Shapeways Magazine
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Design for Complexity With Structure Synth
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What would you make if designing complex objects were actually easy? For some years now we’ve been hearing the buzz-phrase that “complexity is free” with 3D printing. With an SLS printer, the cost of printing a plain wireframe cube is the same as the cost of printing a complex, knotted wireframe cube, provided that they both take up the same amount of machine space and printing material… // Column at Shapeways
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Oops, Now Your Photos Are TOO Good!
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So, you read our previous photo tutorial, and now you have a photo light box and/or a nice clip-on macro lens or whatnot, and your photos are so good they almost look like renders. But your photos need to do more than just look pretty; they also need to show that your design can be printed successfully…
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Easy Pendant Creator Walkthrough
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There are lots of ways to go from a 2D image to a 3D model, but one of the easiest ways is with the Shapeways 3D Printed Pendant Creator — even if you aren’t technically making a pendant. This Tutorial Tuesday, we’ll take you through the creation of a simple design with the Pendant Creator, including ways to tweak your image graphic so that it works well with the Pendant Creator tool… // Column at Shapeways
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Learn to Code in 3D With BlocksCAD
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Happy Fourth of July! Today we’ll take it easy with a look at 3D design with BlocksCAD, an accessible block-based CAD programming tool that you can work with online in your browser. BlocksCAD works much like the popular intro-to-code language Scratch, but instead of creating animations, it is designed for creating 3D models. The fastest way to learn is by watching BlocksCAD in action… // Column at Shapeways
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Porcelain Topographic Models with Terrain2STL
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Sometimes you just want a little piece of Earth to call your own. For example, here’s a Porcelain Ceramic relief map of the Shenandoah Valley region around Harrisonburg, Virginia. But where do you get the map data? There is a lot of it online, but not all of it is suitable for 3D printing or easy to export. Here’s where the website Terrain2STL comes to the rescue… // Column at Shapeways
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Full-Color Prints from Trnio Photogrammetry
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Autodesk discontinued 123D Catch in January as part of a transition to their more extensive photogrammetry software ReMake, leaving many educators, students, and amateurs without an easy pathway for making quick, simple scans. Enter Trnio, a new iPhone app that guides you through the process of taking photos of an object, then stitches those photos together to create a 3D printable scan… // Column at Shapeways
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3D Design Made Simple With Morphi
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How early can kids learn to create 3D printable designs? As soon as they can use an iPad, if they’re using Morphi, a friendly and powerful 3D design app. Morphi removes all the fiddly barriers to designing in a classroom: How does a student get a picture and send it to the computer? How do you convert an online image to SVG format? What if the internet goes down? Not a problem any more… // Column at Shapeways
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Taking Better Photographs of Your 3D Prints
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If you already know something about photography or if you have a nice camera, then this post isn’t for you. Today’s tutorial is for people like me, who needed an easy way to make their phone photos a little bit better and don’t want to break the bank doing it. And as an excuse to photograph for detail, we’ll check out some test prints from the new HP MultiJet Fusion 3D Printer… // Column at Shapeways
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Wrapping a Thing Around Another Thing
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For an amateur 3D designer, how to wrap something around another thing is one of those questions that you know must have an answer but seems impossible to figure out. It comes up so often, in fact, that we’re going to devote this post to answering using Grasshopper. And we’re going to give you the code so you can wrap your own things around other things. // Column at Shapeways
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Parametric Modeling With Grasshopper
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Why create just one design when you can create infinitely many? Instead of designing a ring in just one size, you could use parametric design to control the ring size or the surface pattern, effectively creating many designs within one. Parameters also enable you to create algorithmic, generative designs with amazing complexity. This week we’ll learn how to get started with Grasshopper… // Column at Shapeways
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