I don't know about you, but here at Shapeways we're starting to get into the holiday season spirit.

And it looks like we're not the only ones - community designs for our Christmas Contest are already starting to come in (there are 11 days left to submit your work, by the way! Deadline is november 30th).

We couldn't really curb our own creativity either, so we set out to find something that would look cool on your dinner table and would be easy to make for everyone.

The result is the Ring Poem, the small cousin of our Light Poem. Just enter your message into our Creator, select a font and Ring Poem type and you'll get an instant quote. We did our best to keep the Ring Poems affordable - priced around $10 a piece, you can leave each guest a personal message during his or her dinner.

What do you think? Do you like it?

There were some questions on the forum lately about printing working hinges and what kind of tolerances you need to make them work. Some test objects were uploaded by pzich and we're currently printing those to see how they work.

While we're waiting for them, we thought we'd share a few insights that we gleaned from some test objects that we already have on our tables here

1. Flexible hinges
Instead of making a mechanical hinge, you can use White Strong & Flexible to make flexible hinges. Here are two example: one using a 'harmonica' structure. In this case the material is about 0.5 mm thick:

Another approach is to make a long, flat piece of plastic which can bend. The material here is about 0.5 mm thick as well:

2. Moving parts

This 'GearCard' was printed as a single model in White Strong & Flexible. You can make moving parts by modeling air gaps between the gear and the axis. Although our minimum tolerance is about 0.1mm, we do suggest that you keep gaps above 0.25mm to be safe (these measures apply to White Strong & Flexible only).

We'll get back to you once the new testparts are in!

Here's something that should make you happy (well, at least a little bit!): as of last week, we offer world-wide shipment tracking for all our orders. At no extra charge, of course. Great, now I have another site to reload all day! \o/

Dutch designer Stani Michiels won a contest by the Dutch Ministry of Finance, the goal of which was to design the new 5 euro commemorative coin with the theme 'Netherlands and Architecture'. He explains both the creative and technical process in great detail on his website. An interesting detail: he used only open source software for this project: Python, the Gimp, Inkscape and Phatch (a photo batch processor).

Oh, and before you ask: no, we don't print money

"Does your character have character?" Heck yeah! Ranking this contest was awesome as we had an great collection of wonky, cutesy, scary, artistic and simply strange models - we've saved the contest gallery, check it out!

In the end it was a very close call.. The winner of the $250 free printing coupon is daddymack. His 'Ode to the Boogieman' got your highest votes. Congratulations, daddymack! We'll carefully print out Looie for you and he'll be picking his nose on your desk soon!

Runners up were BAROBA's 'Cute hamster and his bear' and, (oh no!) daddymack again, with 'Looie likes worms'.

Awesome job, everyone! Take a breather and check out our new Christmas contest (deadline is november 30th so don't relax for too long

You can check out the complete contest results in our new contests archive.

CB Model Pro is an entry level surface modeler that's published by Dassault Systèmes, the creators of SolidWorks. You can use it to create all kinds of objects just by pushing and prodding objects in 3d space - much like working with virtual clay. You'll be using a basic tool set containing tools like Point Pull, Flatten, Bend, Neck, Scale and Poke. You can also draw in 2D on your models and then use these shapes for extruding or bending. Finally you can also 'paint' on your models using colors and decals.

It's a great tool for anyone who wants to get his feet wet in 3d design and it's great fun to play with. Having said that, it's unclear why the product is called 'PRO' because it's certainly lacking a number of pro-features (like having more control over your model and it's dimensions).

Download

CB Model Pro is available for both Windows and Mac OS X, and it's completely free (although after 15 days you'll have to register for a free key to continue using it).

• Download page
• Documentation (884kb, PDF)

Uploading to Shapeways

Due to the nature of this modeler, it's hard to create non-manifold objects, and it contains an STL exporter - the basic ingredients for having your model printed are both in place.

The exported STL files need a bit of cleaning up though - they trigger a 'non manifold' error after uploading to Shapeways (even though they're not!). This is easily solved though by downloading the open source package MeshLab, opening your STL with it and saving it as STL again. The default objects (cube, sphere etc) have a dimension of 1, so you should use 'inches' as the STL unit when uploading.

