In this Tutorial Tuesday we’ll make personalized 3D printed snowflakes using the Snowflake Machine, a Customizer built on OpenSCAD code that can procedurally generate over one billion unique snowflakes based on random seeds and user-set design parameters. Don’t worry, it’s easier than that just sounded! Here’s a step-by-step how-to guide so you can get your holiday snowflakes… // Column at Shapeways
Sometimes the easiest things can be so difficult. Wrapping text around a cylinder, which is exactly what you’d want to do when making a text-engraved ring, is one of those things! Depending on what design program you use, this simple task can seem impossible. Today we’ll focus on one surprisingly elegant text-wrapping technique for Fusion 360 devised by Vladimir at DesktopMakes… // Column at Shapeways
Today, we’ll learn how to turn one simple 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. The snowflake design we’ll be working with was created with parametric code in OpenSCAD… // Guest Post at Shapeways
Bangle bracelets are great, but they’re so darn bangly. A circular bangle bracelet has to be pretty big to fit over your hand, which makes it very loose around your wrist once you get it on. If you think about it, when you use a bangle bracelets you’re wearing it 99% of the time, but pulling it over your hand only 1% of the time. How do you make a design that’s optimized for the 99% instead of the 1%?… // Column at Shapeways
It’s math time! Or, at least, designer cheat-sheet time. This week we’ll be giving you the answers you need for deducing side lengths and angles of non-right triangles in your 3D designs. If you’re using professional design software, then you might be able to get all the measurements you need from the design software itself. But sometimes your software programs can’t rescue you… // Column at Shapeways
The holidays are coming, and it seems like the run-up to them starts sooner every year. But for Shapeways shop owners, the holiday season starts even earlier. How much earlier? We’ll break down the timeline and see when you should be ready for the starting gun. There are a lot of holidays in December, but of course, the big dog for shop owners is likely to be Christmas… // Column at Shapeways
Sometimes a design just begs to be printed in Porcelain. If want your model to be food-safe, act as a keepsake, or look great with a beautiful artistic glaze, then Porcelain is a good option to try. However, designing for 3D printing in Porcelain isn’t the same as designing for other materials. This week we’ll talk about ways to modify and optimize your designs for printing in Porcelain… // Column at Shapeways
If you want some 3D printed chocolate but don’t have a 3D chocolate printer, do the next best thing by making molds. Simple 3D printed shapes can be used as presses to create food-safe silicon candy molds. The only tricky bit is to keep air pockets out of the corners of the molds; we’ll solve that problem by creating our designs in Fusion 360 so we can fillet, or round, the edges of our designs… // Column at Shapeways
The 3D printing slicer Cura has a cool hidden feature: It turns out that you can upload an image and it will turn dark/light contrast into high/low elevation. You can use this feature to make a quick 3D-printable lithophane. Black and white images work the best, but you can get amazingly detailed photographic quality from lithophanes, so they don’t necessarily have to be simple… // Column at Shapeways
Want to make a simple design and turn it into a 3D printed product in just a few minutes? 3D Slash is an in-browser modeling tool that is intuitive, easy to use, and unusually fun to use. You can create designs by smashing blocks with a hammer, building up walls, or tracing an image. If you have a simple idea that you want to bring into reality very quickly, 3D Slash is a fun place to begin… // Column at Shapeways