Ideas

When you start out with an idea, how do you know what to make? How does it become meaningful? It’s easy to design and print things (here are lots of tutorials), but it can be hard to design that thing that is just right, somehow. The elegant thing; the beautiful thing; the thing that means something. The right thing that somehow is the answer to the question you didn’t even know how to ask.

For me, it usually happens by accident; basically I flail around in the dark for a long time until something just seems right. For example, my partner and I have our 20th wedding anniverary this year, so for some time I’ve been thinking about redesigning our wedding rings. One idea that I really liked was a riff on Courtney, etc.’s elegant Arrow Ring, which you may have seen a million times headlining the Platinum materials page on Shapeways:

In particular, I was interested in how the two bands float apart from each other. My idea was to turn this ring around so that it was a floating pair of rings in the front, but connected in the back. After twenty years as a couple, it seemed to me that we had learned how to to be our own people while still always having that solid connection behind everything. We talked it over and he agreed it sounded cool and that I should try some prototypes to see how the idea looked in real life.

Prototypes

Late in 2017 I designed some prototypes in Fusion 360 and sent them out to see what looked good, finally settling on a design that looks a lot like two copies of our current wedding rings, with a secret connection in the back. I’ve been wearing around an HP nylon prototype of the ring for a few weeks and I really love it. Here’s what the prototypes look like, and most recent design in silver.

There’s still some work to do; in particular the ring is a little soft in silver and the two bands can bend towards each other if pushed. I might make the connection thicker so the ring will be stronger, or maybe try a harder material. But, I’m not sure anymore that it’s the best wedding ring. Especially because this idea collided pretty awkwardly with another project I’m working on for Valentine’s Day…

Naming and meaning

Specifically, I’ve been working on some jewelry for the sadness of Valentine’s Day. I mean, yeah, Valentine’s Day is great and everything, with all the hearts and candy and Twitter/Instagram photos of how everyone is in love and doing Really Great All The Time. But we aren’t all doing really great all the time. Especially on Valentine’s Day, those who are fighting just to keep it together can feel invisible. I really liked the idea of having some pendants for the hard times. Pendants that make you feel stronger and give you something to hold on to when you’re facing big challenges.

But meaning is what you make it, and also to a large extent what you name it; my goal was to create simple, strong pieces that evoked difficult feelings, and give them evocative names to help reinforce that meaning. Here’s the one I like best so far; it’s called LOSS, and it represents what happens when things break and the center falls out. It’s nice to hold on to and feel the gap, maybe try to close it up with your finger, or put your finger through the arc:

Rediscovery and redesign…

So here’s the awkward part: While thinking about other designs for the Valentine’s Day series I realized that I was already sitting on a perfect design. A ring that looks like a wedding ring, but broken in two pieces — and, even worse, with a perfect name: SEPARATED. So yeah, our new wedding ring is now part of my bleak Valentine’s Day series. Ouch! Thanks, design process! My loving husband very sensibly has already told me that we should to find another design for our 20th wedding anniversary, and yes, ok, he is right. Back to the drawing board!

Happy New Year everyone, and have fun finding your new projects for the year. Don’t forget to share them with us with the hashtag #Create2018 on social channels or comment below if you’ve got a cool design and would like to share your works in progress!

The post Tutorial Tuesday 49: Making Meaning appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

This Tutorial Tuesday we’ll highlight some of this year’s 3D design tutorials that even the youngest (or oldest!) of your loved ones can use to make custom and personalized 3D prints in just a few minutes. Choose one of the tutorial introductions below and get started creating in no time!

Getting Started Quickly

Whatever your age or experience, you can jump right in with Tinkercad, a free in-browser design program that’s as easy to use as dragging and dropping shapes onto a workspace. If you want a 3D sandbox to play in, check out how to get started in Tutorial Tuesday 3: Beginner 3D Design With Tinkercad.

Quick Personalized Models

Ready for family D&D night? Create your own custom tabletop character pieces with Hero Forge. It’s easy to mix and match outfits, physical characteristics, and poses with Hero Forge’s intuitive interface. Learn how to get started quickly with Tutorial Tuesday 36: Quick Custom D&D Characters With Hero Forge.

Or, make a family portrait lithophane for your window using Cura. Cura is a “slicer” program for sending 3D models to a printer, but you can also use it to quickly turn photographs into translucent, light-up artwork, following the instructions in Tutorial Tuesday 38: Lightning-Fast Lithophanes With Cura.

If you were dreaming of a white Christmas but didn’t get any snow, make your own unique flakes with the Snowflake Machine. Designing your own custom snowflake is as easy as choosing a random seed and then modifying style parameters with sliders. To get started right away, check out Tutorial Tuesday 45: Make One Billion Snowflakes With the Snowflake Machine.

For the Kids

If the kids are tearing up the house and need something to do, let them have some screen time that actually teaches them something. Here are three design programs guaranteed to keep your kids busy and introduce them to the basics of 3D design. First, the Morphi app for iPad (or desktop version) is really fun to use and intuitive for kids to learn. Find out how to get set up with Morphi in our article Tutorial Tuesday 21: 3D Design Made Simple With Morphi and an iPad.

Second, BlocksCAD lets your kids use code to design simple models, much like the popular drag-and-drop visual coding language Scratch. If they’re learning Scratch at school then BlocksCAD will be second nature to them already. Get started with Tutorial Tuesday 24: Learn to Code in 3D With BlocksCAD.

