FabLab visits i.materialise
Last week we had the honor of receiving some lovely members from Belgian and Dutch FabLabs. They came with their beautifully creative minds to get a glimpse of i.materialise and the facilities we have at our disposal while sharing grand ideas and concepts for the future.
FabLabs (short for Fabrication Laboratories) are a wonderful establishment around the world where creative minds can come together to try out new ideas and fabricate new things. This is also why you’ll find the use of 3D printing commonplace amongst the FabLabs. As we all know by now, not all 3D printers can be stored at a FabLab as it would need a tremendous space and a huge staff to keep it all running. This is where 3D printing services like i.materialise come in.
So to get a better understanding of i.materialise, we decided to give them an introductory presentation and a guided tour of the Materialise facilities where our guests got to meet our different 3D printers. Afterwards we shared some interesting
Winner of the Father’s Day Challenge Announced
On May 16th we announced a design challenge for Father’s Day where participants could design something fun for their father with the wonderful Tinkercad software package. The challenge got some fun and interesting entries on their Facebook challenge page but as always, there can only be one winner. After a public vote it was made clear that Tinkercad user Samuel McCulloch was the favorite who’ll end up giving his dad a 3D printed Vulcan Bomber.
The Vulcan Bomber made in Tinkercad by Samuel McCulloch
On behalf of i.materialise we congratulate Samuel for winning the challenge and we also congratulate all participants for being a wonderful bunch to their dads. Your fathers can be proud!
However… we’ll be the first ones to let you know to never give up and keep on trying and participating in more design challenges. There are constantly more of them being organized such as the Silver Bead Design Challenge that is currently running at i.materialise. For this design challenge you
Imaginarium brings us Silver Indian Beauties
Mumbai based Imaginarium invites you to take a trip to the beauties of Indian culture in 3D printed silver. Today marks the beginning of a wonderful jewelry collection that’s brought to you by these talented creative minds. We start off today with three wonderfully detailed silver pendants that can be yours for the amazing price of 49,90 Euros and more lovely designs are to follow soon.
So if you’re into Indian history and culture, have a look at Imaginarium’s great gallery items. A preview can be seen below.
Do these lovely pendants inspire your creative mind? Do you also like to 3D print in silver? Then don’t hesitate to take a shot at creating some nice silver jewelry yourself by participating in our Silver Bead Design Challenge. The top 3 winners gets a free print of their designs!
Putting the Machine in the Spotlight
i.materialise and Design Platform Limburg have joined hands to bring the magic of 3D printing to an exhibition at the C-Mine in Genk called The Machine. Anyone that happens to be in the region can visit the exhibition that centers around designing a new industrial revolution. To celebrate this nice event, i.materialise has 3D printed a set of artistic tiles that are spread through the expo. Examples of these are shown below.
And to make sure that it’s not just about showcasing 3D printing but also being a part of it, Design Platform Limburg and i.materialise have decided to organize a 7-day summer workshop for a lucky 10 designers.
Included in the workshop are the following things:
- An introduction to Solid Works software by Itay Ohaly with personal guidance and supervision for the creation of your design
- A Save as Design Challenge by Maya Ben David and Jon Stam centered around designing a personal souvenir of the past from the mines
- A set of open workshops that h
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
Meet the designer: Eric van Straaten
Today we offer you an in-depth look into one of our favorite designers: Eric van Straaten. His multicolor magic has continuously pushed the technology to its limits and has attracted countless of enthusiastic crowds to admire it. Therefore it comes as no surprise that we were more than happy to receive such a deep look into the mind behind the artist. It is with great pleasure that we present you with Eric’s deepest thoughts, feelings and visions told in his own words.
I don’t really think you need much of an introduction anymore as you ‘ve made quite a name for yourself at i.materialise, but what we would like to know is a bit about your background. Tell us a bit about the boy that became the man…
I was born in 1969 in the Dutch city of Leiden and grew up in Haarlem. From the age of about 17 I have always wanted to be an ‘artist’, and after a career that we call in Dutch ’12 trades, 13 accidents’ (more or less successful photographer, musician, actor, journalist, entrepren
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
Meet the Designer: Josh Azevedo
Meet Josh Azevedo, a man who’s driven by love and decided to use 3D printing to translate his deepest feelings for his wife to be, Heather. We met Josh last year when he came to use with the idea of 3D printing a lovely set of gnomes in multicolor. Ever since that moment, we kept on seeing more of his lovely work come to life through our printers. Today we would like to share Josh’s story with our community and highlight his magnificent 3D printed work that (we can safely say this) comes from deep down in his heart.
Here’s what Josh has to say…
Tell us a bit about yourself? Who is Josh Azevedo?
I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. After high school in 1996 I attended Clackamas Community College for some general education courses. On my own, I played with some 3d programs, just cause it looked cool and so I fell in love with 3d modeling. After a short break from the community college, I enrolled in the Art Institute of Portland were I graduated with a Bachelor of Sc
