Another great chance to learn about 3D modeling for a MakerBot! Liz Arum and Jon Santiago, who have done some incredible work developing this kind of curriculum with MakerBot, will be teaching the course. This will take place at The Yard, a Brooklyn co-working space that is celebrating its one-year anniversary. Here’s what you can expect to learn:

“During this day-long intensive workshop you’ll learn how to make and personalize 3D models with free, readily available software like Tinkercad, Meshmixer, NetFabb Studio, OpenSCAD and Blender. You’ll learn how to use these tools, think about strategies to deal with interlocking parts and walk out with your very only printed part. No prior modeling, computer or printing experience is necessary.”

The details of the workshop are below, and you can check out the Eventbrite for more information and to sign up.

When: Saturday, September 8; 10 AM-4 PM

Where: The Yard; 33 Nassau Ave 2nd floor, Brooklyn, NY

Who: The workshop is open to all ages and skill levels

How Much: $150 (plus $9.24 Eventbrite fee)

Jon Santiago works with schools, cultural institutions and community based organizations to create after school programs that are hands-on, engaging, and promote knowledge in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). As co-founder of the HTINK educational cooperative Jon has helped start Young Maker programs throughout the New York tri-state area that get middle school and high school students interested in electronics, computer programming, design, and the use of traditional hand tools. He has also worked with MakerBot Industries to develop 3-D printing curriculum and professional development workshops for teachers. Jon graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) where he worked with the FabLab program, a global initiative to bring digital fabrication laboratories to communities around the world.

Liz Arum has a BFA from Cooper Union and an MPS from NYU’s ITP. She currently teaches Physical Computing and Computer Science at Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn, and is responsible for Education Outreach and Curriculum Development at MakerBot Industries.

 

Some people are just designed to push the limits of things. They see possibilities where others see limitations. And then there’s the special breed of person who finds all these new answers and then shares them with everyone else. Cosmo Wenman continues to prove himself one such person.¹

Here’s Cosmo’s latest: using a MakerBot to make a negative, that is a mold, of something, and then casting the shape in metal. Look at some of the incredible stuff he’s done with this process already.

You’ll see in the video that Cosmo’s using an acetone bath to slowly peel away the ABS mold. This isn’t necessarily something MakerBot encourages people to do, and if you choose to work with acetone, you should do it with a lot of caution. Also, note this extremely important warning on the Thingiverse page for these items:

[UPDATE: I have to point out that all the low temp "cerro--" alloys have lead and cadmium, and are toxic. You need to use proper ventilation, and keep it away from food preparation areas. In fact, I'm going to be looking into "Field's metal", which has neither lead or cadmium, and I'll report back how well that works in ABS. The objects you make *won't* be suitable for food preparation or food containers or utensils of any kind, and probably not for kids' toys either. FWIW, I've seen several gunsmithing how-to videos that don't mention toxicity of the Cerro-lines at all, and they aren't using ventilators either, but they should. For all I know it gives off gamma rays too. Here are some Material Safety Data Sheets I found:

bendalloy.co.uk/Cerrosafe.pdf
alchemycastings.com/pdf/Low158-190%28Safe%29.pdf

Now, imagine the possibilities of this process. Like he says, it’s like lost wax casting, but a few steps easier since you make the target object on your computer and there’s no “wax burnout” step at all.

 

1. In fact, we could probably declare him the champion of Thingiverse documentation. Any objections? [↩]

 

The work that has come out of the Met MakerBot Hackathon has been really ground breaking, especially since it has inspired people who weren’t even with us a couple of weekends ago.

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is one of those artists. I posted about him during the Hackathon and it generated a lot of interest about his ideas of “remixing” and “sampling” physical objects.

The video above, “We Met Heads On”,  is a new addition from Matthew, drawing on what has so far been captured with 123D Catch and uploaded to Thingiverse. Here’s the description of the video from the Vimeo page.

This video titled ‘We Met Heads On’ is my remix of the 3D scan hackathon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY organised by Makerbot. The public were invited to scan artifacts to then modify and 3d print derivatives. The files ended up on Thingiverse, giving me access to the scans, in particular ‘decimation study – met heads’ by scotta3d which is a derivative from another thingiverse user tbuser. To continue the lineage of derivatives, I have placed the low-polygon heads from scotta3d into a Processing sketch that distorts the meshes in realtime in response to sound and outputs the modified stl objects. The soundwave is analysed from the streaming audio and used to force the mesh to twist to the strength of the soundwave. Performed and recorded in real-time.

We are going crazy about this video right now. Imagine what could be done with some of these ancient figures, animating them (re-animating them?) to appropriate music. Renaissance sculpture to ancient Greek music, Oceanic sculpture to Oceanic music.

It’s time to make art dance.

 

Sweet! Another 123D Catch tutorial video, and this one shows how you can use the same process to make a model out of paper or card stock slices.

Photos are a century-old invention that store 2-dimensional memories. Isn’t it time technology improved upon it?

 

The line above got me thinking about the possibility of capturing a memory in 3D. How nice would it be to have a 3D model of your child’s school portrait?

 

Free Art & Technology (okay…F.A.T.) suggests a new activity for your favorite wax museum: 123D Catch. If they’ll let you, get some shots of a few of your favorites and MakerBot some statuettes for your mantle. I think I’d make a Samuel L. Jackson of my very own, because I can, and because I can do it from the sidewalk on 42nd Street.

This is a pretty cool thought, too.

The best part about going to the wax museum is they often have celebrities both living and dead. Historical figures? No problem. I now have a 3D model of the entire last supper.

