Entering Metal Month
It’s the beginning of a new month and with it comes the beginning of a new time… a time to dive into the wonderful metallic materials that we offer here at i.materialise. Yes… this is our METAL MONTH where you get to enjoy our Stainless Steel, Titanium, Silver & Gold while witnessing the launch of even more metallic materials throughout the month. There are two wonderful design challenges with one of them starting today! And as cherry on top, we are offering a 10% discount on all metal orders with the use of a promo code. Do you like where this is going? Great! Let’s dive into the details…
The Metal Awesomeness you will find in our gallery
To give our community a better overview of what Metal Month is all about, we have put together a theme page in our gallery where you can browse what our designers have come up with in our metal materials. Below you’ll find some examples up close, and don’t forget to have a look around in the gallery for further inspiration!
Evaluating our lasers and their cost slicing capabilties
Last month we introduced the temporary pricing formula for our laser sintered polyamide & alumide designs that would fit within a bounding box of 125cm3. The community’s response was quite positive and this was definitely reflected in our numbers. As promised, we said that this would be a temporary trial and that we would evaluate its results afterwards. The month of May is over and so that’s exactly what we’ve started doing now.
In the meantime we have decided to still offer this nice pricing formula for polyamide & alumide designs that fit within a bounding box of 50cm3. This offer will continue to exist during our evaluation period and might change as time goes by. So to quickly recap…
- For any design that fits within a bounding box of 50cm3, you will always pay a standard price of 12 euros
- If you decide to 3D print multiples of that same design, you simply add 4 euros per copy on top of the start-up price of 12 euros (this means that if you want your design 3D printed
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
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.
TEDxLeuven – Wilfried Vancraen
On March 29th, Wilfried Vancraen (CEO Materialise), took the stage at TEDxLeuven. He showed how 3D printing is not only reshaping how things are made, but also our way of life. In this video, this 3D printing pioneer shares his insights on how this rapidly expanding technology has the power, not to become a future form of mass consumption, but to create a better quality of life on a grand scale. Enjoy the movie!
