Bart made a movie showcasing the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) 3D printing process. SLS is the 3D printing process behind White, Strong & Flexible. In the movie you can see how your models are made. You can see our EOS Formiga P100 SLS 3D printers and also how your models are cleaned. The cleaning step is all manual labor and will probably be the biggest surprise for those of you who think that we just press a button and walk away (if only).

We usually make incremental continual improvements to Shapeways. Mesh Medic represents something much more revolutionary. Mesh Medic is an automated 3D printing file repair system that will deal with many issues people have when trying to design for 3D printing. From now on when you upload files to Shapeways Mesh Medic will be there to help you. He will repair holes, invert your inverted normals so they're normal, repair manifolds and generally make life a lot easier for you. 

While Mesh Medic will not work for everyone and not work all the time, this is the most significant improvement to Shapeways so far. Please tell us what you think give us feedback on how to improve Mesh Medic on the Forum. It has never been easier for a designer to take a design that is your head and get it made into a physical object than today and every day after today.  You can try Mesh Medic out right now by uploading your STL, x3D or Collada file here.

For Rhino users it will take away an extra step in checking and converting their models and everyone else shouldbenefit significantly also by having their workflow from file to 3D printed item reduced. Please do always check the uploaded model in the 3D view on Shapeways to make sure that the automatic repair filters didn't repair something they should not have. Mesh Medic currently does work for VRML files but not for the color VRML files with textures and we will enable this as soon as we can. 

You can now use the Sandstone 3D printing material. This material is exactly the same material as the Full Color Sandstone just with the color bit removed. 

The model depicted is MadebyDan's Square platter. The platter would cost $74. Now you can now use this (our cheapest) material without having to convert or upload your model into VRML. Please do take into account that the material is fragile and does need to adhere to the design rules for the material.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ivo Beckers' Alumide 3D printed Playmobil Jacuzzi. 

You have until the 14th to order your models in Alumide. We were very happy with your enthusiasm for the material! However we have sad news, we can not offer the material permanently at this moment. At a later date we want to bring it back though but we can not yet say when. The reason for that is that we have been able to consistently fill an entire machine with the Alumide material orders. The turnaround time between White, Strong & Flexible and Alumide is also a bit longer than we would have liked. This means that the machine we have been using for Alumide would be better served in pushing your White, Strong & Flexible orders out the door quicker. In order to keep offering the lowest possible prices optimal machine utilization is very important to us. We have already started looking at lots of different ways in which we can optmize the Alumide production and we hope that we will be able to offer it once again in a few months. 

From today until the 11th of April we will be holding the Co-Creator Creativity in Co-Design Contest. We are looking for the most interesting & inspiring co-creators that you can come up with. The winner will be a fun, interesting, beautiful interaction concept (and or final product) that at the same time results in a great gift (for oneself or someone else). The winning co-creator will win $100 in 3D printing. The top ten finalists will get a 3D print of their co-creator competition entry sent to them free of charge! 

Thinking about and designing co-creators is very different from making a model or designing a product, we think this is real cutting edge stuff and want to see what you guys can do to push the envelope in co-creation.

We hope a lot of you to participate in this contest because we do think that the co-creators are a real step forward in designers working with customers in order to develop unique customized things. We believe that your creativity and 3D printing technology could result in some boundlessly interesting co-creation concepts and products. Furthermore you can still be "the first" to do something with regards to co-design. Name something else you can be first in?

For some inspiration there are several really interesting examples of generative design in this blog post. Over at FOC they've come up with customized headphones that will be designed according to the owners taste. Fluid Forms is also trying to get a concept off the ground on Kickstarter whereby a street grid is turned into earrings. But, you could use DNA, fingerprints, a quiz, a person's favorite books, shapes, their "social graph on Facebook", their family history, the countries they've visited..anything really.  We were very excited when we saw VirtualV's concept to turn children's drawings into 3D models. Terracotta's "your face and initials here" is also a great concept. Magic's event beads are a new way to commemorate events using 3D printing in color.

