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Month: May 2012

Meet the designer: Eric van Straaten

Today we offer you an in-depth look into one of our favorite designers: Eric van Straaten. His multicolor magic has continuously pushed the technology to its limits and has attracted countless of enthusiastic crowds to admire it. Therefore it comes as no surprise that we were more than happy to receive such a deep look into the mind behind the artist. It is with great pleasure that we present you with Eric’s deepest thoughts, feelings and visions told in his own words.

I don’t really think you need much of an introduction anymore as you ‘ve made quite a name for yourself at i.materialise, but what we would like to know is a bit about your background. Tell us a bit about the boy that became the man…

I was born in 1969 in the Dutch city of Leiden and grew up in Haarlem. From the age of about 17 I have always wanted to be an ‘artist’, and after a career that we call in Dutch ’12 trades, 13 accidents’ (more or less successful photographer, musician, actor, journalist, entrepren

The Month of May in 3D Printing

Another month is coming to a close so as tradition has it, we provide you with our monthly 3D printing news. It was an interesting month with some fun new 3D printer announcements, the usual amount of Kickstarter projects and loads of fun design challenges. Let’s take a dive into the details…

First, let’s have a look at the new 3D printers that were announced this month. First up was the new FDM (Fused Deposed Modeling) 3D printer by Stratasys called Mojo. It’s one of the 3D printers that looks and acts most like a traditional 2D printer due to its ease of use. Stratasys has vastly simplified several key user interaction points, both in hardware and software and is offering the printer at a cost price of $9,900. Still a bit steep for the individual home user, but an interesting price for small business owners and creatives.

The other noteworthy 3D printer that got announced this month was the Objet30 Pro by Objet. At first glance it really reminded me of its bigger brother

Materialising Minecraft Dreams

Today we would like to highlight the work of one of our dear colleagues at Materialise called Sander. He’s a fan of Minecraft and happens to work at a 3D printing company so the following was obviously going to happen someday… With help of a software solution called Mineways, Sander was able to create a bridge between his creations in Minecraft and our 3D printers. The results and Sander’s story can be seen below.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Who is Sander?

I’m a software engineer working for Materialise. In my free time I’m involved in several music activities and I spend quite some time behind my PC programming and playing games.

How did you discover 3D printing?

My current employment brought me into contact with 3D printing. I was not exposed to it before then.

What brought you to Minecraft and which realms do you command in there?

It is kind of strange but my cynicism brought me to Minecraft. When I heard about it first I didn’t believe such a simpl

A creative journey by the students of Sint Lucas Antwerp

Back in February we received a visit from some students of the Sint Lucas Art School in Antwerp as part of their creative design week. The students formed part of first and second bachelor year jewelry design courses and got introduced to the possibilities of 3D printing. They were then given an external 3-day workshop by guest-teacher Fabien Franzen to teach and guide them with Moi 3D: an easy to use CAD design package. With their new-found knowledge the students could now start transforming their traditional works of art into 3D designs that would eventually be 3D printed at i.materialise.

Their objective was to evolve their traditional designs from a previous assignment into a 3D printed version of it. The end result was a collection of miniature kitchen and table appliances that was brought forth as a unified collection.

All the above pictures were taken by photographers Bart Vermaercke and Roger Laute.

As for those of you who like to work with poly

Meet the Designer: Josh Azevedo

Meet Josh Azevedo, a man who’s driven by love and decided to use 3D printing to translate his deepest feelings for his wife to be, Heather. We met Josh last year when he came to use with the idea of 3D printing a lovely set of gnomes in multicolor. Ever since that moment, we kept on seeing more of his lovely work come to life through our printers. Today we would like to share Josh’s story with our community and highlight his magnificent 3D printed work that (we can safely say this) comes from deep down in his heart.

Here’s what Josh has to say…

Tell us a bit about yourself? Who is Josh Azevedo?

I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. After high school in 1996 I attended Clackamas Community College for some general education courses. On my own, I played with some 3d programs, just cause it looked cool and so I fell in love with 3d modeling. After a short break from the community college, I enrolled in the Art Institute of Portland were I graduated with a Bachelor of Sc

Makies: The doll you designed made real

Today is a big day for making-pioneers toy-lovers and 3D printing enthusiasts: MAKIES Alpha is live!

MakieLab founder Alice Taylor left her job at Channel 4 to pursue her start up dream. One or two years ago, she came to visit us, talked about her start up, and printed some prototypes. And now that dream has become reality!

MakieLab has been working hard to give you features like cloth customisation, achievements, hundreds of new items and outfits… It seems there are 100 Alpha Edition MAKIES up for grabs and the shop is now open. Start creating the first batch of 3D printed action dolls EVER to be made. A MAKIE of 10” high, 3D printed, big-eyed will cost you £99 inc VAT.

So get your asses off to http://makie.me and follow them on Twitter through @makielab. And of course, congratulations Alice for pulling this off!

Father’s Day 3D Challenge

With Mother’s Day just around the corner, we’re already preparing for Father’s Day. So, we’ve teamed up with our friends at Tinkercad for the “Thanks, Dad 3D Challenge!”

From now until Friday, June 1st at 12 midnight P.T., create a design on Tinkercad for Father’s Day, take a screenshot of it and upload it on their Facebook challenge page along with a link to your design posted in the caption.

One winner will be selected from the top 5 designs with the most votes. The winner will receive a 3D print of their design in time for Father’s Day on June 17th AND a voucher for 100€ in 3D printing.

And because every dad is special, we’ve decided to give each person who enters the challenge a promo code good for a 15% discount on a 3D printout. Oh yeah!

Here are a few rules to get you started:

  • Only one entry per person, please.
  • Your design must be your own creation and not a re-tinker.
  • Something about dad should be included in your design. “Best Dad!” “My Hero!” “I

These are the Children’s Storybook Characters that will come to life

At the end of March we announced a wonderful multicolor design challenge with the magnificent Digital Tutors. The objective was to create your own interpretation of your favorite children’s storybook character. Needless to say, the participants blew us away with the amazing quality of their entries that we could see in their “in progress” forum page. Today we are very proud to showcase you the winners now that the challenge has come to an end and we’ve collectively managed to pick our top 3 designs. So without further ado… The winning designs that we will 3D print…

Ronia the Robber’s Daughter by DT Community member FLYNN
See the work in progress here and the final entry.

Billy Goats Gruff by DT Community member madics@madics
See the work in progress here and the final entry.

The Very Full Caterpillar by DT Community member timeRemapper
See the work in progress here and the final entry.

We would like to congratulate the winning challengers and also thank a

Using i.materialise to 3D print a metal object

Christopher Barnatt (www.explainingthefuture.com) is a futurist, author, videographer, and Associate Professor of Computing and Future Studies in Nottingham University Business School.  We recently stumbled upon one of his videos where he talked about using i.materialise to 3D print  a metal object.

In the video you’ll see how Christopher models a carbon nanotube in Lightwave 3D and uploads it on i.materialise. He shows the ordering process and the unboxing of the model when it arrives. Whether you’re new at all of this or not, we think it’s a great video that shows how easy an online 3D printing service can be. Christopher Barnatt definitely knows how to explain the future!

After finishing the video, he discovered how easy it was to create a designer page and offer the carbon nanotube for sale in our gallery.

Babyboom

Wonder why you didn’t hear recently from David on this blog, nor Karen when in need for technical support? Currently both have  other priorities. Karen gave birth to a little girl named Lotte and David is the proud father of Sebastian and all this within one week.  While they are trying to get used of their new role in life, our website manager Franky takes the lead for the blog and our support engineer Sofie will try to answer your questions. Our congratulations to the new parents.