The Periodic Table of Materials
At the same time, we put a lot of effort into making detailed information pages about each material. This should help you find the material that best suits your needs as a designer or inventor.
So, we’ve described all the materials, made some sample pictures, collected information about coloring options, thought about the typical use of a certain material, and created videos about different 3D printing technologies. For steel and titanium we wrote design guides to get you on the right track. And we did even more, but we”d rather let you discover that for yourself.
Learning about mater
3D printing a supercar, the Citroën GT
One of the best selling and most exciting racing games out there is Gran Turismo 5. And one of the most remarkable cars in that racing game has to be the GT by Citroën. In 2008, Citroën, Polyphony (the makers of the game) and Materialise joined forces and the virtual racecar was turned into a real fully-functional car. Later that year, the five-meter long concept car made its global premiere at the Paris Motor Show. We do a lot of 3D printing work on concept cars but are sadly almost never allowed to talk about it. Luckily, this time, we’ve been given permission to show you how 3D printing was used to create a large portion of this supercar.
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Who is (y)our Website Manager?
I’m Franky, a 30 years old and I’m the website manager of i.materialise. I wireframe, do some graphical design, occasionally write requirements for our developers, find interesting topics to blog about, take photos of all the nice things you design, make videos…and more. I love to talk about 3D printing, it’s fascinating and everyone deserves to know it exists.
Before joining Materialise, I worked as an editor for a video post-production company in Brussels. After a few years of TV shows, commercials and music videos, I decided to make a career switch. Thus I traded video editing for the exciting world of 3D printing. I barely knew what it was, but it sounded like the coolest thing in the world. Actually, it still does.
I consider myself not an expert at something but someone who knows a little bit about everything. I have college degrees in online journalism, multimedia and audiovisual communication.
When I’m not at work, I’m probably in the gym doing strength and c
Objectified – A documentary about industrial design
“Objectified is a documentary about industrial design; it’s about the manufactured objects we surround ourselves with, and the people who make them. On an average day, each of us uses hundreds of objects. (Don’t believe it? Start counting: alarm clock, light switch, faucet, shampoo bottle, toothbrush, razor…) Who makes all these things, and why do they look and feel the way they do? All of these objects are “designed,” but how can good design make them, and our lives, better?” – Gary Hustwit –
According to director Gary Hustwit, the term objectified has two meanings. One is ‘to be treated with the status of a mere object.’ But the other is ‘something abstract expressed in a concrete form,’ as in the way a sculpture objectifies an artist’s thoughts. It’s the act of transforming creative thought into a tangible object, which is what designers in this film do every day. But maybe there’s a third meaning to this title, regarding the ways these objects are affecting us and our e
3D printing in contemporary art: Nick Ervinck
3D printing is becoming more and more the technology of choice for artists nowadays. Artists’ models often employ a variety of different materials involving small and intricately detailed pieces with various shapes and curves, and special kinds of finishes that accentuate artistic elements. 3D printing allows artists to manufacture forms and shapes that cannot be fabricated in any other way. A lot of them are collaborating with Materialise because sometimes the unthinkable becomes a tangible reality. Meet Nick Ervinck.
“I make sculptures that are on the edge of the physical and digital realm in terms of sculpture and architecture. The art of sculpting has evolved through history with the help of technology. Because architects design mainly with computers now, a new type of language is created. In light of this, I see this new world of architecture as a precursor for what will happen in the world of art and sculpture. It’s great that high-tech companies like Materialise are help
5 Amazing full sized furniture pieces made with 3D printing
3D printing seems to be all over the media lately. I already mentioned it in my previous blog post ”FULL PRINT3D”, but everyone writing these articles seems to be showing only a glimpse of what the technology is capable of. So why not write a series of blog posts to show the versatility of 3D printing? That’s what I thought. I’d like to start with the subject of furniture because I believe 3D printing is taking furniture design to a whole other level. Just ask French designer Patrick Jouin, who actually created the first large scale scale furniture pieces through 3D printing technology together with. MGX. It’s no surprise Materialise’s big mammoth stereolithography 3D printers had something to do with it. Here are, in no particular order, 5 amazing furniture piece made with 3D printing.
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FULL PRINT3D
Earlier this week The New York Times published a nice article called ‘3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution’. Although the article is getting a lot of attention, it only shows you a glimpse of what 3D printing can actually do. If you feel like discovering a whole lot more, you should visit the FABRICATION LABORATORY in Barcelona and experience all the 3D digital manufacturing technologies up close.
Fabrication Laboratory. New scenarios for 3D design and production is a series of events that are held at the Disseny Hub Barcelona (www.dhub-bcn.cat) from 15 June 2010 to 29 May 2011. With FABRICATION LABORATORY the DHUB presents an overview of the new 3D digital manufacturing technologies, a phenomenon that’s constantly evolving and leading to radical changes in design and production processes worldwide. The idea of the DHUB is to show the reflection on how these machines and software allow a new kind of fabrication that involves a different way of designing and programming.
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
Mind-blowing 3D printed fashion
How The Tripods come alive with 3D printing
Do you know ‘The Tripods’? Well, Martin – one of our German customers – surely does. As a long time fan of the BBC science fiction series, broadcasted in the 1980s, he has just printed his childhood dream through i.materialise. That dream was owning a model of a Tripod.
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