Tutorials

The website CB Model Pro Fans has published a number of nice video-tutorials and demonstrations that should get you started:

• Tutorial #1 - Basic Blob Shapes (Sphere & Cylinder)
• Tutorial #2 - Basic Blob Shapes (Cone, Cube & Sheet)
• Tutorial #3 - Basic Blob Shapes (Torus)
• Tutorial #4 - Combining Blob Shapes
• Cube to Table
• Cone to Lamp
• Creating delicate features in CB Model Pro
• And even more video-tutorials!

Who says a house has to remain in the same place all the time? The Danish art collective N55, together with engineers from the MIT have designed a house that can simply walk away if you fancy a better spot (say, if a flood is coming or you simply don't like your neighbours anymore). It has all the basic necessities for living on board - a living room, kitchen, toilet, bed and a wood stove.

This video shows how BMW uses rapid prototyping in their design process for consumer cars and F1 racing cars.  It includes different techniques such as Selective Laser Sintering (our 'White, Strong & Flexible') but also Beam Melting (metal printing) and Stereolithography. Interesting stuff.

When you create an object with Shapeways, the order price is determined by the actual printed volume (not by the model's bounding volume). An easy way to save some money (well, sometimes a LOT of money!) is by making your object hollow. This short tutorial will explain the basics of hollowing objects.

So you've received your Shapeways model and you want to share it with the world? You may find that it's not always easy to take a good photograph that nicely shows all the fine details of your work. Unless you take great care in setting everything up properly, the details can easily 'wash out'. We gathered a few tutorials on product photography that will help you:

Intro to Product Photography
"These particular tips are intended for shooting small to medium sized projects that can be maneuvered relatively easily, and put in a studio environment. But even if your particular project doesn't fit these criteria, many of the tips I'll be giving are universal, and can be applied to any photographic documentation".

How to Photograph a White Object on White Background
A short but useful list of tips.

How to Photograph Dark Colored Objects (interesting for detail photography)
"When photographing dark colored clothing, do like the pros do! Take a 'normal' photo then zoom in on the texture. The trick to is all is to create shadows where you want and need them. That will give your dark item the depth you are looking for!"

DIY Light box for product photography
"Building a light box is pretty easy stuff. A light box is particularly useful for product photography where you need a nice white background. Many people find that their products will actually sell faster with a more professional looking photo. Here you'll find a step by step on how to build your own DIY light box"

Do YOU have any tips or links that really helped you improve your photography? Leave them in a comment and we'll add them to the list!

(Image: Madebydan Platter)

What do you do with a container of printing material whose expiry date has passed? You print  a giant monkey! Our printer guys had a blast with this one.

They wrote:

Cornelius has grown to massive proportions (+/- 20cm!!!) and we poured his feet in pedestal of concrete to prevent him from running away Specs: Objet Eden 500V/VeroBlue/HQ

(VeroBlue is one of the new materials that we're considering - we still need your vote on which one to choose!)

Here's another pic of Cornelius on the shoulder of Aart to get a good feeling for it's size - also check out the "The Statue Of Liberty" en "The Empire State Building" prints in the background!

This sucker is heavy - they didn't even try to save on material by hollowing it out... Remember: do not try this at home. It'll blast a serious hole in your pocketmoney

The best things in life are free - here's one that may not be on your list yet, but it will be soon enough!

MeshLab is an excellent tool to convert and process 3D files: it reads and writes STL, Collada, OBJ, 3DS and a few more. It also contains a large set of filters such as non-manifold face removal and hole closing.

It is free, open source, and runs on all mainstream operating systems: Windows, OS X and Linux. I love it!

I talked to MeshLab's creator Paolo Cignoni to find out more about this project.

Q: Can you tell us a little about yourself?

A: A senior researcher in a Italian government research institution with a lot of interest about the theoretical aspects of practical Computer Graphics and the practical follow up of Computational Geometry. I proudly belong, since its foundation, to the Visual Computing Laboratory of the ISTI-CNR, one of the most important CG research lab in Italy.

Q: How would you describe MeshLab to new users?

A: A versatile, powerful, ever evolving, tool for (mostly) unattended 3D mesh converting, processing, cleaning and repairing. (and that sometimes crashes more than necessary )

Q: What made you decide to create MeshLab?

A: It was the combination of two distinct motivations.