Finally, let the kids smash things up with the fun design program 3D Slash, where you design by smashing and exploding blocks — with sound effects — to construct 3D objects. Get started in just a few minutes with Tutorial Tuesday 37: Quick 3D Design With 3D Slash.

Happy Holidays everyone, and Merry New Year!!

The post Tutorial Tuesday 48: Family Design Time appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Kenny and his ORB Racing FF210

Over the summer, community manager Ruud van den Muijzenberg and I traveled across Europe visiting RC car events. One of the best things about these trips was the incredibly cool people we met along the way. To our delight, many of them were already using Shapeways 3D printed parts on their RC cars.

In this second of our Driver Profiles, we talk to Kenny Mok, whom we met at the IconicRC Revival meeting in Grantham, England in July. Kenny has been a Shapeways customer for a while and runs 3D printed parts on multiple cars in his fleet.

Kenny prepares to race at the IconicRC Revival

Name: Kenny Mok
Age: 39
From: London, UK
Profession: IT Consultant
Hobbies: 1:1 cars, Fishkeeping, Football, Karaoke and Eating
Years in RC: 2
First RC Car: Tamiya TA01 Alfa-Romeo 155 DTM

IconicRC 4WD car line-up

A couple of weeks before we went to England for IconicRC Revival, we announced that we were going to join the event on IconicRC’s Facebook group. We were welcomed with lots of replies of people showing off their 3D printed RC car parts.

One of those people was Kenny, who showed us his ORB Racing FF210, a very unique and almost fully 3D printed front wheel drive buggy that we actually featured in the magazine earlier this year. He was clearly very excited to show off the cars he had built, and even challenged our community manager Ruud van den Muijzenberg to a race!

When we finally met at IconicRC, Kenny told us he has only been in the RC car racing hobby for about 2 years. After looking up information on drones and quadcopters, he stumbled across a group of RC-car-loving enthusiasts, IconicRC. Kenny initially thought that racing RC cars was a dead hobby, but soon realized it is very much alive and active. He found a group of great people in IconicRC, who race from club level to pro.

Kenny added, “When I was a kid, I was never able to afford hobby RC cars. But being older, like the most of us, I am now able to relive my childhood once again and buy the cars I dreamed of as a kid.”

Kenny racing in one of the Revival heats

When we asked Kenny about his experience at the event, he told us,

“Revival 2017 was my first ever Revival. It was simply awesome! From the smell of fried bacon and grilled onions emanating from the campsite to the enthusiastic chattering of conversation with fellow racers, I soon forgot that there was actually racing involved. I met people from all over the world. Some had travelled quite far (Holland, Germany) and it was great to share views and experiences with everyone. The show of beautiful vintage cars was just simply sublime. Oh, and the racing was fun! This will surely be a regular event for me and a lot of other fellow enthusiasts. I thoroughly recommend this to all RC vintage enthusiasts, I would even go so far to class this as the vintage racing event of the year!”

A special commemorative edition FF210, Kenny’s second FF210

Kenny races a very special 3D printed buggy. The ORB Racing FF210 is an almost fully custom-made front -wheel-drive buggy that features many parts 3D printed at Shapeways. In the picture above you can see the special commemorative edition FF210 that was built by Paul Dijkstra, ORB Racing’s designer and Shapeways community member. Paul created this model to celebrate the FF210’s racing success in 2017.

Kenny likes the FF210 so much this is actually his second one. The FF210 is special because it is the only modern front-wheel-drive buggy in existence. And being front-wheel-drive makes it very competitive on low-grip and wet surfaces compared to regular buggies. With England being a very rainy and wet country, Kenny’s FF210 should feel right at home.

Kenny’s Tamiya Top Force

As cool as it is, the FF210 is of no use at the vintage-focused Revival as it’s too modern. Luckily Kenny brought a whole fleet of cars (painted his signature white) to race at the Revival in multiple classes. Just like the car we raced on sunday at the same event, Kenny also races a vintage Tamiya Top Force featuring 3D printed parts designed by ORB Racing. Besides developing their own FF car, ORB Racing also offer a lot of 3D printed replacement parts that are otherwise very hard to find and often expensive if available at all.

“The fact that I can now have 3D printed replacement parts which feel just as strong as the originals is a real lifesaver for collectors and racers of now obsolete cars,” Kenny told us, reflecting the driving force behind many RC car drivers’ use of 3D printed parts.

Kenny’s Yokomo YZ2 with JConcepts front wing mount

He continued,

“I also use Shapeways printed parts from JConcepts on my modern Yokomo YZ2 buggies. Shapeways really opens the world up to designers where beforehand, production costs would have meant it was impossible for their designs to become a reality. Now it’s just a matter of uploading your file and having the design 3D printed at a very reasonable price. The public’s trust in 3D parts is growing as the materials used have become stronger. At the moment, only replacement parts are made for certain cars. I would love to see a whole car built from 3D printing, i.e. a Shapeways-branded car package!”

IconicRC Wheelie race line-up

2017 was a great year of racing for Kenny, who even organized, for the first time, his own event: Super Off Roader at Surrey and Hants Radio Controlled Car Club. Kenny has big plans for next year too, with the IconicRC Revival being the main event. But there are plenty more races on the calendar, like the IconicRC Cup and the highly anticipated Schumacher Challenge.

