It’s smooth, it’s soft…it’s polished polyamide! Free finish for a month!
We’re happy to introduce white polished polyamide to take your designs a level higher. To celebrate we’re offering this finish for free until the 21st of March. Read all about it!
It’s a hard knock life, but i.materialise comes to the rescue and softens the edges a little bit…with polished polyamide! It feels smooth in your hands and it looks great since the building layers of the design aren’t that visible any more. Polished polyamide just gives that little extra touch and feel, which brings your design to a whole new level.
Polishing, also referred to as mechanical smoothing, is a special finishing process for polyamide. To achieve a polished finish, your model is put into a tumbler with small stones. While the tumbler vibrates at a high frequency the small stones smooth your model.
Tumbler stones will get your design perfectly polished.
You can clearly see the difference between the unpolished (left) and the polished (right) version.
…and the building layers are
Flexible 3D Printed Fashion Hits the Catwalk with Iris van Herpen, Julia Koerner and Materialise
Recently, on the catwalks of the Spring Fashion Week 2013 in Paris, 3D printing was again a major highlight in Iris van Herpen’s Haute Couture show, ‘VOLTAGE’. Collaborating with 2 pioneers of the 3D printing industry, the Dutch designer presented never-before-seen 3D printed Haute Couture. Van Herpen is without any doubt the leading lady of Haute Couture and 3D printed fashion.
COLLABORATION
Dutch designer Iris van Herpen’s eleven-piece collection featured two 3D printed ensembles, including an elaborate skirt and cape created in collaboration with artist, architect, designer and professor Neri Oxman from MIT’s Media Lab, and 3D printed by Stratasys. An intricate dress was also designed in collaboration with Austrian architect Julia Koerner, currently lecturer at UCLA Los Angeles, and 3D printed by Materialise, marking the second piece created together with Koerner and the ninth with Materialise .
A MATTER OF TIME
“I feel it’s important that fashion can be about much more
Featured Friday: Showing your 3D printed designs
Happy Friday everyone! Enjoy our featured designs.
Peter Donders made a lovely ring called Cloud10 in high gloss silver.
The second design is made by design studio 3D Materialize Ltd. It’s a bowl 3D printed in multicolor. “The essence of a relationship between men and women was a source of inspiration for our ‘Bowl Couple’. Both sides are in equal position and rely on each other like in a real relationship.”
Guido Mandorf made some more train parts in Prime Gray and painted them beautifully afterwards.
Finally, Rob Hocking made a lightning bolt shaped Quaternion Julia set in gold plated brass.
We hope you have an awesome weekend!
Don’t hesitate to put your own designs in the gallery. Maybe your design will be featured the next time?
Polyamide: Now available in pink!
Today on Valentine’s Day, we’re introducing something new to our color/finish range of polyamide: pink! That brings us to a total of 15, which is the amount of different options we offer to finish your favorite material.
Polyamide comes in a natural white color out of the 3D printer. But we know some of you like to bring some color into your designs. So, we’ve added pink to our range of dyed colors. Remember, you can now also dye bigger volumes with a bounding box up to 200 mm x 200 mm x 180 mm (instead of 150 x 150 x 150 mm). What’s even more: order a large (we’re talking over 150 x 150 x 150 mm) polyamide design in a color between February 11th and March 10th and get a 10 % discount on your next order! It’s finally time to print that huge piggy bank you’ve always wanted.
Are you eager to see and feel the pink material? Just buy one of our colored sample kits.
With 16 materials and over 70 finishes, i.materialise offers one of the widest material range
Valentine Story #3: Say it with 3D printed hearts
365 hearts for every day of the year, designer Marc van Megen sure has some love inside him.
We just loved the whole idea of the pendant and the ring from the first moment we saw it. The designer created it in gold plated brass for that special someone in your life. Just perfect for Valentine!
Van Megem: ” They symbolize the love you feel for someone, built up by the many little things you love the person for. The 365 hearts can also represent the 365 days in a year. Love and time merge in harmony in this meaningful design. You can wear eternal love, it has bonded mankind in beautiful ways.”
Tell us a bit about yourself? (Where did you grow up?)
Marc: «I was born in a little village, Blerick, situated in Limburg (The Netherlands), a district known for its friendliness and Burgundian lifestyle. I graduated at the Design Academy of Eindhoven.»
What do you do in your everyday life?