Sometimes the co-design concept is not the central innovation but the product itself is. Take Designerica's Double Moonball ring pictured above. Mathijs' Snowman is a character with a message. Dimmulain reimagines the letter opener. Whystler's doorplate points to a myriad of labeling things you could try out. Aeron203's Halberd for a pencil is totally fun. Youknowwho4eva is tackling the huge class ring market all by himself. Our very own emascipater made a wallet replacement that could be a new way of looking at an everyday object. For the more engineering oriented Ashers Ipod buddy is a good marriage of tech and customization. Rawkstar320 has an Ipod touch stand that makes it easier to watch video. But Mcad's rotary knob is one of my favorites. You need a knob? Any knob? Any knob what so ever? Mcad will make it for you.  

So what can you do?

• To enter submit your model with the tag "co-design"before the 11th of April.
• Entry must have a cost of between $25-50(so excluding the mark up you want to add to it, does not have to include VAT)
• We will announce the winners by the 15th of April after having studied the entries and compared them with the above criteria. We will take into account community votes but they will not be final.
• The entry must be uploaded to Shapeways, be public and a co-creator.
• You can not be a Shapeways employee or relative of a Shapeways employee.

Combinatory manufacturing is the combination between the unique and the mass produced. 3D printing for example can deliver unique shapes and functionality for a relatively low per unit cost. Mass produced items with millions of copies will be much cheaper per unit but will not be unique in their shape or functionality. But, by being standardized they can pack a lot of functionality into a cheap package. By combining the best of both worlds you can come up with great products.

As a technology platform the cell phone is hard to beat. They are inexpensive, ranging from $25 and up, and within the mobile phone's suite of applications a myriad of technologies are packed. Messaging, speech, speakers, screen, microphones, calling, geolocation and an OS can now be found on the simplest of devices. I believe that a cell phone would be very exciting and powerful technology technology platform for Makers and Designers to build around. Not only straightforward things such as interchangeable personalized covers but also things such as hacking a standard phone so it becomes a tracking device for your car or automatically sends out messages if leaves the county.

This is why I was so happy to see a post on Make about an inexpensive robot that uses a cell phone as its brain. The Android based phone Truckbot is also easy to programme.  As much as I love the Arduino these kind of developments really make me think that for the Make community cell phones could lead to a lot of exciting products. Arduino's are great and also really pack a punch but they don't go over the counter in their millions. Check out the Truckbot video below.

The Hurt Locker was not the only big winner at the Oscars this year. 3D printing won big with 3 Oscars and four nominations. Avatar won the Academy Awards for Cinematography, Art Direction & Visual Effects. Detailed models created with 3D printing firm Objet Geometries 3D printing process were used to simulate all the lighting in the movie. This detailed and high impact use of a physical 3D printed model to "engineer" a movie. Objet 3D printing was used even more extensively in Coraline. Coraline (a fantastic and very scary movie by the way, the  noise of the scissors kept me up at night) used 3D printed Objet models throughout the film. Coraline was stop motion and many of the things you see in the movie were 3D printed on Objet machines. At Shapeways we use Objet for our White Detail, Black Detail and Transparent Detail materials.The movie below shows you how 3D printing was used in Coraline.

In generative design a designer does not create the final product but rather a system, algorithm or tool that in turn generates the final product. Some generative tools create many iterations and others lead to one product. The designer does not design the painting but rather the brush or the method. Instead of the still life one could develop "painting by numbers" for example. Take Joris Laarman. Joris created the Bone Chair using a software tool that simulates bone growth. GM created that tool to model efficient structures for its cars.  This caused C. Sven Johnson to ask a rather pertinent question on twitter, "Who is the designer of the "Bone Chair"?

And the question is not an easy one to answer. Is it Joris? The researcher that came up with the bone algorithm? The software developers that made the tool? The physical principles behind the algorithm? The scientists that discovered those principles? God or nature? All of the above? I for one have no answer. I do know however that generative design has a bright future.

