Design Tutorials
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No Snow? Here’s How to Make Your Own
No Snow? Here’s How to Make Your Own 700 493 mathgrrl
Today, we’ll learn how to turn one snowflake design into multiple products in a variety of shapes, sizes, and materials. We’ll start with simple low-res 3D prints and prototypes on desktop FDM machines, and eventually level up to printing in Nylon and Plated Rhodium at Shapeways. This design was created with code in OpenSCAD, and can procedurally generate over a billion unique snowflakes.. // Guest post at Shapeways
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Making Your Designs Customizable with CustomMaker
Making Your Designs Customizable with CustomMaker 710 534 mathgrrl
One of the most powerful things about 3D printing is the ability to create customized, one-of-a-kind objects. You could choose to make many different personalized jewelry pieces from one ring or pendant design by making modifications on a case-by-case basis in your own design software. Or, you can use Shapeways’ CustomMaker tool to add text, images, and personalization… // Column at Shapeways
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Quick Fixes With MeshLab
Quick Fixes With MeshLab 712 399 mathgrrl
This week we’ll discuss three methods for modifying 3D meshes with the free software MeshLab. When you export a 3D file to STL format, what you’re doing is creating a file that describes the surface of an object with a mesh of tiny triangles. We’ll focus on the top three issues that can arise with meshes: having too many triangles, badly oriented triangles, or badly intersecting triangles… // Column at Shapeways
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Using OpenSCAD to Design with Code
Using OpenSCAD to Design with Code 698 445 mathgrrl
This week, we speak to the geeks. Did you know that you can create 3D-printable designs with code — no 3D modeling required? OpenSCAD is a programming language specifically built for creating designs that are exportable as triangular meshes for 3D printing. We’ll walk you through the basics and show off some designs created with this powerful parametric modeling software… // Column at Shapeways
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Beginner 3D Design With Tinkercad
Beginner 3D Design With Tinkercad 698 446 mathgrrl
This week, Tutorial Tuesday is for beginners. If you’ve never designed a 3D model before, then this post will show you how to get started. We’ll start with showing you how to design simple 3D models with a free program called Tinkercad, and then how to send those models to Shapeways for 3D printing. It’s easier than you might think! Get a cup of coffee and join us… // Column at Shapeways
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Full-Color Printing and Character Models
Full-Color Printing and Character Models 518 304 mathgrrl
Welcome to the second Tutorial Tuesday! There’s a lot of 3D printing and design information on the internet, and it’s our job to sort it out. We’ll pick up where we left off last time, with a second round of Shapeways design and printing tutorials. This time we’ll get technical, focusing on some of the more specialized issues that arise when designing, exporting, and printing designs for 3D printing… // Column at Shapeways
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The Snowflake Machine
The Snowflake Machine 628 472 mathgrrl
Our new Snowflake Machine uses random numbers, mathematical algorithms, computer code, and SCIENCE to create well over a billion unique and beautiful snowflakes, with an algorithm that approximates the way that snowflakes grow in real life, with branches and plates determined by a random seed. Choose that seed, and then set style parameters to determine fullness and fuzziness… // Hacktastic
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Beefy Trophy – Baking meshes into OpenSCAD from Blender
Beefy Trophy – Baking meshes into OpenSCAD from Blender 628 472 mathgrrl
You’re good enough, smart enough, and you deserve a damn trophy. Even if it’s only a trophy that you give yourself for making it through the day, or a meta-award for designing and 3D printing a trophy. (Or maybe a trophy for picking yourself up off the floor after getting the boot in a massive layoff at Makerbot…) We’ll use a python Blender add-on to embed an STL in the Thingiverse Customizer… // Hacktastic
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Low-Voxel Stanford Bunny + Voxelization/Minecraft Tutorial
Low-Voxel Stanford Bunny + Voxelization/Minecraft Tutorial 1024 550 mathgrrl
Move over low-poly, it’s time to go low-voxel! In this post we use phooky’s classic Stanford bunny model to test out a fun, easy method of producing low-voxel designs: take a Thingiverse model, use Tinkercad to convert it to a “blockified” .schematic file, then use Minecraft to play around and repair, and finally use Printcraft to export the new “blockified” file for 3D printing… // Hacktastic
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PolyBowls – From zero to OpenSCAD in 6 minutes
PolyBowls – From zero to OpenSCAD in 6 minutes 638 483 mathgrrl
This collection of bowls and pen holders were all generated from the same simple OpenSCAD code by changing a few numerical parameters. The main purpose of this design is to serve as an accessible introduction to designing with OpenSCAD. Designing with code is easier than you think; if you have six minutes to spare then you can learn this! Okay, maybe seven minutes. But it’s not hard… // Hacktastic
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