Who is (y)our director?
Hello,
My name is Miranda Bastijns and because I am the oldest of the i.materialise team, already have some grey hair, and don’t know how to design in 3D, the others call me boss.
I am also a dedicated fan of 3D printed objects, which is no wonder after having spent the last 13 years of my career at Europe’s largest 3D printing company.
As general marketing manager for Materialise, I have lived through the evolution from technical and medical applications of additive manufacturing, to the 3D printing of consumer goods. I have seen 3D printed dashboards, surgical drill guides, and washing machine parts pass by and now I get to see the creations of individuals as well.
I have seen many wonderful objects emerging from our 3D printers and it has been a source of frustration not being able to make them myself. Now, with i.materialise there is a super team behind me, able to develop all kind of tools that can help me, and others like me, turn our creativity into tangibl
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
Happy new year to everyone in 3D printing land!
Dear people in 3D printing land, we”ve had a fantastic year and hope you have too. We”ve grown incredibly rapidly, especially these last few months. This has brought us into contact with some incredibly sophisticated and beautiful designs. We”ve also been introduced to some incredibly talented designers and inventors and can”t wait to see what they will make with us in the new year. We would like to thank you, our supporters for this year. To the thousands of people that have used i.materialise, blogged about us, tweeted about us and told your friends about us, thank you. This means a lot to us.  We”ve got some very exciting things we”re working on right now and hope to welcome many more people to i.materialise in the year to come. We”re looking forward to 2011 and think it will be the most exciting year in 3D printing”s history.  We want to wish you all a happy new year!
i.materialise will be offline on the 27th
We”re sorry to have to inform you that the i.materialise website will be offline on the 27th of December. We will be offline from 6:30 CET in the morning until 16:00 CET in the afternoon. During that period there will be major electricity works going on inside the Materialise HQ. We know this is a very long time to be offline and apologize for any inconvenience.
Image by Wonderlane, Creative Commons, Attribution
The Year of 2010 in 3D Printing: An Overview
To my abject horror there was no “year in review” for 3D printing. I decided to right this wrong and produce this one. I’ve tried to be as unbiased and inclusive as possible. If I’ve missed something, feel free to point it out in the comments and I’ll add it. 2010 was a miraculous year in 3D printing. Thousands of people have bought and made RepRaps and Makerbots en tens of thousands use 3D printing services such as i.materialise to 3D print their own creations. (more…)
i.materialise buys a Makerbot!
Our software development team and most of our customer services team are in Kiev, Ukraine. Since we don”t have a production facility there they aren”t surrounded by 3D printers like the rest of us here in Belgium. To compensate the team bought and built a Makerbot. One of the main reasons for getting it was to show job applicants going through the interview process a 3D printer in action. Franky (our designer) took some pictures of the wonderful little device while he was over there. The team loves it and enjoyed building it very much.
The first thing the team 3D printed was the Materialise Ukraine logo.
Maksym, one of the builders reports that, “It took 3 evenings * 3 hours each * 5.5 people = 49.5 man hours to assemble the thing. The build went smoothly but they did have some issues,
- Initially it was difficult for plastic to stick to the platform:
- When the structure is flat and thick it starts to deform and peel off the platform
- Small details can cause plastic
Eric van Straaten exhibition
i.materialise Community Member Eric van Straaten is part of a joint exhibition called Zilverlingen in Haarlem the Netherlands. Eric”s 3D printed work will be displayed until the 10th of December in the “provinciehuis” in Haarlem.
One of Eric”s works on display is pictured here and called Glaucoma. It is 3D printed with Zcorp and depicts Glaucus, a merman. The statue was inspired by the Greek myth whereby Glaucus, a fisherman, was transformed into a merman. He ate a magical herb that brought fish back to life and this transformed him. The unquenchable thirst it gave him caused him to have to live in the sea. Quite the reversal of fortune for our fisherman. He does go on to become a minor underwater god and fall in love with a beautiful nymph. The nymph then runs away because she feels more than a little stalked. He goes to another nymph called Circe to help him. Sadly, Circe falls in love with Glaucus and turns the rival nymph into a six headed sea monster. This monster is ca
Google SketchUp 3D printed lamp Design Challenge winners announced!
The results for our Google SketchUp 3D printed lamp Design Challenge are in. This is our most successful Design Challenge so far with 55 entries. What’s more the entries were of a very high level and represented very different interpretations of what a lamp is and what it could be. Most lamps were very well engineered and would actually work well as 3D printed lamps. Most importantly, we’ve seen some very beautiful designs. Within the i.materialise team there were very different ideas and Sandra and the team at Sketchup had their say too. I’ve personally never found it this hard to judge a contest before. The voting and discussions made for a very close judging. We think that all the entrants can rightfully be proud of themselves because of the high value of their work. We hope that they enjoyed designing an entire product for this challenge and would like to invite everyone back for our next Challenge.
Please look at the gallery here where you can see all the entrants.
The top 3
3D printed moveable toy dog Oh Dog
Brazillian students Pedro Figueiredo and Bruna Milam needed to do a graduation project for their Industrial Design course at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. They opted to make a toy 3D print using i.materialise. The duo used functional mechanisms and customization possibilities on the toy to increase its effectiveness and value. The toy’s name is Oh Dog! and he is a sad dog with an absurd cone collar with a mechanical iris on his neck. Pedro and Bruna are now seeing if they can turn their whacky dog into a business. They also would like to thank Karen and Vlad of our customer servies team for all the help both gave them in repairing the file and helping them with the engineering of the Dog. We wish them a lot of luck and congratulate them on a great product! We would like to thank Chris Lefteri for including a reference to i.materialise in his book Making It: Manufacturing Techniques for Product Design, which is how Pedro and Bruna found us in the first place.
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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.