Kenny told us that even though he will try to better his race performance at upcoming events, meeting fellow RC enthusiasts means more than the results. So if you happen to go out to a race next year, look out for Kenny and his fleet of white RC cars and go have a chat!

The post Meet Kenny Mok’s Winning RC Car Fleet appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Step 1:  Fire up the Snowflake Machine

From your web browser, go to the link for The Snowflake Machine:

From there, click on the button that says “Open in Customizer” (at this point you’ll have to sign up for a free Thingiverse account, if you haven’t done this already). This will open a new page that has controls on the left and an output view on the right. By setting the controls on the left you can control the 3D design shown on the right.

Step 2:  Seed and Style your Flake

The Snowflake Machine customizer uses a random number “seed” to decide where to place branches and plates of the snowflake design. All good children of the 80’s will of course start with the seed 8675309. We’re going to make a hanging ornament, so we set Loop to “Yes.” Under the “set-snowflake-style” menu are a lot of sliders. By pushing the sliders around you can control style parameters such as the lengths of the branches, the fuzziness of your flake, and so on. Here’s our stylized flake:

That’s it for the design phase! For more information on how the Snowflake Machine uses OpenSCAD code to generate snowflakes, and tips on printing snowflake designs in a variety of materials, check out our recent article Trim Your Tree With Mathemagical Snowflake Ornaments.

Step 3:  Download an STL of your snowflake from Thingiverse

To download the snowflake, click on the “Create Thing” button, and give your snowflake a name. After a couple of minutes click on your avatar icon in the top right of the screen, and from the dropdown menu choose “My Things”. From here you’ll be able to click on your completed design and download an STL file for printing.

Step 4:  Upload your snowflake STL to Shapeways

If you’ve got your own 3D printer, you can start printing your snowflake right now. If you want to make a fancy ornament on one of Shapeways’ SLS printers, then go to Shapeways and click “Upload”, then upload your STL file. After a minute or so you’ll see something like this:

There are a few things to notice here. First, the snowflake is pretty big: about 11 centimeters across! If you’d like it to be a different size then you can use the “Resize” button to scale your flake, or you can go back to the design phase and change your target size in the Snowflake Machine customizer. The second thing to notice is that, especially for such a large snowflake, this model is pretty cheap: only about $6 in White or White Polished Strong & Flexible plastic.

Step 5:  Fix any printability issues

The third thing to notice about our Shapeways snowflake model page is that there are some scary yellow caution icons saying telling us that there are issues with the model. If this happens to you, click on the “View Issues” button for the material you are most interested in. The issue is most likely “Wall Thickness”; if so, then click on that item in the left column menu. In the middle of the screen is a description of the thickness required for your chosen material. On the right you’ll see an image of your snowflake with yellow coloring the “Suspect” areas that are too thin. Note that in our model that’s the middle of the snowflake and some of the very tips of the branches:

Luckily, there’s an easy fix: Just press the “Fix Thin Walls” button! (If you don’t see that button, then make sure that the “Show Heatmap View” checkbox is un-checked.)  After a few minutes of computational time, your model should be repaired and printable. Its price might change slightly; for example our model somehow got five cents cheaper after the fix.

Step 6:  Print!

Here’s our model, ready to order and print:

Step 7:  Sell your snowflake design (optional)

If you want other people to be able to purchase your snowflake design on Shapeways, click the “Sell This Design button” at the top right of your design’s product page. Fill out a title and description, choose a category, select the materials you want to make available, set prices, and so on.

Don’t forget that the Snowflake Machine is under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non-Commercial – Share-Alike license that requires attribution, so if you do sell your model, you need to mention in your item description that you used the Snowflake Machine to create your design, and link back to the Snowflake Machine page on Thingiverse. We did exactly that in the Product Details section of the screenshot above.

The “Non-Commercial” part of the license means that you can’t use models you create with the Snowflake Machine for commercial purposes unless permission is given. The good news is that the author of this post is the creator of the Snowflake Machine, so she can give you permission right now. Here it is: If you just want to sell a few fun Snowflake-Machine-created snowflake designs on Shapeways then consider this my official permission for you to do that, with proper attribution. If you want to use the Snowflake Machine for more than that, just ask!

Here’s how our snowflake looks on its Shapeways product page. Notice that the Shapeways site has created a nice render image that shows approximately what the design might look like when printed:

Okay, that’s one snowflake made, but there are still over a billion more you could make, so get moving!

The post Tutorial Tuesday 45: Make One Billion Snowflakes With the Snowflake Machine appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Snowflakes are a classic and always-classy way to decorate the tree, and they’re festive throughout the winter. Snowflakes also happen to lend themselves well to parametric design, a method of creating around parameters that can turn one design into many.

Today, we’ll learn how to turn one design, a simple snowflake, into multiple products in a variety of shapes, sizes, and materials. We’ll start with simple low-res 3D prints and prototypes on desktop FDM machines, and eventually level up to printing in Nylon and Plated Rhodium at Shapeways. Along the way, we’ll have to consider ways to optimize for 3D printing on different types of machines, and how to print affordably with different types of materials. The snowflake design we’ll be working with was created with code in OpenSCAD, and can procedurally generate over a billion unique snowflakes. Let it snow!

