Begin typing your search above and press return to search. Press Esc to cancel.

3D Printing Blog

The i.materialise blog keeps you updated about outstanding 3D designs, the newest 3D printing technologies and the best 3D modeling software tutorials.

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

Free stl viewer helps in making your model 3D print ready

MiniMagics can help you in making your model 3D print ready when you have a model in STL format.
A summary of the features of MiniMagics is available at the download site.

But especially 1 feature can allow you to save precious time.
A model has to be ”watertight” before we can 3D print it.
Watertight means that all edges of the triangles of which your model consists of need to have a mutual edge with another triangle.

When the model is not watertight, our i.materialise service might not be showing a price online.
Our server tries to ”fix” the uploaded model and make it watertight automatically but when the gaps between 2 edges of triangles is too big, the fixing process might fill up the hole in a way that it effects the geometry of the model too much. So we limit the fixing within the boundaries that it is safe to fix.

Why don’t we show prices for models that are not watertight ?

Models with bad edges or holes will produce incorrect price parameters and hence inco