things that have popped up recently worth a mention and a listen.
Note/Warning: If you are looking into the purchase of this printer, be warned. The manufacturer has not delivered. Please read the comments below the article, before making a decision to send your money to Sumpod. Fantastic technology has been cooking up on the other side of the pond. I’m talking specifically about the SUMPOD 3D…
The most awesome thing in the history of awesome things has just come to pass. The hack slappin’ crew at F.A.T. Lab has slipped the surly bonds of inoperable construction sets making it now possible to interlink your favorite blocks with the Free Universal Construction Kit. LEGO, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs and seven other sets are…
This is what I would truly call ‘a 3D movie.’ This ‘3Drehkino’ is a series of 3D printed figures of a man walking. An LED is triggered by each passing figure in his appropriate pose, illuminating it and giving us the illusion of motion. Tobias Krawutschke designs all kinds of Zoetropes (which you can see here),…
We all know what happens when you sit young children down at a high-speed pottery wheel. It’s not pretty, especially when the cat is used to ‘improve carving technique.’ However, clay provides endless hours of moldable entertainment for young minds. Add an iPad to the mix and you’ve got days of pure, clean finger-jabbing fun.…
I’m not sure if the following is pure genius or if it goes too far. Who am I kidding! 3D printed guitar bodies in the shape of spiderwebs and the brachy environment of butterflies, beetles and bugs. They’ve gone too far and that’s exactly why it’s pure genius.
How long does it take to cook up a 3D print of a microscopic racecar? Not long at all apparently. A laser beam, some liquid resin and 4 minutes later you have a super tiny, super precise 3D print. It’s a new -printing technology using “two-photon lithography” in conjunction with new, highly-efficient photoinitiators which make…
I know star-shaped owls can be a bit nightmarish, especially the rabid ones with three eyes and wolf fangs, but this one is guaranteed not to carry you or your babies off in the night. Grant Miller of FigureBang is a toy makin’, 3D printin’ He-man fan from San Francisco, California and he’s in the…
If you’ve often dreamt of iconic typefaces exploding from your chest as you vocalize a Shakespearean sonnet, the idea of printing out an 3-dimensional representation of your monologue may sound attractive. Ravensbourne, the UK-based digital media university, adores typeface and 3D fabrication as much as you do, so it only seemed natural to illustrate the…
“This post is from guest blogger, JF Brandon. He works with Enrico Dini and the DShape. He likes 3D Printing, Naïve Architecture, Open Source, Mass Customization and Hockey. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.” 3D printing is part of my job. When I tell people this, I usually get the response “Oh, I heard about that…
I know. You’re like, Make it Real?? Wha!? Huh?! WHHHAAAT? I prefer to make it fake. So fake that it causes people to question if it’s really not real at all. However, for those of you who actually like to ‘Make it Real’, there’s a challenge for that and it’s being put on by the…
“This post is from our new guest blogger, JF Brandon. He works with Enrico Dini and the DShape. He likes 3D Printing, Naïve Architecture, Open Source, Mass Customization and Hockey. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.” I’ve seen a lot of videos promising a desktop 3D printer in every home, as ubiquitous as the inkjet. One…
Let’s just say one day your old, decrepit body needs a piece replaced – a hip, a skullcap, maybe a kneecap or two. Having bits of bone replaced is fairly common, but for the first time ever, an 83 year old woman has a new jaw… a custom 3D printed titanium jaw. The University of…
If there was ever any 3D cad app that could be compared with smooth, silky melted butter, TinkerCAD would be the one. If you’ve not experienced it yet, you must. You simply must. The web-based, 3D modeling app is out with a new version and it’s just about everything you would want and expect in…
It may be completely mesmerizing to watch a wee desktop 3D printer do its thing layer by plasticy layer, but do you remember our interview with Enrico Dini? Creator of the D-Shape printer? The largest 3D printer in the world? Capable of printing large structures? The D-Shape printer. Imagine watching that thing in action. It’s…