The marriage of tech and design is all around us. In a world where everything is designed a meta "way to design" that algorithmically cuts through the clutter is very appealing. A perfect design algorithm could potentially engender choice in design the same way that Google's PageRank set of algorithms do for the web. And this is what generative design already partially does. It simplifies design by codifying it and somewhere within lies the promise of "true", "simple" & "beautiful" design.

With technologies such as 3D printing letting everyone design or co-design things there is also a real need for generative tools. They allow for unique designs but since each is machine made, the marriage is a conceptually comfortable and inexpensive one. Also, rather than forcing the customer into a "blank canvas conundrum" whereby the sheer possibility overwhelms them to the point inactivity, generated models could lead to choice or guided choice in design.

Boston based design duo Nervous System (who will be featured in a Shapeways interview soon) write code in Processing that makes beautiful rings and other items. Jessica Rosenkrantz & Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, who make up Nervous, even provide the tools they use to make their jewelry free of charge to other designers on their site. 

Belgian design duo Unfold (also the subject of an upcoming interview) who had a breakthrough with their ceramic 3D printing process recently also exhibited at Bits N' Pieces with their Brain Wave Sofa. In this design an EEG was used to "design" the sofa.

Jan Habraken (we will interview him also) & Willem Derks developed Chairgenics for the Bits n' Pieces show. For Chairgenics they created a chair genome and "bred" chairs in order to create the perfect chair.   

Singapore based software company Genometri makes technology that designs objects. Their Angel's on Shapeways for example are all generated & all unique.  

Mitchell Whitelaw also made the weather bracelet a bracelet that displays the weather of Canberra.

Michael Piasecki's Cellular Bowl, is beautiful & generated entirely in Processing.

Justin Marshall's Generated ring is made with a suite of generated design software.

Mendel Heit also makes lovely objects using Shapeways & Processing.

Generative design has a myriad of applications. I anticipate that generative design will grow beyond the borders of the systems they are now. One the one hand ever more whimsical "data representations" will fall short of the strictest scope of generative design. On the other hand the nature of generative design will change. Whereas now the designer designs the tool that creates the product more involvement from "consumers" and more "intelligence" in the software will evolve. At the same time the "pure algorithm" will be ignored or augmented by the designer struggling to regain more input into the final object. To me the resulting movement will not be generative design in the purest sense. Rather it will be "Dasign"or data driven design. This design may be evolutionary, algorithmic or generative design but not necessarily rely on any of these for its core inspiration or make up. It will simply have the intersection of data and design as a identifiable characteristic. 

In the future I would expect to see many different data representations, Mii creators, "quiz design" and ultimately profile based design in a lot of different applications.

Data representations could be any representation of data turned into an object. A medallion based on the types of sites you visit as per your browser history. An earing where the thickness of the heart is the number of times it has been broken and the width is the number of times you've broken others. A portrait that does not show you but rather your facial symmetry (or lack thereof).

"Mii creator design" refines the sets of different generations of designs based on the users choices. Using the Nintendo Mii Creator it is already possible to with several generations come to a likeness of yourself or someone else. A similar system for bowls would quickly allow a person to, by simply choosing the design that best matched their preference out of the generated subset, come up with their designs.

In "quiz design" you answer a few questions, "what's your favorite movie? your favorite song? Which picture do you like best? etc. Based on your answers the piece of software will then design the appropriate bowl. This might seem a bit far fetched but the necessary pieces for it are being built as we speak. Initial implementations would also not be that difficult but just have to have a dataset to start off with. This set could then evolve over time.

Profile based design goes further still by assuming, based on previous web searches & purchases, choices and content enjoyed, which designs you would enjoy. This is a rather compelling technology for online retailers to put it lightly and they will drive adoption for it. If you are a designer you should to not sit still until Amazon or Facebook come out with the "you would like to create this" recommendation engine. I urge any and every designer to explore the wealth of possibility that is generative design, right now.    

