MYTH: MakerBot Desktop 3D Printers can only make things up to a certain size. BUSTED

MYTH: MakerBot PLA Filament is harder to finish than ABS filament. BUSTED

MYTH: The quality of pieces made on a MakerBot are great, but they’re not, like, museum-quality great. BUSTED

Cosmo Wenman is a (slightly elusive) artist in California who has just reminded us not to limit our imaginations when it comes to what can be made. The horse head and human bust you see above were made entirely of MakerBot PLA Filament (White) on the original MakerBot Replicator. We believe so strongly in the potential of the renewable bioplastic PLA that we optimized the new MakerBot Replicator 2 for that material.

These pieces were in-house at MakerBot HQ for a couple days before they were swept off to London to be displayed in our booth at the 3D Printshow, and the reactions by staff ranged from “whoa,” to “no, really, how was this made?” The simplicity of the answer may be the most impressive part.

Cosmo captured the original ancient sculptures, the marble “Head of a horse of Selene from the east pediment of the Parthenon” (Acropolis, Athens, 438-432 BC) and “Portrait of Alexander the Great” (Hellenistic Greek, 2nd-1st century BC), using digital photography and Autodesk 123D Catch (free). You may remember his work at the Getty Museum using the same process that got him some buzz back in June. These scans were cleaned up and turned into 3D-printable models using the programs Blender (free) and Netfabb Studio Basic (also free).

Since Cosmo aimed to make the pieces true-to-life and not scaled down, he had to slice them up into multiple pieces. This awesome photo shows the 29 unfinished blocks of the horse head before Cosmo went to work fusing them and adding the incredible bronze patina finish seen above.

Here’s a shot of Bre holding the sculpture in our office to give you an idea of just how large “life-size” really is.

The next picture shows a similar blank of the Alexander the Great portrait, followed by a gallery shot of three different finishes Cosmo tried out on this piece. I can speak for MakerBot staff in saying that these sculptures are incredibly authentic looking and feeling, which caused several people in the office to wonder why we had them. “Are we going to scan these and make them on a MakerBot?” No, no, we explained. These were already made on a MakerBot.

Take a minute to read the descriptions of each of these pieces over at Thingiverse. Cosmo takes great time to explain the motivations for his uploads and his appreciation for the sculptures themselves. Here’s an excerpt.

I imagine a Greek guy walking around 2,000 years ago with acamera obscura with some kind of light sensitive papyrus inside, trying to raise funds to get his light enscribing machine into mass production. Alas, there was no Kickstarter back then.

Or, maybe the artist and horse in bright sunlight, the artist covering his eyes. The horse’s handler startles it into motion, and the artist opens his eyes for an instant, closes them again, then draws quickly with his eyes shut while the image fades in his retinas – the lens, film, and darkroom being his eyes… I dunno – either that or weeks of careful study, scores of sketches of impressions of a horse in motion, composited into this exacting model. But that doesn’t sound like as much fun.

What’s funny here is that Cosmo is trying to figure out what great ingenuity and creativity must have led to the stunning original sculpture thousands of years ago, and all of us are doing the same thing for Cosmo’s work in 2012. MakerBot is proud to display work from this forward-thinking artist and creative explorer.

You can follow Cosmo on twitter, Thingiverse, and at www.cosmowenman.com.

Photo credit: Industry of the Ordinary

More and more, we see methods of 3D printing popping up in the art world, and we are lucky to have great relationships with so many daring MakerBot artists out in the wild.

One of these is Tom Burtonwood, a co-founder of the What It Is gallery in Chicago. For another exhibition initiated by the artists collectively known as Industry of the Ordinary (and ordinarily known as Adam Brooks and Mat Wilson), Tom created a unique piece of 3D scanning and printing that has since been featured on Thingiverse. The exhibition is being dubbed a “mid-career retrospective”, so it is fitting that Industry of the Ordinary invited others to produce their portraits.

Tom’s piece, “Two Heads are Better than One”, was made on his MakerBot Replicator and uses scans of the artists’ heads from Autodesk’s program 123D Catch, stitched together into a model using Netfabb. Merging the heads together on each bead of the necklace celebrates the duo’s collaboration over the years. There are four different beads, each showing the heads three times, strung together with a white leather cord. As you can see in the photos below, these are beautiful scans and prints, showing how far we’ve come in using MakerBots for art.

