Parallellepipeda
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
i.materialise team wishes everyone Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! We have a lot of things planned for 2010, and aim to continue making 3D printing as easy as printing on paper. We are looking forward to seeing more of your creations being materialized with i.materialise. Happy Holidays! i.materialise team
Why i.materialise was born
1985. For the first time I was invited to my girlfriend”s parents house and had to find an original gift for the Christmas party. Pondering many items to shop for, I could not find anything that really fitted the occasion. I finally decided to make something myself. Somewhat naive, I risked hitting the limitations of my creativity and skills, but I decided to imitate some artifacts seen on a previous holiday in Spain.
I made a statue of my bird watching girlfriend and her dog with FDM (Fumbling Deposition Modeling), a technique by which you deposit liquid metal paste on a folded wire structure. (No computer involved yet, but a quite similar technique entered the market 9 years later to become the most selling additive manufacturing machine). While most at the party probably were not rating my artistic capacities very high, the gift was enthusiastically accepted.
Even better, nearly 25 years and 3 teenagers later, we have already consumed many coffee machines, washing m
Top lamp designs for November 2009
Hello everyone, It’s been almost a month since we launched our beta. During this time, we have been astonished by some of the designs we have received and produced with our “Create your own” functionality. Here are some of the lamp models we produced in November for our customers. In 3rd place is the TulipK lamp. What makes the lamp so unique is the fact it can be unfolded, like a flower opens up. Not even our .MGX lamps do that! Yet :0,,) (more…)
Brussels Girl Geek Dinner #19
Last week, our colleagues at .MGX hosted the 19th edition of the Brussels Girl Geek Dinner. Girl Geek Dinners are events for females who class themselves as girly and geeky. Girl Geeks have a keen interest in technology and enjoy the networking aspect of the events, which are always light hearted and fun. You can read all about past and present Girl Geek Dinners on their official blog. The topic of the #BGGD19 (as referred to on Twitter) was ”How to grow design by using 3D technology”.
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i.materialise first week in media
We would like to say thanks to several internet websites and resources that published our news during the first days of our beta launch. Matt @ No-retro blog with his comprehensive first review of our service. Bre @ Thingiverse with our press release on his blog. We have also shared some of our models with the thingiverse community. You can check out our models here. Duann @ Ponoko for posting our press release there. Franco @ RhinoJungle for posting a blog post about our Rhino plugin. And MilkOrSugar team for a review of our service on their website. Thanks guys. i.materialise team
The holiday idea
There is a little over a month left until the holiday season, and it is time to start thinking about holiday presents for your loved ones. But what could be a truly awesome holiday gift for someone who is important to you? Well, we came up with a few things that should help you out in making a proper gift. First of all, the gift should be personal, and hopefully something that the other person feels passionate about. Second, on most occasions it is great if you could get something unique, or possibly create something unique, something that can truly transcend your feelings and appreciation of that person you will give it to, whether it’s your boyfriend or your mother. (more…)
The Creation lamp
And finally the third winner voted by the BlenderArtists community Xander Clerckx coming from Belgium with the Creation lamp shade, and indeed a great design. Just the lampshade without a lamp base looks astonishing. Some of the guys on the team thought it might be a good idea to build it in bronze, but transparency and bronze do not really go together. In the end we settled for polyamide. We had to do some additional adjustments to the model before we could put it into production. Our support handled those in cooperation with Xander, the result is an astonishing lamp with nice shadow effects. (more…)
Cappuccino lamp
A Cappuccino Lampshade by Andres Roppa coming all the way from Uruguay, check out his page @ www.andresroppa.com. The lamp was designed in Blender and turned out to be stunning. The design is actually an exploding cappuccino mug. Very original and one of our favorites so far! A great idea materialised. For this particular lampshade we decided to use translucent epoxy because we wanted to give it a brownish look and feel of cappuccino. Translucent Epoxy allowed us to paint the transparent shade with brownish colors making this shade a unique, one of a kind piece of art. The properties of material made it possible to make the shade semi transparent. I previously mentioned that we usually use polyamide as our preferred material for lampshades, but if we were to paint polyamide in brown, all transparency would have been lost. Translucent Epoxy is a more expensive material, and impregnating the printed model with color takes up additional time, but the achieved result is totally w
Clone lamp
We are happy to present the winners of the blenderartists.org lamp contest that we started several weeks ago. During the contest we have received a number of great submissions (you can view all of them on our Picasa album) and we are truly happy with the results. We greatly appreciate everyone’s participation, and as a thank you, we decided to make a discount on our service during the BETA starting November 9th. So, if you have a nice design in mind and want it to materialised, it might be just the right time! Once you upload your model the price will be generated automatically for you including the discount. Without further ado here is first winner of the contest: Clone lamp by Irwin Quemener from France. You can check out his website @ cloneproduction.net. This lampshade was built in polyamide, which is a strong and durable material. We usually use polyamide in our .MGX lamp shades because of its durability and strength. (more…)