Think of the animation possibilities!

 

Here’s what we’ve learned from a marathon day at the Met with a full team of artists and museum staff. We want to share as much wisdom with readers as possible, and ask you to please chime in in the comments. Remember, this is a community! If you have experience with any of these technologies, we need to know!

The surest steps to success using 123D Catch to capture and remake art:

– Provide enough information with your pictures. Basically, make sure each point in your object is appearing in at least three shots, and make sure there is uniform light around the thing you’re trying to Catch. When you don’t have enough info, you’re likely to get a solid block of mass in your model or a total lack of mass where there should be some stuff. Check out the big hole underneath this ritual seat from the Oceanic Art collection.

– If possible, use objects in the background of what you are trying to capture to help the software parse depth. 123D Catch does not like a blank wall with flat paint.

 

– There is no right way to do this stuff. This is the frontier and we’re figuring this out together. Everyone in this group today was tossing out different ideas and each artist or team of artists was taking a different path toward the goal.

 

Overheard

“This is all experimental. There is no ‘way.’” — Bre Pettis (@bre)

“By taking a whole series of close up pictures just at one level, I got really good 3D detail. Really good reproduction of very, very small depth.” — Michael Curry (skimbal)

“I’m using an iPhone to do this.” — Adam (@adamfont)

 

Today a group of artists with a knack for taking things from the digital world into the physical world will spend some time first doing the opposite: looking at real physical objects and capturing them with cameras and software and making them become digital. It’s that digital space where the new shaping and changing may take place.

Last month, I had a chance to ask some questions of another great artist, who is not part of today’s event but who has certainly thought a lot about this type of art.

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez likes to think in terms of “sampling”. This concept is familiar to us in music, where one bit of a song might be pulled out and repeated with a new beat underneath. This is a mixing of familiar stuff and new stuff, which is what Matthew sees in some of his work, like this tea set.

 

It’s based off a blue vase he found in a flea market once, seen below. I just grabbed a still image off my screen, but you can see the actual model on hypr3D.com. That site provides a free scanning service that allows someone to upload some digital photos of an object and convert them into a 3D mesh with a texture file. Matthew says the process is done within minutes, and he’s had good success with it. Hypr3D was a handy preservation tool in this case: he had dropped the vase and broken it, so creating this mesh was a way of keeping it around.

Read the rest of this entry »

On his blog my plastic future, Gregg Wygonik lays out why Bonzai 3D (B3D) is a good tool for modeling for your MakerBot, and maybe better than SketchUp Pro. Gregg says he wanted to find an alternative, in case SketchUp goes through some changes after Trimble takes it over from Google.

Sketch Up Pro and B3D run about the same in terms of price (just under $500 for both). However, he says his files from SketchUp occasionally have some problems when you try to slice them in ReplicatorG. No such problems in B3D:

Half the time I would have to rework parts I made in SketchUp that had holes or other simple design bits due to errors with slicing in RepG; no such issue with the many things I threw at it from B3D. Interestingly B3D has the ability to “diagnose” various potential problems when you export a STL file, but even with it reporting issues with a few of my objects, I had no problems with slicing/printing.

Here’s Gregg’s Pro/Con list for Bonzai 3D.

Things I liked:

• ability to draw lines and primitives as walls (think: no need to draw an extruded hexagon followed by another one a little smaller and push/pull to remove the middle, just draw an extruded hexagon with a set wall size and done!);
• some pretty sweet additions to regular booleans (slicing, object and surface splitting);
• NURBS with some really cool blending tools, in a much more approachable interface than Blender;
• 4-up “old school” view (top, left, right, perspective all at once);
• helix creation (screw tops!!);
• rounded or faceted edges with myriad settings;
• right-click on any tool and set a keyboard shortcut;
• and my new favorite: thicken, which takes any non-solid and turns it into a solid of a specified width

Things I didn’t like:

• some features require the setting of custom workplanes while some don’t and you don’t know until it throws an error dialog (workplanes are all new to me, but I like overall);
• inconsistent workplane handling (“lock workplane” sometimes doesn’t lock, and you have to use “save custom workplane”);
• adding dimensions to a part is hit-or-miss whether or not it will measure between the points you click or the entire edge you’re touching, while “measure distance” works perfect but doesn’t leave the dimensions on screen;
• too much reliance on hovering to open up tool groups and additional options (small gripe)

More here.

I’m taking a short break from the blog series this week, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging.  I’ve put together a short screencast on how I use the creation tools in 123D Catch, specifically reference points and reference distances, to create scans that print in my desired scale.  This tip is great for anyone who wants tight control over print size, whether you’re working in scale or not.

A Quick Note: I’m running Autodesk 123D Catch on my mac through VMware Fusion.  Autodesk just released a web version, which is great for mac users, but it lacks some of the advanced features like creation tools.  So to use this tip, you need to use the desktop application on Windows.

There’s one week left to sign up for our third class in the “How to MakerBot” series at Tekserve in Manhattan. Liz Arum, our education specialist, will be leading the class.

This class is focused on the program modeling program Blender. In order to participate, those attending the class should take some time to download the following programs before class:

• ReplicatorG
• Blender
• MeshLab
• KinectToStl
• NetFabb

 

And then you should bring that computer, a 3-button mouse, and a desire to learn some awesome stuff about 3D modeling and MakerBotting!

RSVP now to reserve your spot! You can view the invitation here.

Tekserve – Seminar Room
119 W 23rd Street
NY, NY 10011
212-929-3645

Thursday, May 10; 6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.