There are two things to know here. First is that you can see the whole exhibition yourself and get a feel for 3D printed art (details bel0w). Tom’s Improbable Objects collection is also an incredible exploration of 3D printing as an artistic medium.

The second thing to know is that Tom is encouraging the community to find the necklace on Thingiverse and upload new derivatives. This could be any variation on the necklace, or a new use of the head scans.

Industry of the Ordinary: 2003-2013 Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
Chicago Cultural Center 4th floor
78 E. Washington Street, Chicago
August 17, 2012-February 17, 2013

This just mysteriously appeared on the table at SDCC booth #5336 (where MakerBot and @Toy_Tokyo have been jamming for the past few days). It comes from the man who’s been killing it on Thingiverse lately, and sparking some controversy, too.

There’s no mistaking this. This must have been the work of Cosmo Wenman, whose own photo of the piece is really stirring.

This piece is titled “The Replication of Venus”¹ . It’s a brilliant mashup of his cosmonaut figure and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, emerging from The Replicator. In Cosmo’s words:

Archetype meets Renaissance meets 1920′s futurism meets bleeding-edge pop culture. She’s getting closer and closer to stepping out into the real world.

If you haven’t been following it, there has been a discussion about Cosmo’s most recent project on Thingiverse, which so far involves requesting high quality scans of some pretty challenging targets: Oscar Wilde’s tomb, Richard Branson’s beard, the vocalists from Die Antwoord (yes, the actual people), any shape from the floor of the deepest known part of the Earth’s ocean, Challenger Deep, and a single square meter surface section from an asteroid. In case you think he’s talking about a meteorite here on Earth, he’s clarified:

Location: Space

Maybe these requests themselves are an art project, or maybe Cosmo’s trying to make a point about the responsibility we each bear to digitize the world. Or maybe he’s just trying to tell the rest of us to use photos and other resources that are available to turn these things and everything else into 3D models. What do you think? What would you request of the rest of the community to scan if it could be anything?

1. whose face do we think that is in the glasses? [↩]

A very, very rainy Friday afternoon in Brooklyn yesterday exploded into awesome here at MakerBot with a visit from The Hives!

This band has been rolling out legit rock music in four major studio releases since 1997, and this year they released a fifth, Lex Hives. Here’s a single from that album, Go Right Ahead, featuring the guys in their black and white suits as always, but this time riding a giant dirigible…into space.

A bunch of us love The Hives, so it was a big treat to have them around during their time in New York, especially just a couple hours before their show at Terminal 5! Luckily we had a little practice with having musicians in the house, and were able to give the guys custom guitar picks, designed by Zenix. Bassist Dr. Matt Destruction said the pick felt good and sturdy for playing. Here’s guitarist Nicholaus Arson holding his.

Guitarist for The Hives Nicholaus Arson holds his custom guitar pick, made on a MakerBot

We were smart this time: before we let The Hives leave, we had each of them spin in a chair real quick while Nick (one of our events crew members) scanned them with a Kinect. We’ll turn these into 3D models with ReconstructMe, and pretty soon we’ll have the whole band in 3D on Thingiverse, for anyone to download for free. Drummer Chris Dangerous said he could use his own head as a custom gear shift in his car. Not a bad idea.

Drummer for The Hives Chris Dangerous gets scanned in 3D using a Kinect

What we always want to know from artists we talk to is what they would do with a MakerBot. If they had the power to make anything they wanted, how would they use it? Would they download and make art? Would they upload jewelry for their fans? Or would they use it the way so many people do, to download and make things for home?

Lead singer for The Hives Howlin' Pelle Almqvist holds MakerBotted sculpture by nervoussystem

The Hives are definitely a creative group (and a bunch of freakin nice guys, by the way), and everything about them from their stage names to their website to their videos reflects that. We can’t wait to see what they’ll get into once their Thingiverse page goes up next week. If you want to know when that happens, follow us on twitter @makerbot, and be sure to check in at Thingiverse. In the meantime, you can start thinking what you might like to mash their heads up with.

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.

Not too long from now, the artists from the Met MakerBot Hackathon will start presenting their work from this weekend. But even before we get to that point, several of the pieces we captured have already been copied and derived on Thingiverse.

Marble Lion

The Marble Lion on the left was turned into a screaming baby lion with a fancy mane by anamarva.

Bather

Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Bather was derived twice, once by MathematicalGastronomist (left) and another time by cushwa (right).

