Another 3D printed Cardioidal Variation by fdecomite on Flickr.

(via The 10 Most Favorited 3D Printed Products of 2012 on Shapeways - Shapeways Blog on 3D Printing News & Innovation)

#art #sculpture #polygons #nyc

Anatomica di Revolutis: The 3D Printing Revolution on Kickstarter

Joshua Harker has just launched Anatomica di Revolutis on Kickstarter, following up on his massively successful Crania Anatomica Filigre: Me to You project that used Shapeways 3D printing to realize his art.

My latest work entitled “Anatomica di Revolutis” is in honor of the developing 3rd Industrial Revolution. My art has been inspired, enabled, & defined by it. The resources & networks of the revolution are my tools, medium, & art gallery. I’m here to present my art within the context of how & why I make it, not on a shelf or wall in a gallery, but within the current landscape of the public psyche & part of a larger event.

3D Modeler for Hire vs 3D Modeler Needed : Design for 3D Print When You Can’t Design for 3D Print

Many people want to 3D Print their ideas with Shapeways but do not (yet) know how to 3D model their designs. Luckily, at the same time there are thousands of incredibly talented 3D modelers in the Shapeways community, some of whom are offering their 3D modeling services for hire to help those people make their ideas for real with 3D Printing.

We have seen some AMAZING products come to life thanks to these connections made on Shapeways from Siri to shoes (many shoes), trophies for bad sportsmanship, skateboarding elephants, Bronies and Hybride sculptures, whether starting from sketch, fixing an existing model or creative collaboration it is a great way for modelers to stretch their skills and help others 3D print ideas.

If you, as a 3D modeler want to offer your 3D modeling services on the forum post the following details in the forum:  

About me:
Expertise:
Experience:
Portfolio:

Pay Rate:

Note: Please use your own discretion when entering into agreements with other users. Shapeways is not liable for any transactions that take place between users in the forum, we just want to make it easier for you to find each other.

If you have an idea for something you want to 3D Print but do not know how to 3D model, or if you have a 3D model that needs some love to make it 3D printable, you can either post your project in the 3D modeler needed forum or take a look at designers offering 3D modeling services to find the right person to help you out.

Again, Shapeways is not liable for any transactions that take place between users in the forum, we just want to help you get started 3D Printing.

If you want to learn to design for 3D Printing, take a look at our tutorials page, play with one of the easy creators developed by Shapeways and our friends or take a class in the Shapeways Skillshare School…. 

The Disconcerting 3D Printed Teeth Tea Cup

Do you want to sip high tea from the Teeth Tea Cup 3D Printed in Ceramics by Shapeways?

On Proper Usage and Inhibited Ingestion: Why is it that we find the cup so unappetizing? Could it have originated from survival tactics where we relate our proximity to another’s teeth as a threat of life, a reminder of predator and prey, poison and contamination? Is this object then successful in its design to prevent gluttonous behavior should food and drink only be offered in the cup? more information at Lily Su’s site.

How To Start 3D Printing With Shapeways from Autodesk’s 123D Apps

You can now 3D Print your designs with Shapeways from models created in Autodesk’s 123D range of free 3D applications including 123D, 123D Catch and 123D Sculpt.

Autodesk have been making 3D modeling accessible with a range of fantastic free tools to help you make your ideas for real.. Once you have created your 3D file in 123D, 123D Catch or 123D Sculpt you will need to create an account or log in to save it to ‘My Corner’ of Autodesk’s www.123dapp.com.

Once your designs are stored in the Autodesk cloud you can head on over to the fabricate page:

• Start a 3D Printing project
• Choose your design from ‘My Corner’
• Specify unit of measurements and scale
• Choose a 3D Printing service (hint: Shapeways)
• Log in with your Shapeways account (or register for a new one)
• Your 123D App produce model will now upload to Shapeways so you can 3D print in any of our materials.

Bathsheba Grossman Sculpture 3D Printed 6 Feet Tall

We all know Bathsheba Grossman’s 3D Printed sculptures are massive in the world of math art but now they are just, massive… Thanks to the D-Shape 3D Printer and a valiant attempt on Indiegogo , Bathsheba’s Rygo sculpture has been 3D Printed 6 foot tall and has now made it’s way to Vancouver (only Canadian Shapeways users can imagine the UPS duties on THIS delivery).