3D Printing Snowflakes at Home

Each winter, we make a new 3D-printable snowflake design. Back in 2013, when we didn’t know very much, it was a set of simple Snowflake Ornaments created from extruded SVG images. In 2014 we leveled up to a customizable Snowflake Cutter that used symmetric image maps to mimic the way snowflakes are cut out of folded paper, and in 2015 it was a full-blown Snowflake Machine that uses OpenSCAD code to generate over a billion unique snowflakes in different styles from random seeds.

These flexible digital designs can create many different types of snowflake models, including large decorations, small ornaments, and even cookie cutters, all of which we initially printed on a consumer-level Ultimaker desktop 3D printer:

We’ll talk soon about how we converted these designs for printing in SLS Nylon and Metals at Shapeways, but first let’s talk about the parametric design itself.

How to Code a Blizzard

The Snowflake Machine was created in OpenSCAD, a free design program that allows you to use simple code to create and export 3D-printable STL meshes. The power of designing with OpenSCAD is that it is “parametric,” which means that you can construct your designs based on variables and parameters that control the behavior and features of your models.

In real life, snowflakes grow outwards from a core center as they fall through different temperatures, humidity levels, and other atmospheric conditions. These conditions add “plates” and “branches” of various sizes and configurations to the snowflake as it falls. The code for the Snowflake Machine mimics this process, using a random number seed to create many random number sequences that determine the algorithmic creation of plates and branches. Sizing and style parameters allow you to influence the random sequences to create snowflakes with more or fewer plates, fuller or sparser shapes, and so on.

You can make your own unique 3D-printable snowflake designs using the customizable interface of the Snowflake Machine that we uploaded to Thingiverse. Go to the link and click “Open in Customizer” to get started, then change the starting seed and style parameters until you get the snowflake you want. By clicking “Create Thing” you can download an STL of your custom snowflake and then 3D print it at home or by sending to Shapeways.

If you want to have more design flexibility with your snowflake models, then you can download and modify the “Snowflakerator” code from our Hello OpenSCAD one-page tutorial document. For more information on getting started with OpenSCAD, check out our recent Shapeways Tutorial Tuesday post Using OpenSCAD to Design With Code.

Printing Snowflake Ornaments in SLS Nylon

Last year, we decided it was time to level up and 3D print snowflakes on some big-girl machines, with fancy materials like SLS Nylon and even jewelry-quality silver. Of course we don’t have the equipment to do such things from home, so it was time to visit Shapeways!

Of course, printing with industrial-grade machines is different than printing with desktop filament-based machines, and the requirements for things like clearances or minimum thickness can be very different. For example, in SLS Nylon we can print much more detailed and delicate snowflakes then we had printed before. By changing parameters in our OpenSCAD code, we created two dozen new snowflakes optimized for printing at Shapeways in White Strong & Flexible material, a set of Small Snowflake Ornaments and a set of Large Snowflake Ornaments:

To save on per-part costs (which in White Strong & Flexible would be $1.50 for each disconnected piece of our print job), we used Tinkercad to arrange each dozen snowflakes on a thin rod, as shown in the pictures below. The rod can be easily snipped off after printing and shipping. Check out this past post for more tips on how to make models less costly. Tinkercad is a great tool for such simple modifications; for more on that see our Shapeways Tutorial Tuesday post Beginner 3D Design With Tinkercad. For more technical design tips on converting filament designs to SLS Nylon designs, check out our Hacktastic post From Prototype to Product: Snowflakes.

Printing Snowflake Earrings in Multiple Materials

Since holiday trees are only around for a little while but snowflakes can be fun all winter, we also decided to make some snowflake earrings. Earrings are basically just smaller ornaments, but if we simply scaled down our designs from above then their features would be too small, especially for printing in metals.

In the end, we decided to completely remake the flakes with different OpenSCAD parameters and seeds, and made six new designs. We tried to make them as delicate as possible while still having enough minimum thickness for printing in a wide variety of materials. The six designs we settled on were Flurry, Frost, Powder, Ice, Crystal, and Blizzard, shown here printed in six different materials:

Of course, we also need some hooks! After some experimenting we settled on what are called “Kidney wire” earring hooks, because the dangly snowflake prints can just slip around and onto the hooks without us having to deal with opening or closing any metal loops, as shown in the photo below left.

As a final step we altered our designs to be printable in metal; this involved closing up some of the smaller holes in each model so that it would pass the Shapeways Printability Checks for Precious Metals. With Shapeways’ new Variants feature, we were able to add new files to our existing product pages that would be used only when customers opted for printing in Precious Metals like Plated Rhodium.

Okay, that’s enough snowflakes for this winter! Let us know in the comments if you’ve used the Snowflake Machine to make any 3D-printable designs, or if you have questions about Variants, Printability Checks, design tips, or anything else. Or, leave a comment if you’ve ever turned one parametric model into a flurry of different prints and products; we’d love to see what you made.

The post Trim Your Tree With Mathemagical Snowflake Ornaments appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

At Recon G6 Belgium, a RC scaler and crawler event in the Belgian Ardennes, we were lucky enough to meet Christian Lorenz. He has been using Shapeways to develop his own design of a rock crawler chassis.