1. In our VCG lab, in the last 10 years, we developed a nice, rich, complex c++ library for 3D mesh processing ( http://vcg.sf.net ) that we have used for all our many research projects, I wanted to have a easy to use tool where the many features of our vcg library could be evident, but I always lacked the will of doing such an effort.
2. I regularly teach the advanced Computer Graphics course at the Computer Science department of the University of Pisa. It is a course with a small number of usually smart students; some years ago I become tired of seeing always the same mostly useless 3D projects done by the students so I thought to a system with a very modular plugin based architecture that allowed to students to independently develop small portions of a complex system. From a didactic point of view it was a success. Students are really very motivated to see their "home-work" being something real that last for a long time after the end of the course. In practice it was rather easy to make them work really hard and in a professional way.

Q: How many people are working on MeshLab? Who are they?

A: I have never exactly counted them before now . According to Ohloh.net at least 42 people committed code to the base, but the real number is probably a bit larger. Students often work in pairs and sometimes they perform all the commits are done with a single account. Most of the developers are students that work on a very focused task for a limited period of time and then maintain it over the time.

In the last year a few other very talented developers from all over the world have freely joined to the MeshLab team in the classical wonderful Open Source spirit. I wish to warmly thank them for their precious and significant contributions.

Q: Are there any features that are unique to MeshLab and that aren't offered by other (commercial) programs?

A: Initially not so many, probably the users liked a lot the surface simplification tool that is really robust and fast (according to many users much better and faster that the one that you can find in the High-End package like 3ds max, or maya). Now very recently developed CG techniques are being dropped in. I wrote that code more or less 10 years ago, and it was used as basis to the out of core system that simplified the huge Digital Michelangelo Project models.

Also 3D scanning pipeline (alignment and merging) is rather good. It has a rather rough interface but its core is very good. The core of that library was used too in a lot of famous projects,
Just to cite one, it was used to align and merge the meshes of the Parthenon Project of Paul Debevec.

In general the capability of working with very large unstructured meshes is rather rare in most 3D packages.

By the way I think that its overall goal of mostly unattended processing, is something that make MeshLab very distinct from most of the other 3D packages that are more oriented on the design/edit/build paradigm.

Q: Which new features can we expect in the near future?

A: More mesh formats supported, More filters, new algorithms for cleaning meshes, tools for offsetting surfaces, more controllable hole filling, retopology tools, new merging algorithms, a lot of stuff for managing color over meshes, expression parsing in the parameters, and finally a command line version of MeshLab for unattended pipelined processing of meshes.

In a not so near future, MeshLab will have a really well integrated undo, a redesign of its gui (i got tired of floating windows), and eventually a bit of scriptability.

cheers

Paolo

Downloading MeshLab

Download MeshLab here. On the download page, click 'download' and select the right version for your system:

• Windows: .exe
• OS X: .dmg
• Linux: .tgz

We spotted an object in our gallery called 'part of a robotic clamper'. It was used by designer André Bois to fix a broken robot from 1984. The work caused quite a bit of excitement here at Shapeways (drop the word 'robot' in a group of techno-geeks and they'll be talking about little else all day), so I decided to find out more about this project. André really took his time to answer all of my questions. Thanks, André!

3D Printers are still expensive toys. So, what do you do when you love technology and you have enough time on your hands? You make your own!

You've probably already heard of RepRap, Fab@Home and CandyFab. All three are 'Open' projects (all the building plans are available for free) and they aim to design and build cheap 3D printers that will be able to replicate themselves (RepRap), or to print out delicious candy (CandyFab).

They are all very cool, but some people are going low-tech and they're using what they already have in their own home: LEGO! Check out these two tutorials on Instructables.com on how to turn your old pile of LEGO into a functional 3D printer!

• 3D Chocolate Printer made from LEGO
• Build a Polar 3D Printer from LEGO

You'll need to write your own control software for these though (or maybe snag it from RepRap or CandyFab?).

Nice.

If you need a free and powerful 3D application then maybe trueSpace is the tool for you. trueSpace goes way back as a commercial application, but last February Microsoft bought Caligari (the creators of trueSpace), and last July they released the full version of the app as freeware!

The big idea seems to be that they'd like people to use it to provide content for Virtual Earth, Microsoft's version of Google Earth (Google released Sketchup as freeware, too - see the parallels? .

Included in the download are a whopping 51MB of documentation and 132MB of video tutorials to get you going. Impressive.

The only thing that's NOT included in the freeware version is the renderer V-Ray, which is sold separately for $299.

Links:

• Features overview (select the tabs at the top of the screen to see more)
• Image Gallery
• Registration and download