The Service Bureau is now closed until January 4, 2010, and the Advanced Output Center is closed until January 5, 2010. Have a happy holiday!
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2009.
Jay Leno is going to auction off his 3D printer on ebay soon! Bidding starts at $10k, and the winner also gets a one year warranty plus a Nextengine 3D scanner (pictured above). Proceeds will benefit Bailey’s Café, an educational and cultural organization dedicated to building community and inter-generational relationships in Central Brooklyn. I’m not a big Leno fan, but I say we pool our money and buy this.
Jay Leno uses a 3D scanner to digitize an antique car part.
According to this article in popular mechanics, Leno, an avid car enthusiast, uses 3D printing and scanning to reproduce hard-to-find parts for his collection of antique cars. Actually, the headline gets a little ahead of itself. Rather than using the printer to produce actual replacement parts, Leno uses his Dimension to test prototypes for fit, then has a machinist produce real metal replacements.
I wonder what printer Jay is stepping up to to replace his Dimension? Maybe an Arcam A2 EBM System?
-Chris
Tags: 3d printer, rapid prototyper, technology
So recently I had the chance to test out a new plug-in for Rhino. VSR Render is a real-time renderer which has the ability to deal with reflectivity better than rhino render and has some environmental mapping tools. These features make it a better render program to use in place of the default Rhino Render.
Default shaded view of a 3dm mouse file.
So, in the screen shot above you can see a model of a mouse that was supplied with the VSR Render Wizard. In the standard shaded view we have no reflectivity options and flat gray shades (unless you change layer color).
This is the Rhino render view while still in the view plane.
In the shot above I flipped on the Rhino render. This is how it looks while still in the viewing plane. Now we have some material shades assigned and can even apply textures to the object, but it still looks pretty plain looking.
This is the rendered view of the mouse using Rhino render.
The rendered view from Rhino render yields a very similar result to the render we saw while still in the viewing plane.
The rendered view using VSR Render.
What you see above is the rendered view with VSR Render enabled. I’ve not done anything to this object to alter the appearance once the file was opened. So what you see is what VSR Render does to a model by default. You’ll notice the reflectivity to a ground plane (which is added as part of the environment map) as well as a nice lighting setup for the shot as well. This is all done live. So if I move the model around it updates on the spot, whereas some renderers require you to re-render the shot before updates take effect.
Using VSR Render we can easily manipulate materials.
Now that VSR Render is enabled we can open up some of it’s control boxes and manipulate what we have in the render window. You can select individual materials assigned to the object and make them transparent, add reflectivity, refraction and shininess.
Using a custom environment in VSR Render
So with this control box we can load in our own images to use as backgrounds. It allows you to use a cube, sphere, or cylindrical shape for the image to be mapped to.
Adjusting the Ground Plane in VSR
In the environmental mapping tool we can also adjust the ground plane. In this case I made it slightly reflective and made sure it was set to receive casted shadows.
So overall this tool can be pretty useful if you wish to see how your object will look inside of an environment or just want a live render view that is able to give a more detailed output much quicker than rhino render. If you want to test it out, it is currently free (as it is still in Beta) at VSR Render. Now, because it is still in Beta mode, there are currently no help documents, so if you want to try it you’ll just have to mess around and figure out the features on your own.
-Mike
Tags: Advanced Output Center, awesomeness, Free stuff, render, rhino, technology, vsr render
materious' piggy, cast porcelain forms made with a 3D print from the AOC.
Designers Bruce and Stephanie of materious made these awesome slip-cast ceramic piggy banks using a form created on the AOC’s Dimesion Rapid Prototyper. The banks come in two sections: a larger piggy for personal savings, and a smaller one to set aside money for charitable donations. The bases of the banks are formed so that they must lean against one another to stand upright.
The designs for these banks were first made in Rhino (a digital 3D modeling program), then printed out of ABS plastic on the Dimension printer. Several coats of sandable primer were applied to the 3D prints to smooth out the surface. These forms were then used to create slip-casts for the final ceramic pieces.
-Chris
Tags: 3d printer, Advanced Output Center, casting, customer work, rapid prototyper
Take a look at tomorrow’s schedule. Starting to look pretty busy? Well it only gets worse as finals come up. You can expect the laser cutters to be booked back to back. So if you’re looking to do some laser cutting for a final project you might want to start thinking about making some reservations. Remember, you can make a reservation 2 weeks in advance!
Schedule as of right now for tomorrow 12/2/09
The minimum amount of time needed for a reservation is 3 hours, but as finals come up, you may not have any time slots to be filled with that minimum amount of time.
-Mike
Tags: Advanced Output Center, Advice, Laser cutter, Services, technology