Tessellated Skulls of Matthew Day Jackson Reverse Evolution and the Digital Aesthetic

Introducing 3D Printed Black Elasto Plastic : I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rubber

It’s squishy, it’s flexible, it stretches, it bounces, it blends, it’s 3D Printed Black Elasto Plastic!!!!!

Black Elasto Plastic is our first fully flexible material! It is still in the experimental stages of development, and we are learning more about the possibilities and restrictions of this material each and every day. Design, order and give us feedback when your model arrives at your doorstep! This material will be on trial until the July 20th, 2012, so get your orders in soon. After the trial, we will review and decide whether to introduce it permanently, whether we need to change any design rules, etc.

Redesigning Reality: How 3-D Printing Is Shaping the Future of Art, Engineering, and Everything Else | Artinfo

Two interesting things happened this year. First, doctors in Belgium performed the country’s first face transplant. Second, Asher Levine, a young avant-garde fashion designer for the likes of Lady Gaga, produced a pair of radical sunglasses on-site during his New York Fashion Week show. What do a surgical procedure and a line of shades have in common? Both were made possible by additive manufacturing, also known as 3-D printing or rapid prototyping, a technique whose quickly expanding accessibility may have as much of a revolutionary influence on how we relate to manufactured objects as Ford’s assembly line.

It’s a space-age sounding process: The same way a printer produces a document based on a computer file, additive manufacturing devices create made-to-order objects based on a CAD file. There are a few variations to the technique, but they all operate by building an object layer by individual layer in a single process. Some 3-D printers pipe melted plastic through a nozzle in a process called fused deposition modeling (FDM); higher-tech methods, like stereolithography (SLA) run lasers through a vat of powdered material — metals, nylons, concretes — solidifying anything they touch; and then there’s selective laser sintering (SLS), which similarly runs a laser through a resin and solidifies it into a single object by binding each layer together. All of these allow for the creation of extraordinary complex designs with extraordinary ease for the average person.

Hailing from the 1980s, the technology isn’t exactly new, but it has been making inroads lately in both art and engineering, being used to manufacture prosthetic limbs, car parts, furniture, and jewelry. It’s also subject of “Print/3D,” an exhibition of objects at New York’s Material ConneXion that opened this week. “3-D Printing breaks away barriers in design that are challenged by the constraints of standard manufacturing or manual production,” show curator Susan Towers told ARTINFO. While the process still has some definite kinks to be worked out, it’s already being put to revolutionary use.

PROTOTYPING MADE EASY

Levine’s sunglasses are a fun example of how 3-D printing is expediting the prototyping process. Eschewing the costly and time-consuming steps of sketching a design and mailing revised models back and forth to a manufacturer in Italy, Levine used the Replicator, an affordable (relatively, at $1,200 a machine) home hobbyist tool by Brooklyn’s MakerBot to create his experimental sunglasses, made entirely of plastic, including the lenses.

“The fashion industry is stuck in this archaic method of manufacturing, while we’re on the cusp of a new method,” Levine told us. He also let us in on a secret: “I can’t sketch sunglasses.” Instead, he molded models from clay and subtly tweaked the designs using a CAD program — “move this in a bit, move this out a bit, make it a quarter-of-an-inch shorter” — input them into his Replicator, and had a revised version in just nine hours — more quickly, efficiently, and cheaply than the traditional method. The machine took the design and extruded melted ABS plastic through a nozzle onto a platform, building the sunglasses layer by layer via FDM (think ’90s , line-by-line dot-matrix printers, but in three dimensions). Thanks to Thingiverse, Makerbot’s open source website, you can actually download Levine’s designs and make them at home — the only catch is that it’s BYOMB. Bring your own MakerBot.

