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Delight with your very own 3D light

Announcing the Google SketchUp & i.materialise 3d printed Lamp Design Challenge.

Designers can enter to create and win their own lamp using Google SketchUp. The top 3 designers win their very own lamp 3D printed. The lamp comes complete with a light and base. The overall winner wins a Google SketchUp Pro 8 license. Check out the rules, how you can join and some examples on our Design Challenge page here.

We can”t wait to see how you surprise us with your very best in SketchUp product design skills. We’re looking for the most original lamp possible. How far will you take us? What will you make?

You can see some more lovely 3D printed lamp designs here on Flickr.

Meet your new community manager

Dear i.materialisers,

I would like to thank Alex for his hard work in initiating the i.materialise community and wish him well in the new studies he will be pursuing. I’m very proud and happy to take the baton from his hands and become your new Community Manager.

As your Community Manager, I hope to make your lives easier by helping you take your ideas and turn them into products. The next few months I will focus on making i.materialise an easier and more lively place to get things made. I will also be in charge of getting the word out and telling everyone about the great designs and products you make. At the same time I want to listen. I will call as many of you as I can to try to understand what it is that you need for us to be.

I thrive on feedback, and hope to get lots of it from you. If you have any questions, complaints or ideas please email me. I want you to consider me your employee. I work for you, our community, and I am tasked with making you as happy as possible.

Your new i.materialise Community Manager

As of today you will be hearing from Joris Peels quite often on this blog.

You might have heard of him before, as he is a well-known conversation partner in the on-line 3D printing community. We are happy to hear that he wanted to join us just a few weeks ago.

We are very glad he now wants to combine his knowledge of community & 3D printing with i.materialise & you.

Joris will be here to make your lives easier, keep you happy and grow our community significantly.

He will be in charge of improving:  our content, our marketing, PR, social media and most importantly in seeing to it that i.materialise is the best place for designers to get their products made.

If you have any suggestions & ideas you can email him at joris@i.materialise.com

Welcome to our team, welcome to our community.

Using Google SketchUp is a child’s play

Using SketchUp is child’s play! It is so intuitive that a child who has never seen Google SketchUp before manages to draw a table with a pot in: just 30 minutes ‘training’ included.

When I started using Google SketchUp mid 2009, I found it so easy that I used to say to everyone that my daughter of 9 years old would be able to design something in SketchUp. Last month, somebody asked me : “why can’t she try it ?”

So I took the challenge and …one evening, after supper, I launched Google SketchUp, called my daughter and showed the basic principles.
After 10 minutes  she took over the mouse, saying she was going to draw a table. 20 minutes later, she didn”t only have a colored table, but she managed to get a pot on the table as well.

FUN
To be honest, I was impressed by the speed she got familiar with the tools and her enthusiasm and fun she had during the modeling -the effect of the push-pull tool on her model made her laugh several times somehow-that I promised to 3D pri

Creating 3D printable objects with Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended

In April 2010 Adobe released the new Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended. One of the new features of that Photoshop version is the Repoussé, a tool that allows you to create 3D objects extruding texts, selections, paths and layers masks. To celebrate the CS5 release, Adobe 3D printed some souvenirs via i.materialise for the team that developed the Repoussé technology. Nikolai Svakhin, one of the Photoshop Developers, wrote a terrific tutorial on how to create 3D printable objects with Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended.

Adobe Photoshop is the world’s leading graphics editing program. Its extended version basically adds 3D capabilities to the program. One of those exciting new 3D capabilities is called Repoussé.

“Repoussé is a new research system for the interactive enhancement of 2D art with 3D geometry. Repoussé creates a 3D shape by inflating the surface that interpolates the input curves. By using the mean curvature stored at boundary vertices as a degree of freedom, a user is able to ma

THE ROBOTS ARE BACK

i.materialise recently sponsored the price for the Doga CG robot contest in Japan, by 3D printing the winning design.

Hiro, our Japanese colleague, had the chance to meet the winner, Yuunagi – to give his price and to ask him some questions. You can read his answers below, along with some pictures of his 3d printed robot character.

Yuunagi is a 3d model hobbyist active in Computer graphics since 6 years. He creates amazing renders of robot characters.

Hi Yuunagi, Did you enjoy the contest and the award?


“It was a great challenge, open for everyone to participate, also for beginners. Those challenges are a great chance to sharpen your 3D modeling skills. I will participate in the next one for sure.”


What do you think on your 3D printing model?


“I was surprised and excited to win the challenge. It’s amazing to see how my design came alive as a real model. It’s fun to touch it. I heard 3d printing is used a lot in the industry, but it