Done any 3D architectural projection mapping lately? No? These guys have, and it looks amazing:



You can also watch this video in HD quality, and read more about the event.

This is going to save you tons of time: we now support Zipped uploads for all file formats! I just tried this with a 63MB VRML file. Before, it would take me almost 10 minutes to upload this. Now, I can zip it to about 8MB and it uploads in about 1.5 minutes. Hallelujah!

Image by p_c_w

3D Bioprinting new blood vessels or even organs may be possible in the future. A first step has been taken with the first commercial bioprinter, by Organovo. It currently prints cell structures but nobody has dared to put them in their bodies yet. So while this looks like a promising development, I'd take good care of your body just a little longer - say, 30 years or so?

InstaTuts have published a guide for exporting a model from 3DS Max and printing it in ABS plastic (our 'Grey Robust' material - we no longer offer 'Cream robust'). The article contains some useful pointers for the use of 3DSMax’s STL Check Modifier and STL export function (note: Shapeways supports the more compact Binary STL file format, too!)

I found it interesting that the article refers to manifoldness as 'the Vertex to Vertex Rule':

What this means is that each triangle of the mesh must share 2 vertices with its adjacent triangles. For example one triangles vertex cannot lie on the side of a triangle, it must be attached to another vertex of the triangle.

There's an image in the article that illustrates this. What do you think? Is this a clear/better explanation?

Meshmixer is a very peculiar bit of software. It makes it very easy to combine existing objects, but it does so in a unique and intuitive way. This video explains it much better than I ever could;



What makes this amazing to me is how easy you can just 'drag' an object over another object, and it'll follow the shape wherever it can. The connections between the two objects are also quite smooth and natural.

It looks like Meshmixer is doing a good job at generating manifold objects - as long as you input manifold objects, that is. I ran a few tests and each design was printable by Shapeways.  The current version only loads .OBJ files, so you may need a tool like MeshLab to convert your files.

Meshmixer is developed by Ryan Schmidt, a computer graphics researcher at the University of Toronto. It's a free, Windows-only download.

Every now and then a little gem of usefulness appears on our forum that is just too good to leave it just there. Community member Jeff LaMarche wrote a great tutorial on getting your Blender designs cleaned up and ready to upload to Shapeways. Together with Jeff, I cleaned it up a little and republished it as a full-fledged Shapeways tutorial. Thanks, Jeff!

Link: Prepping Blender files for 3D printing

Like all technologies, you can put 3D Printing to dubious use as well..

Today's news is a German hacker, Ray. Ray likes to collect handcuffs and find crazy ways to open them.

This time he was able to duplicate the key to Dutch police handcuffs (there's only one key format - duh!). He simply took a high-resolution photograph of a key that was dangling from a policeman's belt, reconstructed it in 3D software and printed it on a 3D printer. And yes, it worked!

It's probably not legal to own such a key so I don't advise printing one, but it does make for a very interesting demonstration of what happens once production tools become democratized.

Now handcuffs are only for temporarily restraining suspects (at least by the Dutch police), so I don't think this is a major issue for them. Still, the trouble with the interweb is of course that once a file it out in the open (as it is in this case) it's extremely difficult - if not impossible - to remove it, making the key in question virtually useless. If this had happened to, say,  a master key of a building, you'd have to  replace every lock..

This story is not unlike the British police chief Bob Quick, whose secret document was photographed on the street. Do we need to be more careful 'out there'? I makes me wonder what's next; people taking an ultra-high resolution photograph of your thumb to replicate your fingerprint? (yes Ray, we have your fingerprint on file now, too Replicating your car keys when you leave your car?

[Via blackbag.nl]

Spore is the <buzz-word alert>multi-genre massively single-player metaverse god game</buzz-word alert> from Maxis, published by Electronic Arts. In it, you take a species from the 'cell' to 'space' stage and at each stage you make decisions about its development (more information on Wikipedia).

With the latest update ('patch 5', released last July) they added a cool feature: exporting your creatures to Collada files. Not only can you export the geometry of the creatures, but also their rigs and several texturemaps (diffuse, normal and specular maps). Pretty cool!

On the Spore forums, several groups have jumped on this and are documenting their efforts to import the models into several 3D applications.

So far, I've found Maya, Max and Blender users working on it - if you know of any others please let me know and I'll add them to the list at the end of this post.

