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

Sid Meier of Civilization (and many other games) visited Baltimore this past weekend.  He was a judge for the Art Bytes Hackathon at the Walter’s Art Museum in Baltimore, MD.  This is the second hackathon I’ve attended at an art museum, and after the successes at both of those, I can only imagine other museums will want to host them too.

One of the problems that many of the museum curators wanted teams to focus on was helping visitors find their way around.  The Walter’s Museum is made up of four separate buildings that are connected with complex staircases and passageways.  One of the teams who won the way finding award was The Waltours team and you can check out their progress here.    The winner of the ‘Wiz Bang’ award was team Time Machine who developed an truly amazing augmented reality app to turn back time on the sculptures in the museum to see what they looked like before natural weathering took its toll.  One team developed Frame which provides historical context alongside the gallery pieces.  Another developed Tanzaku, which allows you to interact with and leave messages for other people at the museum about galleries, collections, and specific works of art.

Sid presented the ‘Fun Award’ to me and Thomas for our work with the MakerBot.  We were able to use 123D Catch and Meshmixer to capture dozens of pieces at the museum.  Thomas and I were able to clean up and share most of them here on Thingiverse and more will be uploaded soon.  Check out our restoration work by looking at the digital rhinoplasty we performed!  Thomas Troy is only 14 and had never used any 3d modeling tools before this weekend, nor had he ever used a MakerBot.  Here is Thomas with his new Serapis swag.

We gave Sid Meier a model of the front cover of the first Civilization game, which I made with The Replicator and boy was he happy.  You can make your own by downloading Cover of Sid Meier’s Civilization.

We have seen some sensational stuff done on MakerBot technology in the past. This collection from the artist David Hirmes has got to be a quick entry into the hall of fame. Check out “Boolean Buddhas“.

These pieces are all based on a single Buddha head model that was uploaded to Thingiverse back in 2010¹ by Peter Bios. David Hirmes notes that the 3D design file is listed in the public domain, which is important. The licenses available on Thingiverse allow everyone else to adapt the file for other uses. Because of that licensing, he felt free to go wild with this art.

Using the free design program Blender, he mashed up the head with other shapes using boolean operations. A boolean is when you subtract the outer surface of an object from another solid object, leaving a negative space in that shape. Two other boolean operations are “union”, or when you mash two things together, and “intersection”, when you leave only the space that the two objects have in common. David’s graphic explains it much more simply.

Look at the insanely cool shapes he got from this process.

The gold paint looks incredible. And here’s the sweetest part, and the part that we have all come to expect: David has graciously shared his entire process on his own website and put all of the design files up on Thingiverse for you, yes YOU, to play with.

1. Take note! There may be some untapped gems for you to explore from years past! [↩]

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? [↩]

I want to clue you guys into one MakerBot all-star you should know about, Mike Moceri, or Moceri on Thingiverse. Mike is easily the new go-to expert on using Kinect and ReconstructMe to scan and make models of people on a MakerBot. He has posted a couple dozen busts of people who visited him at various events in the Chicago area, and shared his expertise on how to host that type of event.

He’s a key member Tonight Mike’s going to be over at the Zhou B. Art Center in Chicago participating in an event called Facemask, which is tagged the “Eight Annual National Self Portrait Exhibit.” The exhibit is expected to draw over 800 people for the opening night. More detail:

Facemask explores the hidden personality behind our social media face. Such personality here described as our “other”. This exhibition will take place in the main gallery of the Zhou B Art Center and it is the theme of this year’s 8th Annual National Self Portrait Exhibition.The main gallery of the Zhou B. Art Center will become a national laboratory for the exploration and visual representation of the “self”. The exhibition will include works ranging from representational, non-representational and conceptual ideas of the self. It will feature works in a variety of media. The Zhou B. Art Center is home to 33 Contemporary Gallery and it is located at 1029 W. 35th Street, Chicago, IL 60609. Opening night is from 7-10pm.

Mike will be joined by several members of the ChiMUG (Chicago MakerBot User Group), including, Met MakerBot Hackathon participant Tom Burtonwood, the uber-creative MakerBotter TheNewHobbyist, and the digital artist Patrick Lichty. The team will be scanning visitors and making their likenesses on Mike’s Thing-O-Matic.

And they’ll be livestreaming it! Check out all the action here and on Mike’s twitter account @MoceriMike.

Have fun, guys!

Look what PrettySmallThings did at the Met during our Hackathon!

There’s a special bit of information on the Thingiverse page, too:

The awesome thing about this print, is that the helmet its based on isn’t on display at the MET, it’s in storage – I worked off a 123D Catch created by MET staff. You can’t see this at the MET, but you can see it in your own home thanks to 3D printing!

Kaboom! This piece of armor is otherwise inaccessible (there’s only so much space!), but the Met staff was so cool as to snap some photos of it and share them with a digital artist so that the entire world can now get their hands on it.

Check out the original here, and compare the two pieces. PrettySmallThings (aka Kacie Hultgren) did some “restoration” work on the file in order to re-sculpt some parts that didn’t render quite right. This is an excellent addition to the armor scales by Krest that MakerBlock blogged about the other day.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?¹

1. scale these up and wear them for in-office chair jousting [↩]

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.

We are working on getting you tons of information about replicating our experiment at the Met. But in the meantime, we’ve been getting everything organized on Pinterest for you to follow and get excited about.

To make everything clear, there are two boards:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Digitized in 3D

Remember, we have been digitizing the works of art at the Met. This Pinboard has all the things that have been turned into 3D models that are just like the original art. We — that’s us and you – are building a #futuremuseum, where real things from the physical world are turned into physical models.

Burgonet all'Antica - Date: 1540 - Digitized 2012

Luisa Deti by Ippolito Buzio – Date: 1604 – Digitized: 2012 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, #Made

This is the board where you can find all the various derivative art. These are replicas of the original pieces that people have made on a MakerBot, or versions of completely new art based on the original art from the Met. These things are just waiting to be changed into new art, and you’re just the person to do it! Look at these fine examples.

Leda and the Marsyas by JonMonaghan

Naiad Decimated to 2736 Polygons by bre

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!