Marloes ten Bhömer 3D prints individualised shoes
One thing I’ve always been interested in 3D printing shoes. To make custom made shoes that look exactly how people want them, that fit exactly and that are customized for my weight and walk is a dream of mine. So I was happy to read about designer Marloes ten Bhömer”s Rapidprototypedshoe.
The shoe is intended as a 3D printed couture shoe customized for the individual. The shoe is also designed to wear and break down in layers so it can be augmented and repaired. I really think that 3D printing individualised shoes is an industry waiting to happen. If you are a shoe designer and want to get involved with our efforts in 3D printing shoes, please email joris (at) i.materialise.com
Marloes has a lot of very creative and beautiful shoe designs on her site here.
via Core77.
3D Printing a Xeno-coRPus
Koen Boonen, who works in HR and prevention at Materialise made a wonderfully arty and geometric piece called Xeno-coRPus using i.materialise. The model cost 44 Euro to make using Zcorp 3D printing.
“This model is an adaptation of the Julia-fractal in a xenodream metamorph. I optimised the mesh in Cinema4D, created some renderings, and the result was so appealing that I simply had to have this object! The i.materialise result is stunning:Â it is heavier than expected and has the look and feel of a rough stone sculpture.
The object now fills the void in my living room like an alien artifact: wonderful and strange…
Koen”
Beautiful Modeler by Interactive Fabrication, Rocks! Multitouch design for 3D printing using your iPad!
Beautiful Modeler is a tool that combines the iPad with a Mac and turns it into a wonderful 3D modeling tool. I think its absolutely fantastic and a real portent of what is possible. The iPad acts as a controller and be moving and slanting the iPad you can change the orientation of your model on screen. Each model has a set of points and you can manipulate and change these points with your fingers. This is how easy a lot of 3D modeling tools have to be are we to get everyone started with 3D printing. And yes, the output from this nifty, and open source tool, can be exported to STL and 3D printed! I adore Beautiful Modeler by Interactive Fabrication!
Check out the video of it in action below:
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
A 3D Printed Individualized Fluid Vase
Supabold’s FluidVase is one of the most beautiful things ever made with i.materialise. This fully customizable art object lets you take falling and colliding water and turn that into a vase. You can learn about the Fluid Vase here or play with the online tool on the Supabold site here.
Choose your container, choose where you want to pour, determine how much water you would like and watch the water dance. Replay the clear animation and select your favorite frame. This frame can now become a real object thanks to 3D printing. The 3D printing process used is Selective Laser Sintering. Each Fluid vase will be different but the size can be up to 9.5cm by 9.5 cm by 21 cm. The Fluid Vase costs $560 (399 Euro).
When designer Fung Kwok Pan first made this with us we were thrilled. When we saw his fun interaction & design tool we were happier still. Our happiness turned to pride when DesignBoom, PSFK, Wired, FastCoDesign and many other publications joined in a chorus of approval fo
dancing & wrestling robot Wit Laser augmented by 3D printing
Appearing at the Dekinnoka! 7 Robot Pro — Wrestling Competition is Wit Laser. Wit Laser is a combat robot, specifically a humanoid wrestling robot decked out using 3D printing. The robot”s head and torso body parts are made with Selective Laser Sintered polyamide parts. I for one salute our attractive robot overlords(and would like to point out that the Skynet & Cyberdyne Systems T shirts I own are not taunts). You can see Wit Laser below showing off some awesome break dance moves that will hopefully help his wrestling. It seems like our man in Japan Hiro is successfully continuing his journey to introducing the Japanese robot world to 3D printing.
3D printed Christmas decoration free with every order
Thanks to you we”re in a celebratory mood. We grew rapidly once again this month. To celebrate this with you we”re going to be giving away Christmas decorations with every order. Designer Nicolas de Jaegere made these lovely 3D printed Christmas decoration for you. The decorations come in 3 jolly variants: Snowflake, Reindeer and Santa that you can hang in your Christmas tree. The decorations are made in one piece and you can jiggle yours to look on in amazement at the trapped Santa or Rudolph. One of the many new people? You can upload a design to see its price here.
This offer is valid from today until the 8th of December. The offer is valid until our previously 3D printed stocks of decorations last. The decorations have a diameter of 8 Centimeter and are made with Selective Laser Sintering. We”re not selling these decorations they”re available only to our loyal community.
We hope you enjoy your little gift. Thank you so much for making it possible!
Will we 3D print entire cars?
Stratasys, the 3D printer manufacturer, has just announced that it will be the first to 3D print an entire car. This 3D printed automobile body will also actually go into production. Stratasys is making the car together with Kor Ecologic.
Kor Ecologic aims to make a fuel efficient, “electric / liquid-fuel hybrid reaches more than 200 mpg, highway and 100 mpg, city in U.S. gallons with either gasoline or ethanol (250 mpg highway /125 mpg city, Imperial gallons).” The car will be called the Urbee Hybrid. The Urbee competed in the 2010 X-Prize competition and will now made for real with Stratasys” FDM technology. The car will be 3D printed in ABS plastic.
This is a big step forward in Direct Digital Manufacturing. Hopefully the coming years will be peppered by more examples of people making short production runs of actual products using 3D printing. Because this sort of thing is exactly what we want to do too. You can read more on the Stratasys site here.
News via RedEyeTim
What is a 3D Printer Bounding Box?
One of the the biggest issues we have is to get people to think in 3D. Even though we operate in a 3D world thinking and designing in 3D is difficult for a lot of people. People can also quite easily visualize or feel a Kilo or a Liter but a cubic CM is much more difficult. People miscalculate volume all the time and have a hard time understanding the relative size of a lot of things. I have no idea why this is but I know it effects us sometimes also. In order to better help us visualize and understand the lamps that people can make with our design your own lamp tool, Franky actually made a physical bounding box. A bounding box is a rectangle that contains your entire 3D model. In 3D printing we use the term a lot to indicate how large a particular thing is or can be. Franky took some tape, cardboard and Styrofoam and made us a bounding box so we could imagine, feel and see the maximum size of our lamps in front of us. I thought it was a funny way of helping us to make decisions that
3D prints & a Creme Brulee torch part 2
Immediately after posting our Creme Brulee torch video we knew we made a mistake. We wanted to show you that Ultem was a significant material because it was certified for use in commercial aircraft. We wanted to illustrate that by burning an Ultem part with a Creme Brulee torch. Several commenters and bloggers however saw the video and went, “whats the big deal here?” We realized that we probably spend a bit more time burning thermoplastics than other people. To adress the issue we went back and made another video for you. In this video you can see a direct comparison between a standard 3D printed ABS part and the Ultem part. You can see that although the Ultem part does indeed deform it does not give off significant fumes and it acts as a fire retardant. I hope that this video is clearer!