I was pleasantly surprised when I met Eric Finley, who uploading his Spore models to Shapeways. Eric uses Blender to import and fix the Spore files and then prepare them for printing. He writes:

I found manifolding/watertightening them to be moderately tricky, involving a reasonably large amount of manual tweaking.  Spore's exported DAE files are definitely not watertight, but they're close; the major submeshes (body, mouth, etc) seem to be reasonably close to manifold as-output, but the minor submeshes (details and decorations in Spore) are frequently nonmanifold in subtle ways.  Some fairly aggressive remove-duplicates operations, some mesh joins, and a number of out-and-out fill operations all seem to have helped.  The worst of it was trying to do manual corrections to the mesh, to rectify something I didn't like about the Spore model... that was quite tricky, although part of that may still be my Blender inexperience talking (for example I'm still not clear on the distinction between "Merge verts at center" and "Collapse  verts").

We'll get some characters printed - stick around to see how they turned out!

(Render by scozdawg)

Links

• Spore to Blender
• Spore to Maya
• Spore to Max
• Here's Eric's Dragon Warlock on Shapeways

Two very useful plugins were recently released by Pixologic. Decimation Master can reduce the polygon count in your model to manageable proportions (remember we have a 500,000 polygon limit per model here at Shapeways). 3DPrint Exporter allows you to correctly size and export your model to STL or VRML, both of which formats are accepted by Shapeways.

Both plugins are free and come fully documented. At the moment of writing, they are Windows-only. A Mac version should be coming soon, according to the website.

3DPrint Exporter

• Export in STL, Binary and Ascii.
• Export in VRML.
• Size in Inches and millimeters.
• Export the current or all the SubTools.

More information

Decimation Master

• High quality optimization with accuracy details.
• Two different optimizations for a better control of the result.
• Optimization based on the polypainting information
• Support of Masks for details protection.
• Border protections.
• Support of the symmetry and partial symmetry.
• Optimization of your UVs for exporting models for 3D Color printing

Extras

• Export all SubTool as one OBJ file
• Clone all SubTools

More information

We just published a new mini-tutorial that can help you further reduce printing costs by removing overlapping edges in your model. Check it out!

Did you ever get the dreaded 'Your model has too many polygons for us to process it' message after uploading your model? Then check out  our new tutorial in which we explain how to reduce the polygon count of your design using the free open source tool MeshLab.

Link

• Tutorial: Polygon count reduction with MeshLab

We just published a new tutorial on fixing non-manifold errors in your models, with lots of examples and videos. Please let us know if there's anything you think we missed and we'll add it!

The makers of form.Z have just released a first public beta of their upcoming new “sketch-oriented” modeler, BonZai 3D.

BonZai 3D is a brand new Mac and Windows application based on the same code base as form.Z. It is 100% percent file compatible in both directions with form.Z. It features real-time Boolean operations, NURBS and what the company calls “Smart 3D” drawing. It also will have extensive file interoperability (over 30 export/import formats).

Some features:

• Fluid, powerful and smart interface
• All classic modeling tools
• Push/Pull tool for easy shape making/sculpting
• Realtime Booleans
• Dynamic graphic editing
• Smart 3D drawing
• Advanced OpenGL rendering with shadows, transparencies and textures
• Google Earth and SketchUp file compatibility
• 30+ import/export formats
• Embedded video tutorials (streaming)
• Embedded 56 page PDF manual
• Support for 3D Warehouse

I played with it only for a short while, but I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to create complex shapes and upload them to Shapeways. Pricing hasn't been published yet, but there's mention on the forums of a price point around $500.

You need to register before you can download the 141MB OSX version or the 76MB Windows version; the video tutorials are streamed on demand. After registration you'll also get access to the beta forum.

If you'd like more background info, I can recommend this interview with Chris Yessios, creator of form.Z.

John Chan [madox] did a nice writeup of his first experience with Shapeways: designing a mechanical iris diaphragm. John writes:

[...] I set out to design something in the shortest amount of time and yet would still give me a good ‘feel’ of what 3D printing is capable of today.  The time constraint was probably also due to the fact I read about the offer at midnight and wanted to send it to print before I sleep :)  Result? Concept, Design, Upload, Ordered all within 2 hours!

Very cool! Any chance of a video showing the diaphragm in action, John?