Marc: «I am an industrial designer and self-employed. My company is “Van Megen Product De
Valentine story #2: How to propose with the help of 3D printing
Hywel Vaughan and his girlfriend Sarah had been together for just over three years. As his New Years resolution of 2012, he decided to ask her to marry him. Being an industrial designer though, Hywel figured he could do something much better than just buying a ring from a shop.
Hywel has been so nice to post photos and instructions of how to make the ring on Instructables. It includes everything from buying the gem stone to the actual proposal! In December of 2012, he surprised Sarah with a trip to Bruges in Belgium. Sarah had no idea they were going anywhere until Hywel came down the stairs with packed bags and directed her to the taxi waiting outside! A brief Eurostar trip later, the couple was in Bruges walking next to the canals in the moonlight. At a quiet spot next to the ‘lovers lake’, he got down on one knee and asked her to marry him. She said yes, with the biggest smile he had ever known her to have.
“The finish on the ring was fantastic, and the accuracy of the product
Valentine story #1: Engaged with 3D printing
There’s nothing more romantic than an engagement story involving 3D printing. When we saw this story of Joris Donders in our mailbox; we had to share it with you!
«I’ve always been someone who tries to be creative in my own way and I couldn’t afford my proposal to be any less. I wanted to have something which would help us remind the moment every time we would look at it. A picture of course would have been too simple. At the same time I wanted something that could help me explain the question just in case that I was to nervous to say it myself. You never know how you’ll feel at such moments.»
«I didn’t exactly know what I was going to make, but then it hit me. As an engineer I knew about the 3D printing capabilities and someone pointed me towards i.materialise. I was expecting a lot of difficulties and a very high price but I couldn’t afford not to investigate. I had to know if it would be possible to design what I had in mind.»
JOKE
« Deep inside my own heart lied a questi
Plenty more possibilities in Polyamide!
It’s our second Material Monday and this month it’s all about polyamide. Find out more about dying larger pieces and get a sneak peek at our new color!
POLY…WHAT?
Polyamide is a very popular material and is constructed from very fine, white nylon powder. The technique to build your designs with this material is called ‘ laser sintering‘. The result is a strong, somewhat flexible material that can take small impacts and resist some pressure while being bent.
Pricewise, the material is quite affordable. All designs that fit within a bounding box of 125 cm3 and have a maximum dimension of 200 mm comes at 12,5 euro a piece. Examples of those designs are rings, iPhone cases, dices, earrings etc. If your models are larger, then pricing will mainly be based on the bounding box. Also, the more copies you order, the larger the discount.
Polyamide is typically used for small series of models, complex models, lamp shades, but we’ve also seen people use it for jewelry and accessories.
Featured Friday: Showing your 3D printed designs!
Happy Friday! Let’s go into the weekend with some wonderful new designs. Let’s hit it off with The Ring of The Monkey Pirate King.
Inspired by Pirates of the Carribean, Tintin, Monkey Island, and ancient Inca gold, Ben Dansie created this dazzling ring. 3D printed in silver (gloss finish) and hand finished with Liver of Sulphur for the dark patina.
Human White Matter Tracts
Prevue Medical presents the world’s first accurate model of the wiring of the human brain. It seems these structures have never been reproduced in 3D, until now. The model scale is 1:1 and shows various connections between parts of the brain. These connections are beneath the familiar gray matter, embedded in the white matter of the brain. The individual fibers are actually microscopic, so bundles of fibers are here represented by millimeter scale tracts.
Bogies for R Class Diesel
And last but not least, a nice work in progress from Richard from WA SN 3-1/2 Models. 3D p
3D printing a GoPro Scuba Mount
Described as the world’s most versatile camera, GoPro has sold over 3 million cameras over the past three years. It’s a camera that is quite unlike what you are used to. A GoPro is not meant to be handheld but to be mounted on surfboards, skateboards, helmets, bikes, and so on. And if the standard sold mounts are not your thing, you just design one and 3D print it. Just like Felipe De La Torre, a high school senior/scuba diver from Pacoima, California did.
“This was my first 3D printed design. I always found the technology really interesting… thought I’d give it a go. Honestly, it was a bit difficult for me to design this, considering I didn’t have much experience going into this. However I got ideas from similar mounts and figured I would make a derivative composed of multiple ideas. Luckily, it worked out in the end… the design was everything I thought it to be.” – Felipe De La Torre
Why a tool for his camera? Well… the real reason is that he just didn’t have the heart to dri
