MakerBot Industries

Cube Farm Playset by tc_fea

I have been enjoying MakerBot Operator tc_fea‘s models up on Thingiverse for a long while. We have featured Tony Cervantes’ pine tree and miniature castle projects here on the MakerBot blog — and his truss bridge kit, outhouse, flower, and his and hers toilets are among my favorite models up on Thingiverse. Tony brings humor and impressive modeling chops to the recreation of everyday elements of modern domestic life (well, in a wide range of centuries).

And now with his Cube Farm Playset he introduces a challenge — can you model the environment where you model and share it with everyone on Thingiverse?

Tony specifically requests that you create more cube farm stations to add to his kit (tag your model in Thingiverse with “cube farm“), but I’d bet he wouldn’t mind if you recreated (to his scale) the home office, backyard hutch, or the secret underground laboratory where you work so that your workstation can be printed out and arranged into Dilbertian cubicle labyrinths by the future middle manager of the world.

I think his challenge is a very good one — and might well be the solid CAD analog to the many self-portraits an apprentice visual artist makes on his or her way to mastering the tools and eyes to create later original work. Stop what you are doing right now and look around you — can you model where you are working and share it with us?

Cube Farm Playset by tc_fea

This is a cube farm playset project to honor all of us who toil on in the corporate rat maze and keep America going. If you decide to create something for this project, please add the tag: cube_farm so that we can find it and add it to our cube farm playset. I provided some dimensioned pictures for those who do not use Google Sketchup. I sorta plan to eventually add things like: computer monitor, keyboard, chair, wall clips etc. Or maybe I will add a laser cannon to zap noisy co-workers.

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As cool as the last of CreativeTools‘ featured projects was, they’ve really upped their game with his one.  It’s a high-res laser scan of  a bit of high tech from the bronze age — a shield.  No, not a lolshield or gameshield, a literal shield.  It might look basic to us today, but to a bronze-age Scandinavian soldier, this was state of the art.

In all seriousness, we all know that digital fabrication and 3d printing are the future — but they’re also key to providing access to the past.  Want a Venus di Milo (Ἀφροδίτη τῆς Μήλου to those in the know) or maybe a Laocoön and His Sons?  Well, print your own…one day.  After all, these treasures should be freely available to all — they’re certainly not copyrighted.

I hope to see more antiquities on Thingiverse — until then, hats off to CreativeTools for getting the ball rolling.

CreativeTools.se - Handyscan 3D - Laser scanned - Bronze Shield by CreativeTools

This is a 3D-scanned bronze shield that we borrowed from Länsmuseer Halland. This is a very unique item that we have been blessed to handle and 3D-scan. In order to scan this shield we used Handyscan 3D-scanner VIUscan. To process the shield and decimate the model we used Geomagic Studio. Feel free to download the files! The .zip file includes the full-res STL file with over one million facets. There are also .IGES, .OBJ, 3ds Max file and Geomagic files available in the zip-file "Extra formats".

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