Christian and his crawler

Name: Christian Lorenz
Age: 35
From: Karlsruhe, Germany
Profession: Process Operator
Hobbies: Mountain biking, BMX, Running, Swimming
Years in RC: 8
First RC Car: Tamiya Manta Ray

One of the steep, rocky trails at ReconG6 Belgium

Christian made his way from his home in Karlsruhe, Germany to the Belgian forest for Recon G6. He brought multiple cars to the event, but the one we were most interested in is his Prototype Rock Crawler, designed by Christian himself from scratch.

After being out of the RC car hobby for some years, Christian caught the bug again and started with an Axial SCX10 scale truck. While working at a mold-making company, his access to CAD software and milling machines meant that it didn’t take long for him to start making custom parts for his trucks.

Christian’s unnamed Prototype Rock Crawler

The Prototype Rock Crawler is Christian’s second custom build truck. His first project, the Spilux, was a scale rock crawler truck with Pure Spider axles, a custom carbon chassis and a bunch of handmade milled metal parts, all covered by a bobbed Toyota Hilux body. The new crawler was designed to compete in the prototype class in the German Yeti Trial Challenge. Almost every single part on the car was designed by Christian himself and is either 3D printed at Shapeways or milled from carbon fiber plates or brass. It took about three months of development and designing in Cimatron to complete the crawler. It’s an amazing feat of engineering from just one man, one that looks like it’s from a big manufacturer.

The main chassis is a skeleton construction featuring many extra supports to make sure the chassis is strong and stiff enough to handle the abuse the car will go through. Christian told us he guessed how much support was really needed, and then doubled it just to be safe.

Inside the chassis is a completely custom-made drivetrain. The transmission housing is 3D printed and has steel gears handmade by Christian himself. It also contains a full interior complete with 3D printed racing seat, dashboard, fire extinguisher, and NOS bottle. Even the hood scoop on the front is functional — it has an electric fan inside forcing air onto the motor to keep it cool! Most competition crawlers don’t have any scale details like an interior, but 3D printing makes it possible to fit these components inside the compact chassis and still keep it lightweight.

The car features a fully 3D printed interior

This hood scoop is actually functional and cools the motor

Both front and rear axles are also completely custom-made. They are portal axles, again with steel gears handmade by Christian. He also machined some brass weights for each corner of the car to keep the tires planted on any obstacle. Both front and rear axles have 3D printed housings, but the rear axle is beefed up with a carbon fibre tube inside. This car really is designed to be bulletproof!

Fully custom axles, hubs and even the wheels

The chassis is unnamed at the moment, but at ReconG6 we joked about how it should be called “Skeleton Screamer” because of the way it looks and sounds. Christian powered the crawler with quite an unusual setup combining a regular car’s electronic speed controller with an outrunner brushless motor that’s normally only used in RC airplanes. The result is a small motor with a ton of torque on low RPM and a loud, high-pitched whine, making it sound almost like a turbine engine. The noise is unique to Christian’s car, and really gives it character.

The crawler after conquering the muddy Belgian trails

Now, with the Prototype Crawler (AKA Skeleton Screamer) finished — and even taking a podium spot at the Yeti Trial Challenge — we asked Christian what’s next. His current project is even crazier than the crawler: Christian is designing a fully custom-built racing machine on track plates, like a tank, but FAST.

Christian’s new project; A race vehicle on tracks

To follow Christian’s progress, get the first look at his new developments, and keep track of race results, check out his Yoyoyotapilot RC page on Facebook and @Yoyoyotapilot on Instagram.

What’s the craziest car you’ve ever designed?

The post Lighter, Faster, Stronger: Christian Lorenz’s Incredible RC Crawler With No Name appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

I usually start my designs by prototyping at home with a desktop FDM/filament 3D printer. But some models are really, really difficult to print on a filament-based 3D printer, and my “Fidget Cube” model is one of the worst: it has enclosed hinges that point in every possible direction, and pieces of the model that have to somehow print floating right above other pieces. On an SLS/nylon powder printer like those used for Strong & Flexible plastic prints at Shapeways, such “impossible” prints can be printed with great success rates. But at home, different desktop filament printers, different filaments, and seemingly even different days of the week can have an influence on the success or failure of 3D printing Fidget Cubes.

In this post, we’ll track the evolution of one particularly fidgety 3D design over the past five years, from an assembly model to print-in-place on FDM machines, to multicolor variants, and finally all the way to SLS printing at Shapeways, where we will be able to level up our idea of “impossible” to include the printing of a fully-functioning Yoshimoto cube!

2013: Pieces

Our story begins with a 3D-printable Folding Cube by the legendary emmett. This model prints in eight separate pieces which you then click together to assemble.

This model is based on the popular “photo cubes” that you might have made out of paper and tape when you were younger. If you want to make a paper one, check out Magic Folding Photo Cubes on Instructables. Emmett’s Folding Cube is a beautiful model that is really fun to fidget with, but because I’m not good at rotating or visualizing objects mentally, I had a really difficult time putting the pieces together properly. In fact, I was so bad at it that I vowed never to do it again, and set about to create a remix that could print all in one piece, fully assembled.

2014: Print in Place

After a lot of trial and error, I ended up creating the design from scratch in OpenSCAD. Clearances between hinge parts and adjacent surfaces have to be just right for the Print-in-Place Fidget Cube to print successfully, and getting your slicer settings and model clearances to hit that sweet spot is a fairly advanced 3D printing challenge.

