Hello everybody, greetings from Germany. : ) I just recieved the polyamid print of my procedurally generated growth process. This process generates three dimensional structures with a clean polygon mesh which can be printed right away without any postprocessing. The growth process has several features. For example it is able to avoid obstacles, the direction of the growth can be directed or the structures can glue together. I posted a video on facebook, which shows the process in action. The video is also available on Flickr. The fotos below show how the growing structures avoid the grid object and wind around it. The grid object and the grown structures are not connected. Both objects can be moved a little bit. Thanks Shapeways for making this possible. I know no other production method which could produce structures like these!
Wow! This is really impressive. The fact that the process can produce directly a printable object is awesome. Great job! Did you try Full Color Sandstone? I am sure you can easily add color to the model (for instance depending on the age of the cell).
Very cool! Reminiscent of some of Nervous System's work. There don't seem to be many people working in simulated natural processes. Are you writing everything in your own programs, or are you running code inside of an existing framework?
Thank you for your kind feedback. : ) @Magic I have not tried colored sandstone yet. But you are right. It is a good idea to color the separate objects with different colors or even encode attributes of the process in color on the mesh. Thank you for that tip. I will give this a try. @henryseg First of all, I am a fan of your youtube videos. Very cool work that you are doing there : D I like that there is always an explanatory video for your 3d printed objects. For my work I am using several of the big 3D packages like Cinema4D. They all have some kind of interface for implementing your own code. It is always possible to write everything from scratch (and sometimes it is necessary). But if there is already something you can build on then it is a good idea to do that to speed things up. Here is another experiment with the process. A kind of scarf. I am not quite sure if there is a 3d printing material available which feels comfortable on soft on the human skin. Maybe some kind of rubber? (Sorry if this belongs to the work in progress section instead.)
You could try the polished WSF material, although the rigidity of any material might be an issue for the wearer. Would these designs come apart or hinge somehow? How would you get your head through it?