tomorrowday: June 2010

Sunday, June 13, 2010

On The Substantiation of Downloaded Things

So, today I feel I made a breakthrough in the world of printing things.
I've realized that there is a world of people out there that spend hours upon hours making very very very accurate 3d objects for use in animations etc. And they are printable.

Yes, it takes a bit of tweaking but with a basic path of,

Download somebody's 3d object (in poser, or obj or whatever) that they made to make
some game or something better or maybe just for fun and a dream of fame and riches

Load it into blender (for poser things you need extra scripts but they are also out there
for free somewhere)

Clean it up if you want,

Export as a .stl

Import it into netfabb studio (also free in basic mode) and make it all manifold and shit, put it on the xy plane, resize it to make you happy, and save it back as an .stl

Open with skeinforge and slice it up (for those who don't do this often, this is the evil-scripting demon that figures out tool-paths for the print head as well as the codes to turn it off and on, temp speed, basically tells the machine what to do)

Save that puppy and then load it into ReplicatorG (the printer controller) and press print.

And some amount of time later you get something that sorta kinda looks like you thought.

Now go back to blender, clean it up more, try some different skeinforge settings, maybe play some different music in the background to keep it calm and go boy go.

Now the next question is....

what are the copyright issues around printing someone's graphics?

If they say I can use them for any non-commercial purpose I guess that means I can print them. But I suspect they'd be a bit baffled by them getting used for something that they didn't even think possible.

This is a very interesting time to be alive.

Very interesting indeed.

-nat

Cleaned up a bit.

Still feeling cool.

Tintin's rocket.

Grabbed the 3d obj file off a graphics sharing site. Imported it into blender. Outputted a stl. Opened that in netfabb, resized it, put it in the right place on the xy plane, saved it. Opened it in skeinforge, sliced it (generated the tool path and gcodes), saved that. Opened it in replicatorG and pushed print.

3d cg to physical object, two hours.

I feel very cool right now.