It probably isn’t going to work on your printer, with your filament, on the first try, but once you find the right settings and clearances you should be able to print these Fidget Cubes reliably with a low failure rate (or, you can obviously go straight to Shapeways). If you decide to print it at home, the Print-in-Place Fidget Cube model we put on Thingiverse is customizable so that you can tweak sizes and clearances and try to find what works for your machine.

2015: Yoshimoto

The folding action of the Fidget Cube is the same as that of the Yoshimoto Cube, an incredible model that takes advantage of the fact that a cube can be evenly dissected into two Stellated Rhombic Dodecahedra — and in fact, that those two Stellated Rhombic Dodecahedra can themselves be folded inside out to form cubes of the same size as the original cube. You kind of have to see it to believe it:

You can make a Yoshimoto Cube using origami or you can purchase a truly beautiful version from the MoMA store. Unfortunately, you can’t make a Yoshimoto Cube by carving up a Fidget Cube into two pieces, because the hinges protrude out of the shape and would interfere with the nesting of the pieces. However, we can carve out a Stellated Rhombic Dodecahadon shape from the inside of our fidget cube to form a Fidget Star that folds one way into a cube and the other way into a Stellated Rhombic Dodecahedron.

Here it is in action. This piece isn’t any more difficult to print than the Fidget Cube, but it seems a lot more impressive and surprising when the entire shape of the object changes as it turns inside out.

2016: Embedded Hinges

Next in line is the Kobayashi Fidget Cube by pkobayashi, which prints in one piece and has flat hinges! I think you still couldn’t make a good Yoshimoto Cube out of this, but this version should be much, much easier to print than the Fidget Cube. This design isn’t a remix of mine or of emmett’s, but it is definitely an improvement on both:

Designer pkobayashi later created a Dual Color version, which you print in pieces and then assemble:

2017: Multicolor

What about two-color print-in-place cubes? As of this year, that also exists. MosaicManufacturing has been making beautiful Multi-Color Fidget Star prints! Design-wise, this was made from the Fidget Star just by splitting the model into two pieces (a cube surrounded by a shell). But, printing it is a serious accomplishment:

They made me one, and it’s huge! Thank you, Mosiac Manufacturing!!

They handled the two-color printing with a Palette, a device you can use for pre-processing filament to send to your 3D printer. The Palette actually cuts and assembles pieces of colored filament at exactly the right lengths for switching colors in the correct places while printing.

If you have a dual-nozzle 3D printer then you can download Mosaic Manufacturing’s Multi-Color Fidget Star model and print it yourself. Here is one I printed on the lovely dual-nozzle Ultimaker 3. I happened to print it very small, and on fast, low-res “draft” mode, so it’s nowhere near the highest quality that the Ultimaker 3 can produce, but it still looks pretty good and it works!

… And Beyond: Shapeways!

Printing any of the Fidget Cubes above on an FDM printer can be a difficult process that involves a lot of trial and error, skill, and luck. A lot of the problem lies with the fact that the model has to print without support material for the hinges to operate, which means that the many overhangs and bridges on the model have to print without that support. These problems melt away if you print with a “powder printer” such as the SLS Nylon printers they use at Shapeways to print in Strong & Flexible plastic:

Having industrial-grade 3D printers makes a huge difference in what you can print successfully. Here’s a wonderful, tiny Fidget Cube Stress Reliever by brandutchmen on Shapeways:

Even better, with the SLS printers, we can get to the holy grail of Fidget Cubes: Nesting hinged models that combine to make a Yoshimoto Cube! VeryWetPaint created a fully functional, two-piece, nesting Yoshimoto Cube model that prints in SLS Nylon at Shapeways, called the Yoshi prime box. His open-style design very cleverly allows both pieces to be hinged so that they can nest together. It’s amazing!

Shapeways people, what’s next? Can you push this design to the next level? What even is the next level? Let us know in the comments and we’ll see which designers dare to take fidgeting to new heights…

The post Printing the Impossible: Evolution of a Fidget Cube appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

I also wanted the tablet to be easier to hold and to stand upright on its own. So I designed a combination tablet stand, handle, and amplifier for my new tablet.

You do not necessarily need electronics to amplify sound. Acoustic amplifiers can direct sound waves and enhance volume solely due to their shape. Having seen some acoustic amplifiers for iPhones, I realized 3D printing could do the same for my tablet.

I started by using digital calipers to measure the thickness of the DragonTouch X10, the dimensions of its speakers, and the distance between the speakers and the edges of the tablet. I created a 3D model in Fusion 360 first by sketching the speaker’s shape and creating an offset. Then I created a few planes at different angles, and a loft between each plane to make a funnel that would direct sound toward the front of the tablet. I also made sure the handle would have a friction-fit around the sides of the tablet.

After adding the handles, Netflix and YouTube videos were loud and clear with volume to spare! Also, while having a few friends over, I was able to put on some music in the background.

Originally, I created these handles for desktop 3D printing, but I remixed them to be 3D printed in Shapeways Strong & Flexible Plastic.

The nylon would have a nicer surface finish and sturdiness than the ones I made on a desktop 3D printer, but the handles would cost more than that of the tablet itself. If I had designed these parts for Strong & Flexible plastic from the start, I would have integrated thinner walls and nested the parts as close together as possible in order to keep cost down.

