There’s now a free 3D model site intended for car parts: PrintYourVehicle.
At first, I thought this was another site that was offering printable toy vehicles, where you’d print a tiny replica of a 1970 Mustang on your Ender-3.
Nope, that’s not it at all. This site is for REAL car parts. Parts that you might print and install on an actual vehicle.
And it’s entirely free and open source.
But there is a catch. While they are on the path to get to that point, and the current stage is the ability to print scale models of vehicles made from actual 3D scans.
They explain:
“We’ve built the largest open-source library of accurate car meshes, 600+ models extracted from video games, each based on 1:1 real car scans. Every panel gap, every badge, every body line is accurate.
The catch right now? These are triangle meshes, they look perfect but can’t be printed directly. They need to be converted into printable geometry. That’s the hard problem we’re solving. Some of it is being done manually by the community, and we’re simultaneously researching automated pipelines to do it at scale.”
At this point, they have body models for quite a few popular vehicles, both current and historical. Above you can see an example, an ancient Volkswagen Beetle. That was made from a 3D scan, but one can imagine in the future you’d see the body sectioned into separate printable parts.
A few of the models are packaged up as “kits”, where you can print all the parts and assemble the entire vehicle. Others are just a mesh file, like the Beetle above.
The full kits show where this service is headed. I looked through the Koenigsegg Jesko kit, and found 580 (!) printable parts in STL. You could absolutely print these parts and build a life-size Jesko, assuming you have the underlying frame and motor. Above, you can see a piece of the front hood for this vehicle.
Ultimately, one might use the resources of this site to, for example, print the body parts of a supercar in a home conversion project.
The team is looking for the public to help by contributing not only part scans, but also code to make the entire process seamless.
This is quite an ambitious project, but it may succeed because there are an enormous number of people interested in this area.
Via PrintYourVehicle