So there is this fruit company. It is one of the biggest fruit company's out there. It makes high margin, high concept, very expensive fruit. They used to be mocked because they made incompatible fruit that was all about looks. Now they are lauded for exactly the same reasons. This fruit company cares a lot about its Intellectual Property. They would like to protect the magic that lets them sell more than 60,000,000 identical things each year while retaining a feel of exclusivity. They like to send people letters. And one look above into the adoring but somewhat disdainful eyes of James Potter tells you that these letters will not be ignored. The image below of the waving alien is an example, used here for educational purposes only, of an inappropriate use of the Apple logo.This is an example of something we would not like to see on Shapeways.

Since a several people are making items that are MP3 player accessories we thought it prudent to point you to some trademark guidelines. You can find Apple's trademark guidelines for 3rd parties here. And from them one gets the impression that the 1st and 2nd parties, is where its at. The trademark guidelines are written by lawyers and lawyers are expensive. In order to justify this expense they tend to be baffling. You would be good at being baffling also if you were being paid $500 an hour to tell people stuff they already know in such a way as to make them doubt that they know it. But, if you are a designer and want people to respect your IP, then setting a good example can not hurt.

Apple states that you are only allowed to use their logo if you are an authorized reseller. For educational use you can have a look at the above logo. The above image is an educational illustration of an inappropriate use of the Apple logo. You could not use such a logo on your products. You are also not allowed to imply that Apple endorses you. So "Apple loves Joris", or "Iphones love to be cuddled by my Iphone case" would not be OK. When making an Apple accessory, it is OK to say, "Compatible with Apple Ipod." "For use with Apple TV" or "Compatible with Iphone" is OK. But, Apple gets nervous when you call your product 3DprintedIpodcase or "Apple wants you to buy my 3D print" or "Authorized Apple 3D print."

Apple also prohibits people from making any kind of merchandise with its logo on it. You are also not allowed to say anything mean to or about Apple. As such, I would like to apologize to Apple on behalf of the entire world for what we said about the Ipad.

For a completely mysterious reason you are also not allowed to mention things such as: Appletree, Apple Cart, Jackintosh or PodMart. The last one is a shame really because I could see PodMart become a totally huge retailer of stasis pods. And Jackintosh should be a great descriptor for the nonsense Apple fanboys sprout. Also, Appletree is not incorrect English but copyright infringement. "Think Different" is both. Throw Leopard or Snow Leopard Rug, are not mentioned nor are MacPoorBro or Uwork. Lets say you wanted to make an Apprika for example. For educational use only the image below illustrates that such a use of the Apple logo would be inappropriate.

Please also pay attention to some of Apple's lesser known wordmarks such as Shake and Safari, the latter especially if you are Kenyan. Aperture might not sound relevant now but come the apocalypse I'd like to see who can beat Jobs with regards to that trademark.

I am completely not kidding about the following: Apple does not want you to take a picture of an Ipod being used or shown next to your accessory. Only very few companies have the permission to do this. So even if you buy the Ipod you are not allowed to photograph it next to your accessory. Our previous statement was incorrect. You can show a picture of your Apple compatible item with an Apple product. Any kind of rendering is not allowed however.

As a suggested step I would add “Joris is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc” to any and all communications. Yes, this will make twitter challenging & birthday cards seem stand-ofish but it is better to be safe than sorry. 

On the up side you can however get a lovely Powered by Darwin web button. This is completely free and a lovely accessory for people who like evolution.

On a completely unrelated note: the top image is the property of Apple, the second, third and fourth images are used under a Creative Commons Attribution License and remixed by people who will remain nameless.

We shot a quick video showing you some of the test models we made for the Alumide material in the sunlight. You get to see Bathsheba's Bioform & Vorodo,  Virtox's Gyro the cube & TriMatrix, DeLaVega's Ball Bearing & ejisfun's Ferris Wheel. I should really have opened with "we 3D printed a Ferris Wheel." We're offering the Alumide material until the 14th of March. The material is polyamide mixed with Aluminum. It is rigid but less strong than White, Strong & Flexible. I think it looks lovely and am sure that Alumide would be Frtiz Lang's favorite 3D printing material.

