The best triply periodic minimal surface ever!

I put a bigger one here.

This is a mobius strip of Level 1 or Super Mario Bros. The whole level is wrapped around itself in a single surface, and poor Mario begins and ends at the same spot every time :(

All the elements from the level are there: every mushroom, turtle, cloud and star. They are all carved out of the surface at different heights, which looks fantastic when you have a light coming from the side, and each block casts a shadow.

It's a great piece to have on your desk, or to hang from a string to let it spin around.

This must surely be the smallest commercially available 3D puzzle cube in the world.
It is a tiny 7.5 mm across and presents a real challenge to solve and take apart - and not just because of its size.
It is an example of a sequentially interlocking cube which means that it won't fall apart once the pieces are slotted together.

You can find many more interlocking puzzle cubes in the microcubology shop.

The puzzle was inspired by the cover of Elbow's brilliant album, The Seldom Seen Kid.

I created the skeleton of a skeletal Lepidoptera. The Death's Head Hawkmoth (Acherontia atropos), seen on The Silence of the Lambs , has a skull marking on its back. I made a full human-like bone structure for the moth, with the grinning skull protruding from its back.

The model is very thin, yet sturdy and flexible. Detail level is fantastic, and the natural texture of the 3d printing process gives it a bone-like appearance that works wonders.

Yes, moths don't have endoskeletons, that's the whole point...

This design was inspired by the swirling seed heads of Clematis flowers. When I first saw the seed pods, the first thought that came to my mind was, "The flower is dancing." This model took me longer than expected to finish. My first model was a chaotic tangle of lines. (It looked like the flower went mad instead... hahaha) I went back to look at references to try to capture the original lightness and motion of the flower seeds. At the end, the model was tweaked further to make sure none of the tails intersect each other.

This cube really is something quite special.

About a year ago, after seeing the Transformers movie, I was inspired, by the behaviour of the alien technology in the AllSpark cube, to try and design a puzzle that could expand equally in all directions. To make things even harder, I wanted each piece to be locked in place by the preceding move.

After many prototypes I finally succeeded in creating this unique sculpture consisting of six parts.

The first stage in solving the puzzle involves discovering how the pieces fit together in the expanded configuration. (One of these moves includes a rotation, which makes it much harder to crack by computer!)

The second stage is to collapse the expanded cube down to the smaller cube by pressing each of the faces in the correct sequence.

The name of the puzzle comes from a (now obsolete) alternative to the Big Bang Theory proposed by Fred Hoyle. I like the fact that from its expanded, steady state the cube can either collapse inwards or explode outwards.

© Richard Gain 2008

This steampunk style knotted cog was procedurally generated using 3-dimensional spherical geometry, then stereographically projected into our (mostly) Euclidean universe.

Other sizes:
www.shapeways.com/model/231026/knotted_cog__large_.html
www.shapeways.com/model/231045/knotted_cog.html
www.shapeways.com/model/277265/knotted_cog__smaller_.html
www.shapeways.com/model/232385/knotted_cog__small_.html

The Inside Out Cube is the first miniature cube puzzle from microcubology.

This is a real working interlocking cube puzzle that requires both skill and dexterity to solve. This version of the Inside Out Cube is 1.5 cm in size. Why is called the Inside Out Cube? Because the whole puzzle can be rebuilt inside out leaving a 3x3x3 hollow on the inside and all the interlocking legs on the outside.

In its life this puzzle has had three different names. As well as the 'Inside Out cube', which probably describes it best, it has been known as Triple Mirror, because three of the pieces are mirror images of the other three. And before that I used to call it the Tiresias cube. I'll leave you to figure that one out for yourselves!

© Richard Gain 2007

The Hipster pick for the 2011 Holiday season!

Our living room wall is decorated with some LP's which are, in turn, decorated with some 3d printed goodness: two birds on a branch, tweeting along to your favourite music. The branch can be clipped onto wall mounts for records.

Goes well with the second clip-on model: the vinyl notes.