Imagine a Record Executive going over to a 3D file sharing site downloading a pair of patent-protected headphones, laughing as he jiggles and listens to his DRM’ed music list. Ironic. You may think ‘big deal’ when you hear it, but thePirateBay.org, a site infamous for file-sharing and online piracy is making torrent-tearing waves with the…
Who loves wooden gears? We do! We do! Wooden hand high five all around for a tool that helps you create the gears and the templates to crank those creations. The Gear template generator from woodgears.ca is a magical web-based tool (probably) using little wooden mathematical gears on the back end to output a 2D…
Nothing screams I AM AWESOME like having the faces of the people you have vanquished surrounding you. But what if you could turn those faces into 3D printed vases (or coffee mugs), put some flowers (or coffee) in them and bask in the glory of your victories? Now you can. Sculpteo has released the Sculpteo…
You see that little girl? She’s happy because she just printed some little yellow shoes to match her little yellow shirt. THAT COULD BE YOU. We should have known by now, with sites like MyRobotNation and the taunting of Origo 3D Printer for kids, it was only a matter of time before big 3D print…
I saw a clock give birth to a timeline once. It was sticky and had something to do with how Julia Child’s vocalization of the words Les oeufs brouillés changed over time. This timeline curated by i.materialise is cooking up something a little different though. It’s a look at the the past year in 3D…
Moving dirt. Mixing concrete. Inspiring people. Not something you want to do with a spoon, a bucket and lots of screaming. Especially when your goal is to create entire civilizations from scratch. Typically, you would need a few dozers, a backhoe or three and a lot more money to throw at materials and manufacturing equipment.…
How do you really upset a machinist? Show them an fully-integrated SolidWorks CAM solution that puts their 2D toolpath pickin’ to SHAME. That’s one angry CNC programmer. That is, until they realize how much time you’ve saved them. HSMWorks, creators of the product by the same name, is releasing the first free CAM solution for…
Robots! And they’re sooooo adorable! Wait, that one looks like… yes! THE FUTURE. Boys and girls, what you’re about to see IS the future. A glimpse at custom-fab-to-hand ingenuity in the shape of a wee, 3D print of eventual human devouring goodness. Now, customized fab tech isn’t new, but My Robot Nation is making it…
3D modeling apps can’t make it to the web soon enough and Chris Chalmers of Bios Design Collective could very well be pointing the way. His new, custom lamp fab site Fabripod is the foundation of a Kickstarter project set out to combine 3D design and web based visualization in a ingenious way… and as…
Whoa buddy, 3D Systems continues their 3D print related rampage through the additive manufacturing industry gobbling up companies to compliment their forward looking plans of content-to-print domination. It seems no company is safe from having MILLIONS of dollars thrown at them, if they’ve got the “strategic fit’ 3D Systems CEO, Abe Reichental, is looking for.…
This is a special guest post from Sky Greenawalt of School Street Design who writes about CAD/CAM tools and the process he goes through in the quest to create high-quality composite parts at BetterLivingThroughCNC.com. Catch his webinar on T-Splines V3.3 retopo tools and applying T-Spline surfaces to mesh data, November 29th. Register here. Well folks,…
Shocking and amazing. Creating something on the iPad, instead of absorbing the limitless digital content, browsing design variations instead of movie options, sending in an order of that design to be printed instead of sending in orders for a large deep-pan pizza. The iRing3D iPad app has done it. It’s all simple and quite basic…
Are 3D Printers a disruptive technology? Are you kidding me? Look at the image above. That person, or that person’s arm, is obviously being sucked into the filament carriage to be used in the construction of extruded parts. Totally disruptive. On the flip side, that’s one more substance we can add to the growing list…
I once CNC’d a foam shelter for a family of marsupials, except they ended up eating it, then attacking the neighbor family. It could have been worse, but I certainly wish I had come across Zomadic’s zensational (HA!) Zome structures before then – perhaps the wee creatures would have been happier. The Zome is a…