If you’re using a tablet or smartphone, creators around the globe have designed 3D printed acoustic amplifiers available from Shapeways. Find one that fits your device.

The post 3D Printed Handles Pump Up the Volume on a Tablet appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

PODCAST: We are back with a new cosplay announcement, and the successes and tragic failures encountered so far! We are ready, 2017! Check it out on soundcloud.com/thelasergirls #icon32 #3dprinting #cosplay #scififemales #golaser

A post shared by Sarah C Awad and Dhemerae Ford (@thelasergirls) on Feb 6, 2017 at 9:17am PST

Following our Lightning as Cloud 3D Printed Cosplay Project, we were exhausted but itching to jump back on the making train. We decided to take on an ambitious new costume project only three months before I-CON, in March. We chose two of our favorite characters from science fiction media: Ripley from the first Alien movie and Re-L Mayer from the anime Ergo Proxy.

Sarah Makes Re-L Mayer’s Choker, Pendant, and Shotgun

Re-L’s look may be minimal, but I always found it striking and iconic. The main challenge was not the complexity of the accessories, but realizing them in a clean and nearly perfect way that embodies Re-L’s streamlined aesthetic.

The bezel that held the lapis stone in Re-L’s choker was made in SolidWorks, with the final printed on our desktop 3D printer in black ABS. From modeling to prototyping, I completed the entire piece in one productive day with no additional outlays.

For Re-L’s pendant, I imported a vector drawing into SolidWorks, where I gave it thickness and added in details. I 3D printed several prototypes in the same ABS as the bezel before ordering a brass print from Shapeways.

The final print was a pleasant surprise, as it beautifully captured minute details I thought would be easily lost, especially the XII carved into the back.

I had very little reference material for Re-L’s shotgun, so it took about a month of trial and error. After two failed attempts at modeling the gun, I went back to the drawing board and created a to-scale blueprint using vector drawings I made in Illustrator. Then I played with the overall shape and style of its profile.

Once I was happy with the blueprint, I then imported my vector drawings into SolidWorks, made them 3D, and figured out how all the parts would fit together. The power of 3D printing lies in being able to create unique items, so 3D printing barrels would be redundant and costly and I decided to use 1″ diameter wooden dowels for the barrels. Then I built the other pieces around the dimensions of the dowels.

The body, handle, grips, and cap were printed on an SLA printer at the LaGuardia Studio at my alma mater, NYU. I love this material for props due to its high resolution and durable, smooth finish that makes post-production sanding, painting, and weathering a breeze. SLA prints also have a nice heft to them, which I find gives my pieces more lifelike appeal. If you don’t have access to an SLA printer, Shapeways Frosted Ultra Detail 3D prints use a similar material and are likewise great for cosplay.

At that point, the shotgun looked flat. To give it more contrast and drama, I painted it with both black and purple spray paint, then finished it with a high-gloss topcoat for extra protection. I used sewing notions and rubber plumbing rings left over from other projects to complete the shotgun.

Dhemerae Makes a Flamethrower and a Watch for Ripley

Ripley’s costume posed a surprising challenge because of the strong community around Alien and its depth of knowledge. I had a hard time trying to incorporate all of the nuances that Alien fans had painstakingly outlined. Contributors to the Replica Prop Forum had already done all the hard work in collecting amazing reference images, and I got a good picture of how the original film pieces had been made. This helped me figure out how to adapt those techniques for my workflow at a lower budget.

The Flamethrower, fresh off the printer!

I developed 90 percent of Ripley’s flamethrower in SolidWorks and printed it in ABS plastic on a Fortus 450 MC (also at LaGuardia Studio), a large FDM printer that can produce stellar high-resolution prints. And the support material is dissolvable, so there was no sanding needed prior to priming. The ABS pieces looked fantastic fresh out the printer and all the parts fit together perfectly, making for an easy build. As an alternative to ABS, we recommend Shapeways PLA!

For the back cylinder and the hoses, I altered, primed, and painted plumbing supplies. I had a really hard time finding canisters with rounded bottoms in the right size. Then I found two vintage Super Soaker refill canisters, and those worked out wonderfully for the gas canisters.

The most difficult part of this project was also the smallest: the watch. In Alien, Ripley’s watch was made from 2 Casio F-100 watches fused together. Since F-100s are a rare collectors’ item, I got two Casio F-91W watches and used SolidWorks to design a case that could fit the guts.

I printed the watchcase with all its buttons, the orange backing, and the clear display cover in color on a Stratasys J750, which prints in full-color plastic. It took about five iterations before I arrived at a design that captured the look of Ripley’s watch and could fit the parts from the Casio F-91Ws. Though a bit rushed and imperfect, I was nonetheless thrilled. I’d like to go back to the watch, flesh it out, and share my 3D models so anyone could print them and build one.

Ready for Action as Ripley and Re-L

When you finally put on the complete look for the first time, you feel like you can take over the world! We met several artists and cosplayers at I-CON who were really into 3D printing and the lore of our characters.

Building costumes in three months was a great trial for TheLaserGirls, and it really tested our abilities to design pieces outside our wheelhouses. We love choosing projects that will challenge us in a new way, for it not only tests us but encourages and inspires us to push the boundaries of 3D printing.