Evan Malone was one of the crucial people behind the Fab@Home project which demonstrated to many that desktop 3D printing was not a pipe dream but a usable technology. He has now founded NextFab Studio and the NextFab Organization. NextFab Studio is a Philadelphia based organization that is a hackerspace that you can go to in order to make & invent things. The NextFab Organization hopes to spread learning and information about all the open source design and fabrication technologies available. I am a fanboy and tried not to swoon.

Joris Peels: Will everyone really make everything?

Evan Malone: No. I believe there will always be economy of scale in certain processes, and simple practical constraints, like the size of objects, or the amount of power required to work with certain materials that will prevent individuals from making everything.  Personal fabrication technology is a new branch of manufacturing – I doubt it will replace the entire tree.

Joris Peels: Won't people be too lazy? Won't this only be for nerds?

Evan Malone: It is a good thing that people have diverse interests, as civilization requires vastly many other roles than product innovation.

Joris Peels: Do you believe in microproduction, of brands of one, of everyone being their own business?                      

Evan Malone: This is merely artisan craftsmanship with new tools.  It has been around since Neolithic humans made stone tools – some people were good at it and everyone wants the best.  It has its place, but it will not replace all other forms of innovation and commerce.

Johnny Kelly is an animation director who works for Nexus Productions an award winning independent animation studio. He was tasked by Dutch advertising agency KesselsKramer to do the production for the new opening titles for a Dutch television show, Het Klokhuis. To make the opening and closing titles Johnny and his team used stop motion using 3D printing.  You should check out the video below first to see the final result of months of painstaking work. We're very proud to have played a small part in this amazing video by 3D printing the apples used in it.

"Het Klokhuis" Opening titles from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

Joris Peels: Why stop motion?

Johnny Kelly: Het Klokhuis is aimed at a younger audience and all about how things are made and how things work, and for this reason it seemed suitable to create a title sequence using something as handmade and process-driven as stop motion animation. I made sense that the first rebranded episode was all about how we made the animation. In addition to this, stop motion is interesting because it looks quite fresh on television, in contrast to a lot of the slick graphics we are used to seeing. As an older generation, when we watch stop motion it triggers happy memories because it reminds us of television when we were growing up, which featured a lot of this type of animation. For younger audiences it is interesting because its different to the other programs they see.

Joris Peels: Why use 3D printing?

Johnny Kelley: Christian at the advertising agency, Kesselskramer, had designed a beautiful logo graphic. We then had the problem of how to create a physical object that would have exactly this shape. We discussed many possibilities, I had used paper on projects before but it didn't seem right as it wouldn't have the same curvature. Plasticine would have been too messy, imprecise and not have the right shininess. We also talked about making foam models, but again, it would have been difficult to ensure all 8 or so apples would have had the exact same shape. My partner had done some 3D printing before (she's a product designer) and it seemed like the perfect way to physically recreate Christian's logo. We almost ruled it out when we got some prices from London-based 3D printers, it was working out far too expensive for our budget. Then I remembered having come across Shapeways- we tried uploading some models and it turned out to be affordable.

Joris Peels: Was it hard to prepare your files for 3D printing?

Johnny Kelly: No the workflow was very easy. The instant price calculation was particularly useful for us, as we were keeping an eye on the budget. We worked out that were able to bring costs down by using the thinnest thickness of material for some of the larger models.

Joris Peels: What were the advantages of using 3D printing?

Johnny Kelley: Because the models were coming from 3D computer program (3D Studio Max), we were able to also work out what size the set should be, what size to build the plinth etc. Using the same lens on our 3D camera as we would use on set (135mm) we were able to work out how far back the camera would need to be so that we wouldn't get any camera lens distortion on the apple, allowing the top and bottom lines of the core shape to be perfectly flat and level. Once we had the camera position we worked out what size everything else needed to be to fit into frame. This was helpful in cutting down preparation work, because we only had a short amount of time in the stop motion studio.

