Prior to the Digital Fabrication class I had absolutely zero personal experience with 3D printing. I have practiced 3D modeling in Blender but it was really only to help familiarize myself with the software/interface. Friends of mine had printed various things so I had seen some of the final products but never took it from beginning to end. In my first 3D printing assignment I learned several things that you can only learn by doing. Excited to see where it goes from here. Obviously, now I want to get my own!
Inspiration and Research
I’ve been cruising around the internet looking for various kinds of 3D printing inspiration. I wouldn’t say the what I have found directly impacted my most recent prints but I know that I will begin to incorporate some of these ideas and designs into my future prints. Over the past few days I have found several different artists whose 3D work has struck a chord with me:
Gilles Azzaro – his 3D print of one of Obama’s speeches is such a wonderful use of this technology and provides alternate ways of interacting with something in our history. It is also insane that this “single” print took over 350 hours on his desktop printer. I still don’t think I have grasped the scale of printing time.
DBLG – Such a ingenius idea! Stop motion in itself is wonderful but to use the precision of 3D printed objects to create the “frames” is even more beautiful. It has so nicely created this endless loop that is just mesmerizing. Again the scale of time involved is ridiculous because to get this two second animation it took 4 weeks of photographing 50 different models. Again, I still the time element of 3D printing is something I’m having trouble grasping!
Process and Progress
First Print
As far as process for my first 3D print (and 3D modeling) there was a lot that went into making what I designed ready for print. This was an arduous process that I had no point of reference for aside from a few stories from some friends. For this intial print I didn’t want to create too much of a challenge so I started with two models downloaded from Thingiverse.com. The dog figure was ready to go but I had to “disassemble” the wings from the dragon they were attached to. I decided to bring that .stl into Blender and enter edit mode so that I could select the parts of the model that could be deleted. After I had the wings by themselves I need to make sure the model was manifold so I went ahead and closed any open areas with new faces. Once the wing model was complete I was able to join the two models together using a boolean union operation. After my model was done it was time to take it into Z-Suite so I could get it ready for printing. I learned alot about scale and print time in this step and had to shrink my model down considerably to fit the 50 minute window. Once the print settings were decided upon and the supports were added it was time to take it to the printer. Obviously, printing was almost as bad as watching paint dry. However, towards the end when the object started to emerge it was pretty eye-opening.
I only have a photo of the finished product but I’m happy with how it came out. And know that documenting more of the process will be important in the future.
Generative Print
For my generative model I played around alot with the examples for Structure Synth and was able to get a good handle on most of the structure for defining and calling rules. At this point I felt it was necessary to tinker with the examples so that I could make something my own and then get another print under my belt (little did I know that was going to be another 2 prints under my belt). After Structure Synth it took some time in MeshMixer to get the model to be solid. Playing with the Cull Edges Threshold seemed to fix some things so I was able to then take it into Blender and decimate it. I ended up reducing the number of faces from over one million to a little under one hundred thousand. Now that the model was ready for Z-Suite I went ahead and added supports and did the first print of this object. It took around 35 minutes and it turned out… like crap. This was my first learning experience with respect to printing orientation and how that affects supports. After doing some more tinkering and rotating in Z-Suite I was able to produce a print that took about the same time, was bigger, and needed less supports. While it’s not something I think I will used in my second project it was a useful exercise to go from Structure Synth to a finished print.
Reflection
So far I’m really enjoying the process of turning a 3D model into a 3D object. The capability to bring the ideas in my head into a 3D dimensional space is mindblowing and I’m looking forward to learning more about the process of printing and modeling in general. I know that an increase in modeling practice will only expand my knowledge of Blender, which is something I’m excited to learn more and more about. I’ve found, as I’m sure many others have, that the availability of models on the internet is basically limitless. That being said, I want to get to a point where I can start modeling my own creations from scratch.
While it’s probably not part of this class I find that functional printing is extremely fascinating, especially in our society that is rife with planned obsolescence. The ability to print your own replacements for broken components on a product is incredible and I find that it could be very useful in my life so I don’t have to purchase (or repurchase) unnecessary items.
Obviously there is the environmental impact of creating more and more plastic objects. This is something that I’m wrestling with because the technology is so powerful. I’m happy to know that there are more and more filaments coming out that are biodegradable because that could potentially make a decent impact in our current plastics pollution crisis.