Have you used 3D printing for costume design? We’d love to hear your story. Leave a comment below for a chance to be featured in Shapeways Magazine.

The post Ripley and Re-L Mayer: The Making of a Sci-Fi Cosplay Project appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

As I’ve said before, you don’t have to be a 3D modeling wiz to create impressive 3D printed jewelry. More power to you if you know how to create mind-bending organic models with advanced surface modeling techniques, but I’m here to show you a basic workflow involving Rhino and Meshmixer that you can apply to any simple jewelry design to add some interesting details.

In this example, I will create the skeleton of a simple, trendy U-shaped ring in Rhino and add improvised details in Meshmixer. Feel free to follow along or just refer to these tips to save yourself some gray hair on your next project.

Let’s get started by establishing the framework of the ring. Begin by creating a circle in Rhino with the diameter equal to your preferred ring size; a size 7 ring should have a 17.3 mm diameter.

Then use the Point command to mark the circle where the top of the U will open. I find it easiest to create one point and then use the Mirror command to duplicate it precisely on the other side.

From there, use the Split command to divide the circle using the points as cutting objects.

Now sketch the contour of the U. Points and Lines are great ways to structure curves and build in relation to your objects in Rhino. Use the Line command to draw a straight segment between the two points. Make sure that Midpoint is selected in your object snap settings, then use the Point command to mark the middle of your line segment.

Next, navigate to the Top viewport and move your midpoint marker forward along the green Y-axis roughly 8-10 mm to form the dip of the U. If you want to be precise, you can enable the Gumball widget as shown in the image below, select the Point, and click on the green Y-axis arrow to move it forward a specific amount.

Now you can use the CurveThroughPt command to connect your three points. Rhino will draw the path of the curve in the order that you select the points, so make sure you begin on one end, not in the center. The settings for my curve are 3 for Degree and Interpolated for Curve Type, but I recommend tweaking these until you’re satisfied.

This curve is a good foundation for the U, but it’s still a bit too spiky for my liking. To further edit the curve, select it and use the EditPtOn command. Select and drag the two outer edit points to modify the contour. I moved mine upward and outward.

Now that the framework is in place, it’s time to create the surfaces of the ring. It’s important to build outward from the base curves in order to maintain the size of the ring. With this in mind, create two closed semicircles to sweep along both of the foundation curves. I created the semicircles below by drawing a 2-mm-long line segment perpendicular from the U of the ring, connecting the two end points with the Arc command, and joining the line segment and the arc to form a closed semicircle with the Join command. Repeat this process to draw the same shape perpendicular to the curve for the base of the ring.

If you’re following along, your curves should look something like this:

Activate the Sweep1 command and select the U of the ring as the Rail and the semicircle perpendicular to it as the Cross Section Curve to create the surface.

Next, close the surface you just created by selecting it and using the Cap command.

Now we’ll repeat this process to create the surface of the ring base by using the Sweep1 command on the remaining two curves.

Use the Cap command again to close the surface you just made for the band of the ring.

Next I’ll add some decorative orbs to stabilize the corners where the U meets the band of the ring, and to create some extra volume on the U shape for sculpting later on. Make sure that none of your decorative shapes poke through the surface to the underside of the ring.

Select all of your objects by using the SelSrf command and then the SelPolysrf command. Then join them together with the BooleanUnion command.

Now you can generate a high-quality mesh from the 3D model. Select the ring model and activate the Mesh command. For a tightly knit, high-resolution mesh, I recommend the settings below:

Now export the mesh as an .stl and open Meshmixer.

On the landing screen of Meshmixer, click Import and select your .stl file.

Our model needs to be completely solid before we start sculpting, so navigate to the Edit menu to find the Make Solid command. Toggle the default settings to make the solid conversion as accurate and smooth as possible. Solid Type should be Accurate, and Solid Accuracy should read 512. Click Update and, when your model renders, click Accept.

The time has come to freestyle some sculpted details using the Sculpt menu. I want a crater effect on the orbs, so I select the Drag brush and check off Symmetry in the main Sculpt menu to mirror my sculpting on the left and right side of the ring. When Symmetry is selected you will see a white line superimposed on your 3d model indicating the mirroring axis.

With the Drag brush selected, I made this crater effect by clicking and pulling the surface of the model and experimenting with different directions and speeds. Try selecting Flow in the Brush settings, which lets the duration of a mouse click control the intensity and strength of the sculpting brush.

To smooth out the craters and add some contrast to the irregular surface, I held down Shift and toggled back and forth to the secondary brush, which was set to BubbleSmooth.

When you’re satisfied with your design details you can export, but keep in mind that those details add a lot to the file size. So you need to bring your newly sculpted model back into Rhino to reduce the bring the mesh under 64 MB so it can be successfully uploaded to Shapeways.

Select the newly sculpted mesh and activate the ReduceMesh command to reduce the mesh by 10%.

Then you upload the final ring mesh to Shapeways and double-check that all sculpted details fit within Shapeways material guidelines for the material you want to print the ring in.

My digitally sculpted ring, which I named the Moon Rock Ring, passed thin wall analyses for almost every material, so I went ahead and ordered it in my personal favorite, Raw Brass. The hardest part of creating this simple ring is waiting a week to meet the brass version in person.

Coming soon: the official unboxing of the Moon Rock Ring.

In the meantime, tell me what you’ve been making in the comments!

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