MakerBot Industries

Last week Bre declared an internal 3Dtin.com botcave throwdown for all MakerBot employees. Bre: “It could be something simple, like a smileyface badge or you could go wild and make a self portrait or the empire state building, but I’d love to see everyone try and use 3Dtin to make something!” Well, many of us jumped on this tool, experimented, and exported objects to Thingiverse.com, with results ranging from Matt Mets’ Ball Maze to Ethan’s hilarious Deerorbunny. We have been assembling a few “Pro Tips” to help those encountering the program for the first time to push this strange beast even further.

A few quick tips for using 3Dtin.com to achieve Awesome + Beauty

• Save often as the the Undo features can behave unexpectedly.
• Before you do major work (Such as filling in a new row or deleting lots of blocks) save your model, and then work in a “working” copy.¹

• If you want to design from an existing image, bring a source image into a graphics program², rotate/skew the image to establish a perspective from one of the six “faces” of your figure³ and then use lines or guides to approximate a grid to work from. You can now print this marked up version out or just keep it open to eyeball while you design. Bonus points for creating guides for more than one perspective.

Guide scaffold and outline base layer in 3Dtin for "A Single Mario Cloud"

• If your final goal with the design is an STL for 3D printing, take advantage of color as a guide. By alternating between highly-contrasted colors from layer to layer you will have an easier time seeing what blocks you have filled or voided than if you stick with the same color for the entire model.⁴
• Additionally, you can place voxel markers anywhere you like while you are designing — to help you eyeball symmetry, etc. — and simply dismantle this scaffolding when you are satisfied with your final design.

• Take advantage of the Tool Palette in the lower left side to help you quickly mock up your model.
• Camera Placement settings can take you immediately to each of the six perspectives.
• Afterwards, clicking the top cube icon can help you alternate between “Orthographic”⁵ and “Perspective”⁶ .
• The Color Selector is powerful, if a bit bizarrely implemented. You may never quite achieve the same color chip again once it disappears from the palette, so I’d suggest doing color as a later stage of “finishing,” one color at a time, or pick colors you can easily re-create.
• Switch from the Pencil to the Eraser view so that you can quickly reference cube boundaries. Then return to the Pencil tool to continue to build your model.

Use Transform: Scale filter to change scale of x, y, z axis -- separately!

• Bring your resulting STL model into a tool like Meshlab to run filters and scale your model. Note that using the Transform: Scale feature you can turn off Uniform Scaling, allowing your to scale x-, y-, and z- axes separately to deform the shape of your “voxels” or otherwise expand or contract your model.

• Create many models and print them — tiny crude models can result in more compelling prints than you expect. Depending on the level of detail in your initial model — and whether you opted for the “extra shells” option in the Fill section of Skeinforge — your prints might can range from strictly geometric to more organic results.

We learned from Legos and Volvos that there is Beauty in Boxy. And, counter-intuitively, there is an evocative Awesome hovering around low-resolution splendor (think Chiptunes and ascii art). Dive into this tool and keep hacking away — and don’t listen to anyone who tells you your model isn’t Awesome + Beautiful. (Or printable?)

–Matt

A Single Mario Cloud @ 3Dtin.com (2.5D version) by mifga

I have always been a fan of the clouds floating along in Super Mario Bros so I thought I'd take a stab at creating a 3D 8-bit voxel version at 3Dtin.com. This is an exclusively 2.5D version (i.e. 4-axis millable extruded profile, more like a coin or a keychain). I added a Pendant version that includes a hook at the top for dangling this bling from your gold chain. Special shout out to Cory Arcangel, who I got to know while interning at Harvestworks a little before he launched his Mario Cloud cartridges!

This thing brought to you by

1. I created the initial footprint of “A Single Mario Cloud_outline” as one model, and then created “A Single Mario Cloud_working” for  taking risks with additional layers so I could go back to the previous model if necessary. [↩]
2. I recommend Inkscape [↩]
3. Approach your like a 6-sided die: top, bottom, left, right, front, back [↩]
4. The color information is going out the window when you export an STL file anyhow! [↩]
5. Orthographic projection – lines parallel over distance instead of skewed for perspective, very useful for designing one later at a time [↩]
6. Perspective projection – good for working with an overall sense of the developing model as it will appear when printed [↩]

Why is everyone laughing at me?

Last week I had dinner with my in-laws.  My father-in-law was talking about making a trip to the hardware store because he was hoping to find a specialized bracket just so he could hang a new mirror on the wall.

At this point my wife, my daughter, and I all erupt with laughter. ¹  My in-laws looked at us like we’ve lost our minds.  When we finally regained our composure he asked us what’s so funny.

“Um, Jerry, you know that that room over there, the one we call the ‘robot room,’ has not one but two robots capable of creating any kind of bracket you can imagine?  Why in the world would you go to a hardware store where they *might* have something that would kinda work when we can just make you exactly what you need?” ²

Oh, grandpa!

1. Photo courtesy of Alex-s [↩]
2. I kid you not.  We re-named our living room the ‘robot room.’  It contains at least four honest-to-goodness robots.  A Cupcake CNC named Bender, a Thing-O-Matic named Flexo, a yet unnamed Egg-bot, and a kitty litter robot. [↩]