And they're soooo cute...

I had these printed because I wanted to show you a comparison of our three printing options (Cream Robust, White Detail and Transparent Detail). They came out really nice - they're only 6cm tall and the amount of detail is great - you can even see their belly buttons!

You'll find more close-up photos on our Material Options page.

I did learn a few things from this:

• The transparent detail material will really stand out when you make it wet - applying an acrylic lacquer finish should make it permanently shiny.
• I didn't take proper care of balancing my objects - they keel over backwards.. It's a bit tricky to get this right, but I'm working on a method involving Blender's real-time physics engine. More about that in another post!
• If you want to print small objects, use the 'Detail' materials. The Robust will create stronger objects, but at the cost of a somewhat lower resolution.

That's it for today - I now have to take care of my monkey babies!

TopMod3d is a free, open source, topological mesh modeling system that allows users to create high genus 2-manifold (watertight) meshes. It runs on Windows and OSX.

To me, topological modeling feels weird, but after playing around with it for a little I managed to get some nice results. As an added bonus most models will be readily printable by Shapeways (after conversion to X3D/Collada, still).

Links

• Download
• Gallery
• Tutorials

Here are some videos that are interesting to watch:

'Twisted Cube Handles'

(This interface version is outdated, but the way of working is still the same)


'Tetrahedron Spikes'



'Generated models'
Some nice models made in TopMod3D

Over the last few weeks I found that everyone (including me!) is curious about our printing process. How fast is it? What do the machines look like? How many models can it print at once? Are the models ready to use after printing?

To answer all this, I went to the printing facility with a videocamera and created a short report. It covers everything from preparing the design up to the point where I'm solving my little puzzle like a madman

This video only covers our Stratasys FDM 400mc; last week we added the Objet Eden 500V which works differently (we can now offer new printing options, by the way). I'll try to capture the Objet next time.

We've also revamped our video site, so happy watching!