DEMOCRATIZING DESIGN, MINIMIZING WASTE

If Makerbot is like the home dot-matrix printer of additive manufacturing, Shapeways is the Kinko’s — and while we’re making analogies, a high-tech version of Etsy, too — an easy and cost-efficient way for designers to establish themselves on the market. Users digitally upload their designs — avant-garde iPhone cases, intricate jewelry, or the world’s smallest Rubiks cube — and Shapeways does the rest. Founded in the Netherlands, the company’s services are already used worldwide. They “print” a model in the designer’s material of choice: silver, alumide, glass, or ceramic. One popular material is nylon, which, at .7 mm can be used as a fabric, and at 3 mm is strong enough to make furniture. The designer decides the markup, and the object is posted on the site to be ordered by potential consumers. Because objects are only created once they’ve been bought, there’s little investment on the designer’s part and almost no waste on the manufacturer’s.

“We have designers in Brooklyn who make beautiful cufflinks. They said it only took about the cost of three bad dates to figure out what design they liked,” Shapeway’s Carine Carmy said. “It’s similar to the music industry’s content creation online — more and more people became creators of that content. As we democratize access to these tools with design, regardless of your background you can make your own products.” As a mark of its cresting popularity, the Netherlands-based Web site opened up a new outpost in New York in 2010. 

CREATING THE OTHERWISE IMPOSSIBLE

Far beyond printers and copy services, Materialise, the Belgian company that made that facial transplant possible, doesn’t quite have a present-day equivalent yet. It constructs objects of a higher level of quality, size, and intricacy, perfect for medical products like implants, hearing aids, and prosthetic limbs — not to mention models that replicate the anatomic details of a patient’s face, allowing doctors to map out the intricacies of delicate surgical procedures beforehand.

“Shapeways is really specialized in smaller pieces, and there’s a difference between these two markets,” said Joris Debo, director of .MGX, Materialise’s creative division. “When I speak about the high-end market, I’m talking about a seven-foot chaise longue that we couldn’t finish with Shapeways technology.” .MGX, the service of choice for the blue-chip art-and-design world, constructs furniture, lighting, and artwork. It has made sculptures for Frank Stella,as well as the geometrically complex Fractal Table and the bust of Lady Bellhaven’s elaborate hat for gallerist Murray Moss’s highly imaginative V&A show glimpsed at last December’s London Design Festival. 

LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE

The world of additive manufacturing spans a wide array of possibilities — we didn’t even mention the fluorescent-colored plastic hermit crab homes to preserve the ocean’s shell supplies, or fossil reproductions for building dinosaur robots, or customized automobiles a la “Pimp My Ride.”

If 3-D printing is so miraculous, why is it still a novelty? The truth is, according to Debo, that it still has a long way to go before all the kinks are worked out. “I think this is one of the first new technologies from the last 20 to 25 years that really changed how you approach designing, transporting, and buying objects,” he said. Yet, although processes and materials have made technological leaps and bounds in recent years, “it’s still a question of time before they get cheap enough.” Because of the layer-by-layer nature of 3-D printing, large-scale products don’t quite come out perfectly smooth and still need finishing, a costly process. And because mass manufactured products become cheaper as more of them are made (3-D printing costs remain stable), old-fashioned manufacturing techniques are likely to remain king.  

Certain industries, however, are shifting toward 3-D printing gradually, the same way in recent years the market has shifted toward online shopping. Additive manufacturing’s influence is mostly likely felt in arenas that most benefit from its greatest strength: the ability to produce bespoke products, like hearing aids that are designed to fit individuals, rather than one-size-fits-all. “It’s going to allow us to offer new types of products to people. Why can’t we bring that custom element to every single consumer?” Levine asked.

In the next five to ten years, Debo believes in the possibility of downloading a design from a sneaker company like Nike and printing it at home to your exact measurements and color choices. Taking things a step further, Levine dreams of standing in front of your computer, scanning yourself, and downloading an outfit. A faster method of getting ready in the morning is possible, and by the looks of things, it’s well on its way.

To see objects manufactured by Shapeways, Materialise, and MakerBot, click the slide show, or visit Material ConneXion’s ”Print/3D,” on view through May 11.

Real Heart Hollow by cadop 3D Printed in Sterling Silver by Shapeways)

Made with lasers, assembled with love

(via Shapeways | blog: Furniture and Butter Knives: How To Assemble a 3D Printed Chair)

The Strandbeest 3D printed in BLACK by Shapeways. Looking ominous