We were working at two scales and the other advantage was that we could plan this out. Because we needed so many models of the melting bubblegum apple (25 altogether), it made sense to make this sequence at a smaller, half size. This meant that we had to make the plinth at a smaller scale too, and we used the 3D software to work out exactly what size that needed to be, and where it needed to be. So we didn't need to change or move the camera or backdrop, just swap the plinth and apple, to the smaller version and we were ready to go.

Joris Peels: Would it not be cheaper to use regular animation?

Johnny Kelly: Well in the end, the final effect of the film has a look that I hadn't quite anticipated. It looks almost like it could be CG, but not quite. I really enjoy this effect, a blurring between computer graphics and tactile animation. If we had made this entirely in computer I don't think it would have turned out the way it did, it would have been impossible to create the little imperfections the give the final piece its charm. Its also interesting because there is so much CG animation right now which is trying to look like stop motion, and here we are coming from the other direction- where everything is so precise that it looks computer generated.

Joris Peels: What do you like most about the movie?

Johnny Kelly: Just as the Het Klokhuis features many experiments, so we decided to experiment when we were making title sequences. What is nice about this is that, even up to the last moment, we didn't know how we would animate certain sections, so we had to think on our feet. We couldn't anticipate the results, and they were always unexpected. For example, I had fully planned to film the final smoke explosion using live action, but the cost of getting a live action camera was out of our budget so we animated coloured merino wool, and I think this, in the end, is a much better result. My favourite part is probably the ending animation with the clockwork apple, I like the idea of scientists using a giant wooden hammer as part of their experimentation. If I was a scientist I would probably end up using the hammer on everything.

Joris Peels: What does Shapeways need to do to improve?

Johnny Kelley: Once we got the models back from Shapeways we did have to spend a huge amount of time sanding down the models to get rid of the faceted surface, and making the curvature perfectly smooth. I think however, that this may be more to do with the limitations of 3D printing, and the material we used (White Strong & Flexible), rather than Shapeways in particular.

If you liked this interview, you'll love our gallery.

From today until the 14th of March we will be offering you Alumide as a 3D printing material. If enough people like it (and buy it) we will then decide to keep it for you. Whystler, Chris and many others have been asking for Alumide in the forums so here it is.

Below you can see the models: Sports Vigilante by Admiral Duck Sauce, 3 Tealight Lanterns by Whystler, Ball Bearing by DeLaVega(it works well in the material) and Gyro the cube by Virtox.

Alumide is White, Strong & Flexible with Aluminum dust mixed in. The material looks space aged and has a higher heat resistance that regular plastics. Its melting temperature is above 172 Celsius It costs $1.59 per cubic centimeter(plus $1.50 start up costs per model). The material is brittle and less flexible than White, Strong & Flexible. We intended it to be a good Maker material for projects such as Arduino cases and RC Helicopters but after testing it and seeing it the material would seem to be fun for all sorts of other models also.The pictures below are for Bill's Arduino case model. 

It feels smoother than White, Strong & Flexible and up close looks like it came from space. It could be part of a meteorite or a chunk of alien technology that fell off of a space ship. And Alien technology for $1.59 per cubic CM, thats a bargain. Update: as per Kristopher's request we've created a material page for Alumide here.

We had a number of great entries for the Maryland Plastics injection molding contest. You can check out the entries here in the special injection molding theme gallery. The people of Maryland Plastics carefully looked and evaluated each model. They said that, "Our decision was based on how well the model followed the rules of the contest. The items had to be moldable, original, and fit into the Crystalware line. These three designers showed the best understanding of these rules, and created very attractive products. The winners as well as all other models submitted are under consideration for purchasing the design from the designer." We'll follow these developments closely! But, what we know now is that in third place is RK110, Robert Kane with his Cake Tray.

   

In second place is HolyBowly (Rob Mack) with Crystal Bowl.

The winner is Mendel Heit with Cell Glass.

Thank you so much for participating everyone and thank you Maryland Plastics!!