MakerBot Industries

Colin Butgereit – one of our Bot Assembling All-Stars – has been assembling Thing-O-Matics for customers from the moment we began offering them eight months ago. He’s gotten faster and faster with each build and can currently build a TOM in a little over an hour. If you’ve assembled a Thing-O-Matic on your own you know that this is pretty impressive! Our production workshop is currently in the process of making the switch from Thing-O-Matics to Replicators so we made sure to spend some time this week documenting one of Colin’s last Thing-O-Matic assemblies. With the simpler, cleaner design of The Replicator there’s no doubt that he’ll be building them at top speed in no time.

Also, pay close attention to the music in used for the video. It’s a song made ENTIRELY FROM MAKERBOT NOISES created by MakerBot Support Wizard Mike Battaglia. Check out more of Mike’s awesome music here.

Are you coming across the MakerBot Replicator for the first time? Are you still trying to wrap your head around how a MakerBot works? Are you trying to explain to a friend what a MakerBot is, but frustrated because they still don’t get it? Well stop being frustrated and confused and WATCH THIS VIDEO! This is where MakerBot CEO and Co-founder Bre Pettis explains it all! See the MakerBot Replicator in action for the first time ever! And be amazed!

Ever since the earliest days of the first proto-MakerBots, time-lapse footage has been showing up in videos featuring MakerBots. The reason is obvious: watching a MakerBot print¹ is an inherently visually experience, and a time-lapse compresses the entire process of printing into a few minutes like a magic trick.

Last week, Becky and Matt from the MAKE Live invited MakerBot to share behind the scenes tips and tricks for creating time-lapses on their live-streamed show. As I have created many of the recent time-lapses here (posted below), I went on to share my thoughts, and chat with Matt.²

Some Tips I Shared with Matt and Becky

• You need something that is fixed or moves slowly to “gel” the time lapse.
• Be careful of auto-exposure and auto-focus, as these kill illusion.
• Sell realism by simulating camera moves — s-curves and ease in/ease out help give the viewer a cinematic handling feel while direct lines feel kinda mechanical (security cameras).
• Typically folks add music after the time lapse — but if you pick music you like, you can make adjustments to the time lapse to connect it to (or work against) the music.
• Shoot a big enough image to give you room for reframing — but make sure the resolution for a tighter shot looks good enough for your needs.
• Many time lapse/stop motion/intervalometer type tools can be hacked to be queued by something other than time. If you are recording something that changes over time, you can create a tool to trigger the shots that are interesting (motion sensing, tracking, sound sensing, etc).
• Once you are done shooting, it is like you have a strip of film. You can use any number of batch file renaming or image processing tools to change parts or all of your sequence well before encoding it as video.
• You can “thin” out your time lapse to have only images doing what you want, and then use a batch file renaming tool to create a new consecutively numbered sequence of images.

What Time-Lapse Videos Are You Watching?

Well, watching time-lapse projects of unboxing/MakerBot assemblies as well as printing and frostruding is always a real treat for me so I wanted to direct you all to take a look at some great videos NOT created by MakerBot and encourage you all to post links in the comments to other great MakerBot-related time-lapses that you have created or encountered in your travels through the Internets.

The above is my currently reigning favorite of the MakerBot kit assembly videos — this one takes advantage of lots of manually triggered time-lapse events as well as tricks to shoot large formats and then re-frame for nice, believable pans and camera moves. Great work!

Another great MakerBot assembly time lapse — the camera position directly above makes this a really fun group build video.

The above video isn’t a time-lapse, but it is a video showing MakerBot Operator RobertHunt working to update Thingiverse Web Warrior Marty McGuire’s gcode-activated time lapse script for the Thing-O-Matic. With a stepper driven extruder going, the time is prime for slipping your camera automation into the gcode for your print!

1. or even putting the kit together for the first time [↩]
2. Doing my best to hold off just talking about MakerBot the whole time, a real temptation! [↩]

The latest webivision webispode of MakerBot’s weekly series on all things MakerBot.

• Bre shares a 3D scan time lapse from the New York Notables series — challenging viewers to identify the model.
• Matt interviews MakerBot staffer Ana Ranches about her Thingiverse love — a shout out to the Ladies of Thingiverse.
• Ethan shares a tip¹ for getting your shell game sorted in ReplicatorG.
• And Isaac introduces the MakerBot Father’s Day Sale — the best deal in 3D printing history.

1. including using MiseryBot’s Test Stripes part [↩]

Matthew Borgatti put together this awesome time lapse video of MakerBots crunching out art over at Ponoko.

I attended the modeLabInteractive Parametrics seminar a month or so ago (check out our previous post on it here) and had the chance to film some Makerbots hard at work. I’ve got to thank Bre Pettis for providing Makerbot troubleshooting, Marius Watz for teaching, modeLab for hosting, and Kidd Video for the music.\

Lots of colored plastic, lots of colored LEDs, and lots of awesome!

In the BotCave we have been loving us some time lapse video in recent months. (Automated Build Platform, Cathedral, and Water Soluble PVA, just to pick three I have put together.) These tiny videos not only allow us to make cool videos with still cameras, but also are really a great way to compress the process of printing an object right down to the best part: the Wow part.

Back when we made the three videos I listed earlier, I used a Canon 7D in combination with Dragon Stop Motion. (Oh, and a modest amount of post-shoot tweaking.) But lately we have a cluster of second-hand Canon PowerShot Sd1000s loaded up with CHDK so that we can experiment with scripts such as Sunset4.¹ (And we are looking to tweak the script to defeat the autofocus and make things happier for printing this kind of work.)

Well, there are so many great time lapse videos being put together by MakerBot Operators² using all sorts of cameras to make these: webcams, HDV cameras, and iPhone 4s. So we gotta ask! What are you using to grab video of your prints?

1. That is what I used for the above video. [↩]
2. Ah, that Betaworks time lapse video! Really raises the bar for all of us! [↩]

I’m such a sucker for time lapse photography, of anything really. Ants making an ant-bridge to cross a barrier, a little seed growing up to be a flower, or a guy who takes a picture of himself every day for six years. Although we’ve posted videos of builds before, this time lapse of last week’s Betaworks build of a Thing-O-Matic is especially well done. Share and enjoy!