Marsyas

Thingiverse user GuyFromLE grabbed and made this model of Marsyas by the sculptor Balthasar Permoser.

More to come!

On the night of March 18, 1990, a pair of thieves disguised as Boston police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and roamed the museum’s galleries, stealing thirteen works of art.

Perhaps the biggest property theft in recorded history, this 1990 theft of paintings including Rembrandt’s only known seascape, remains unsolved. Holy shhhhhmoly! That sounds more like a movie plot¹ , than something that could have happened in the 90′s.

It’s Day 2 at the Met MakerBot Hackathon and everyone’s down to work on their new art, and it’s crazy to think that we’re at this point. Because here’s the thing: we thought we’d have to come in and “steal” this stuff, until the Met listened to the idea and got excited about it and helped us take it a few steps further.

The idea of an art heist has still been tossed around. Let’s face it: heists make good stories. It’s good drama about a few people against a big group and you start cheering for the underdog. But what you never see in the movies is all the people who won’t see that art because of some trickery.

Food for thought:

•  Just last year, a drawing by Picasso was stolen from a gallery in San Francisco. The gallery’s president, Rowland Weinstein, said his “greatest fear” was that “the person will realize it’s unsellable and will dispose of it in a less-than-proper manner.”

•  The frames of the stolen pieces from the Gardener Museum, mentioned above, are still hanging empty on the walls, just waiting for the art to return.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. actually that does sound a lot like the end of The Town [↩]

Two of the artists in the Met MakerBot Hackathon, Colette Robbins and Micah Ganske, sat down with us to share their perspectives on their #Met3D collaboration. Bios on these two artists below the video.

Colette Robbins was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from Parsons, the New School for Design. Colette shows her work both nationally and internationally. Recently her work has been featured in shows at Deitch Projects, NY, Workshop Gallery, Venice, Italy, Lesley Heller Work Space, NY, RH Gallery, NY, Art Star, NY, Yautepec, Mexico City, Mexico, Field Projects, NY, Sloan Fine Art, NY, and 92 Y Tribeca, NY. She is an affiliate of Parlour, a nomadic exhibitions project that holds one-night art salons in living rooms throughout the five boroughs of NYC and abroad. colette has been awarded grants for residencies such as The Cill Rialaig Project in Ireland, and the Vermond Studio Center. She now lives and works in Queens, New York.

Micah Ganske was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1980. In 2002 he received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from the Maryland Institute of Art in 2003. In 2005 he received his MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art. In 2005 he was the recipient of the Adobe Design Achievement Award in Digital Photography at a reception held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where his work was also displayed. In October, 2007, Deitch Projects exhibited Ganske’s first solo exhibition. In 2011 he launched his second solo exhibition with RH Gallery in Tribeca, where he is now represented.

This is the first collaboration of these two artists, which is remarkable since they share a studio. And they are married.

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)

The transfer of physical objects into the Thingiverse has begun. You know when Flynn gets digitized into the game grid. Yeah, like that, but in the Met! Get ready to start DERIVING/HACKING/MAKING!

The works of art that the team of artists from the Met MakerBot Hackathon are starting to be processed in 123D Catch and uploaded to Thingiverse. The first one is right here! A whole new chapter of universal access to art!

This means that the design files for the 3D models of these pieces, as well as the pieces that this team of artists are creating, will be available to everyone around the world to download for free. Whether or not you have a MakerBot (we hope you do), you can get up close and personal with this art in a whole new way.

Here’s what you need to know:

Thingiverse is designed so that one person can upload a design file and another person can download it. If you make a version of someone else’s Thing, here’s the one thing you should do.

PRESS THIS BUTTON.

That’s it! That’s the only step. Pressing that button shows the world that you are contributing by testing other people’s designs, and giving your thumbs up to the quality.

If you forget to do this and you upload your Thing on its own, don’t worry. You can actually go back through and name a “parent” for your Thing. Simply click “Edit” at the top of your Thing page, scroll to the bottom, and enter the Thingiverse ID number of the parent Thing.

This is important stuff on Thingiverse. Since everyone in the world is putting in the work to make new Things for everyone else to enjoy, it’s important to attribute stuff to its origins. This is how we build off each other’s work and ensure that everyone is a rock star.

Why are you still reading this?! There’s art from the Met on Thingiverse. Go!