
A picture is worth a thousand words – here are a few more…
Kendall, one of the five “sisters” living at the Shellter West crabitat, seems happy in her Project Shellter shell. She’s one of two crabs sporting printed Oxystele sinesis shells in the crabitat.
Here she is adopting it for the first time:
Follow, share and contribute to help save hermit crabs by keeping natural shells in the wild! Use the hashtag #shellter or the shellter tag to let others know you are participating in this crowd-sourced science experiment!:
Tip o’ the hat to Greg at Dropcam for the “Holy Crab!”
This guest post is part of Project Shellter
UPDATE 2011-12-13 07:23Kylie Karshellian adopted a print of this shell today! See it happen here with annotations and music: youtu.be/LtvlLBQnEc0UPDATE 2011-12-07 21:35Kendall Karshellian adopted a print of this shell today! See it happen here: youtu.be/QpCusZ_q0wwUPDATE 2011-12-04 19:11The original oxystele.stl had spiral holes in it. After running it through cloud.netfabb.com the holes are gone. If you downloaded the file before, please re-download it.
Another one of M. B. Cortie's greatest hits sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/009784939390054D!
Modeled on the shell of the Oxystele sinensis sea snail, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxystele_sinensis, will Coenobita clypeatus - "Purple Pincher" - hermit crabs like this? Only experimentation will tell!
It was created using Maya's shellNode plugin, which is based upon Cortie's model, and thickened using Blender's Solidify modifier blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-256-beta/solidify-modifier/.
The goal is a workflow using open source tools, but this shell surface required a commercial tool. Thanks to a tip from thingiverse.com/mesheldrake, the conversion to a solid is now handled by an open source tool. :)
Cortie's model and many of its resultant shells have been written in Maple maplesoft.com/applications/view.aspx?SID=3851&view=html. Porting them to an open source tool such as Sage or Blender is the last step in creating a complete open source workflow.
Any python ninjas up to the task‽
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