Shapeways Magazine
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Custom D&D Characters With Hero Forge
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Want to make a 3D-printable Dungeons & Dragons character without learning Blender, ZBrush, or Maya? Try Hero Forge, one of the Shapeways Creator Apps. Hero Forge allows you to build a D&D character miniature from scratch, using a very simple online customization interface. This week we’ll show you how easy it is to create and print your own mini D&D character from the ground up… // Column at Shapeways
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Add Custom Heraldry to Tabletop Minis With Meshmixer
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Earlier this month, Geek & Sundry featured the new Shapeways tutorial video The Ultimaker Conversion Tutorial: Add Custom Heraldry to a Miniature. This week on Tutorial Tuesday, we’ll build on that and show you how to create, remix, and add features to tabletop models. One way to easily create a custom tabletop figure is with Hero Forge, an in-browser, character designing app… // Column at Shapeways
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FDM=ASAP but SLS=OMG
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If you’ve got a desktop FDM 3D printer at home, then you can make your own same-day prints whenever you want to. But, unless you’re hiding a refrigerator-sized $300,000 SLS machine in your garage, there are going to be times when it’s worth sending your prints to a professional 3D printing service like Shapeways…
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Thickening 3D Models With Blender
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So, you have a 3D model, but it’s too thin to print reliably — or too thick to have the fine detail you want. How can you fix it? In this week’s Tutorial Tuesday, we’ll focus on that one specific modeling skill. There are a lot of tools you could use for thickening or thinning a model, but today we’ll explore Blender, which produces reliable results and a good mesh, even with challenging designs… // Column at Shapeways
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CAD in the Cloud With Onshape
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Are you a design amateur but starting to need more professional design software? Hobbyists and educators can get access to parametric design, collaboration tools, and cloud file management for free with Onshape, a powerful alternative to the engineering CAD software Solidworks. In this Tutorial Tuesday we’ll get you from zero to cloud-CAD in just a few videos… // Column at Shapeways
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Learn to Fly With Wings3D
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In this week’s Tutorial Tuesday, we’ll expand our design toolbox to include the 3D modeling program Wings3D. Wings3D is free and open source, but includes much of the functionality of paid professional software like Autodesk’s 3ds Max, as well as topological mesh modeling software like TopMod. Wings3D is a low-poly subdivision tool, which means that you can create… // Column at Shapeways
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3D Design Electronics in Tinkercad
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It’s back-to-school season, so this week’s Tutorial Tuesday will focus on using 3D printing and design to enhance learning of another subject: 3D design and printing for electronics. Specifically, we will explore a brand-new feature in free online 3D design software Tinkercad that combines 3D printing and circuit design, based on Electronics Lab and 123D Circuit.io from Autodesk Circuits… // Column at Shapeways
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Repair and Prep Structure Synth Models
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A couple of weeks ago we discussed how to make complex designs with simple Structure Synth code, but what we didn’t mention is that the resulting models can need a bit of cleanup before they are printable. Because of the way Structure Synth models are constructed, they often consist of a large number of overlapping objects, and this can lead to some pretty nasty geometry… // Column at Shapeways
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Rescue 3D Models With MakePrintable
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Now that NetFabb no longer has a free cloud service for repairing files, where do you turn when you have a 3D model with hopelessly bad geometry that needs repair? Meshmixer and MeshLab provide free solutions that give you a lot of control over how you modify and repair your meshes. But when those programs aren’t enough to rescue your file, where do you go for help?…. // Column at Shapeways
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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About X, But Were Afraid to Ask
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Sometimes the specifications for a 3D design require certain length or angle measurements at the outset, which in turn determine other lengths or angles in the design. In other words, some mystery measurement X in your design might be mathematically determined by other measurements whose values you know. But how do you solve for X?… // Column at Shapeways
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