The Shapeways Blog: 3D Printing News & Innovation
Entries from September 2012
Tuesday, September 25. 2012
Urban Planning with 3D Printing in Louisville, Kentucky
This is urban planning for people who thought the best part of Monopoly was playing with the little houses and hotels. At Louisville, Kentucky's Ideas festival, community members got the chance to rearrange the city and try out new ideas for future development, all with the help of 1/1000 scale 3D printed models of existing city buildings.
The buildings were printed out live at the event by local hackerspace LVL1, who had collaborated with University of Kentucky architecture students to develop the models. Attendees were not only able to move the 3D printed buildings around the huge map of the city, but the building's designs could be modified via Google SketchUp and printed live on one of the five 3D printers that LVL1 provided. Sort of a real-life D&D tabletop game, although with no dice or goblins, and more discussions of traffic patterns and zoning designations.
The interactive event was used to kick-off Vision Louisville, a planning initiative to shape the next 25 years of the city's development. The city plans to hold on to the 3D printed building models and record the ideas that were developed on the map for future use. Louisville is not the first city to get the 3D printing treatment, Chicago was rendered in 3D in 2009 as part of an exhibit by the Chicago Architectural Foundation.
Sound like a lot of fun (maybe even more than Monopoly), and if you want to get going on arranging your own city, maybe check out these sweet buildings from Shapeways' own pfeiffer stylez.
Via The Atlantic Cities Image Geoff Oliver Bugbee via Flickr
Monday, September 17. 2012
Friday, September 7. 2012
3D Printing the Stairway to Heaven and/or Star Wars Theme (VIDEO)
Can't decide whether to 3D Print Stairway to Heaven or the Star Wars Theme for you Fisher Price turntable? No Problem, you can simply order the Double Sided Disc hot from the Shapeways 3D Printer.
You do not need to settle for this double disc of 70's nostalgia when you can design your own thanks to an Instructables by our latest hero Fred Murphy aka Fred27 aka Fred27.
You can download the files you need to get started here, rock on, and PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE share your videos with us...."Attached you'll find the new version of my Fisher Price music editing software. It's included as an executable and (if you don't trust randomly downloaded software from the internet) the C# source code is there too. Feel free to take a nose around in the source code and compile it with the free version of Visual C# 2010 Express.
You'll also need a copy of OpenSCAD. This amazing software allows the scripting of 3D CAD objects and is what turns the idea of what you want into the STL file that a 3D printer accepts.
Wow - all this software and no need to pay a penny for any of it.
If this all sounds like too much trouble, then you can just open one of the pre-generated STL files. Your jukebox comprises of Stairway to Heaven, the Star Wars theme and You are my Sunshine. If none of those float your boat then don't complain... get editing. I'd love to hear what you can do."
Thursday, September 6. 2012
SolidWorks Tutorial: Creating a 3D Model Using Sketch Pictures (VIDEO)
From time to time, you'll likely come across an image of something you want to create a 3D model from. With SolidWorks, you can use the sketch picture tool to import an image to build from. This Kebo bottle opener by Rush Product Design Studio makes for a great example, and we'll use it in this weeks tutorial from SolidWize.
By bringing the picture into a sketch, you can quickly reproduce the desired geometry inside of SolidWorks using just a few lines, arcs, and the fully define sketch tool.
Watch the full tutorial below. If you right click and save the picture of the Kebo, you'll be able to follow along. You can also download the completed model from the Solidwize Shapeways page.
Kebo Bottle Opener Upload 2 from Rohit Mitra on Vimeo.
Next week's video will cover using Simulation Xpress to validate and optimize your design for a Shapeways Stainless print.
About the author: Rohit Mitra is the founder of SolidWize.com, a membership based online training system for SolidWorks users.
UPDATE: Solidwize is holding a webinar on creating beautiful renders using Photoview 360 next Wednesday, September 12th. Check out http://solidwize.com/webinars for more information.
