Towson Report

We read Susannah Naree’s eclectic report on a visit to Towson University by designer Arthur Hash, who is one of many who are using 3D technology (among other techniques as you will see) to develop unique and innovative artistic designs. Hash’s website provides a rather unique dynamic display of his recent works, including the baby… Continue reading Towson Report

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Mouse Brains

We don’t know about you, but if we received a 3D Mouse Brain as an anniversary present, we’d be pleasantly surprised. That’s exactly what happened when LiveJournal blogger Molliebatmit opened her first anniversary present. She writes: And yesterday, Adam came home with my anniversary gift. Now, some people might get a necklace or a pair… Continue reading Mouse Brains

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The DesignDashboard

  This intriguing tool gets more interesting the deeper you look into it. What is it? It’s a handy device to help you discover new design aspects of almost any complex design situation. According to their Q/A: The Dashboard maps design space and then lets you choose a path. Specifically you can use it to… Continue reading The DesignDashboard

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Is a 3D Print High Quality?

  Many who encounter 3D printing initially react badly when they realize that the print resolution on today’s 3D printers is not so great. For fine details, the capability just isn’t yet there, at least with the lower cost 3D printers and services.   However, that does not mean 3D printing is unusable. You simply… Continue reading Is a 3D Print High Quality?

Digital Vases

  Artists continue to exploit 3D technology. This week we encountered a report from Digital Collisions that spoke of New York based designer Joshua Davis, who recently used 3D tech to produce stunning vases, including the one pictured above.   Davis evidently used Maya to produce the 3D model, which was then printed. The vase… Continue reading Digital Vases

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3D PreFab Home

    It’s not a home, exactly, but at least some components of a prototype home of the future were manufactured on a Z-Corp 3D printer for the “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. According to DesignNews on wall:   has been fabricated from a… Continue reading 3D PreFab Home

Signs of 3D

Another innovative use for 3D printing has appeared as reported by Today and Tomorrow. PRINT magazine commissioned a cover from Artist Karsten Schmidt, who:   used the Gray-Scott reaction diffusion model in a Processing sketch (an open source programming language) to generate a 3D typographical model. While this project was intended as a magazine cover,… Continue reading Signs of 3D

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The Most Expensive 3D Model?

The folks at Blossom posted several articles recently detailing their work to design and produce a rather unusual 3D object. It’s a small-scale model of a strange and complex sculpture, as you can see in the rendering pictured here. Evidently the shape of the object baffled the 3D printers as it had a double-layered shell… Continue reading The Most Expensive 3D Model?

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A Strange Fusion of Sculpture and Manufacture

Painting Polygons recently interviewed Chris Cornish, a 21st century artist and designer. According to his website, Chris Cornish works in photography, digital film, sculpture and 3D computer media. Recent film works address aspects of spectacle and reality, locating 3D environments within the illusory space of video. Although presented as moving images, Cornish’s films are marked… Continue reading A Strange Fusion of Sculpture and Manufacture

Fabbing Fabrics

Technothreads is an exhibition taking place in Dublin, Ireland from 26 April to 25 July 2008. The purpose of the exhibition is to offer a glimpse into the future of fabric, both from a design and technical point of view. From their website: Conceptual Couture concentrates on the use of science by fashion designers at… Continue reading Fabbing Fabrics

The Tiny Table Experiment

When shopping for a 3D printer, one of the primary considerations is the size of the build chamber. Generally, we prefer as large as possible to enable the biggest objects to be printed. Printers with smaller build chambers sometimes use specialized software that automatically decomposes the 3D object into snap-together parts that are printed separately,… Continue reading The Tiny Table Experiment

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Car Artists Meet 3D Artists

The guys at Local Motors are definitely not the same as those you’d find at your neighborhood garage. They are a full on “vehicle design studio”, and as you might imagine, they make use of 3D printing tech. This time they’ve taken a road trip to visit the wildly artistic “Design and the Elastic Mind”… Continue reading Car Artists Meet 3D Artists

Companion Cube Sequence

Zorink’s Flickr page displays a sequence of images of his “companion cube” creation, apparently designed in SolidWorks and printed out on what appears to be a ZCorp 3D printer. The images show not only the design, but also the printing process and the resulting cool object. Via Flickr

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Who Determines the Future of 3D Printing?

DesignNews discusses the recent “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibit at MOMA in New York City, with an emphasis on the radical. They indicate that while “engineers who control the practical aspects of design and manufacturing”, “artists and industrial designers can provide some insight into additive fabrication too”. The article goes on to list specific… Continue reading Who Determines the Future of 3D Printing?

Parametric House!

  Dorota Kabala and Verena Vogler of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia have designed an amazing and stunningly beautiful system for an adaptable house. It can: “adapt to its environment, to its users or to any other parameter” The idea is to produce a modular system based on a 3D matrix of spaces… Continue reading Parametric House!

Dining Room Table Printed

  It’s really just a model, but the concept was developed by Swiss Designer Phillippe Cramer. Interestingly, Philippe’s model is entitled, “Stalactite Table”, which mirrors the 3D printing process that produced it: layer by layer.  Maybe when the build chambers of commonly available 3D printers are a bit bigger than they are now (12 inches… Continue reading Dining Room Table Printed

3D Brain Lamp

It’s been a few days since we last reported on an unusual 3D design item, so today we have a very unusual item indeed. The designer, Alexander Lervik of Lervik Designs managed to massage MRI scan data of his own brain to create a 3D model of that most important internal organ. After punching it… Continue reading 3D Brain Lamp

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Ponoko Contest Winners

The lads at Ponoko (a New Zealand-based prosumer-oriented fabbing service) have announced the results for the Invitation Round of their Jewelry Design Challenge. Truly amazing designs were devised by Ponoko’s customers. Steven from Ponoko said: There were a spectacular number of creative and interesting designs, and it was VERY hard for all involved to choose… Continue reading Ponoko Contest Winners

Design and the Elastic Mind

Design and the Elastic Mind is the name of a new exhibit to open in February at New York City’s MOMA. The exhibit will feature the work of Finnish designer Janne Kyttänen, who is one of the founders of Freedom of Creation, a firm we’ve posted on previously. The exhibit runs from February 24th through… Continue reading Design and the Elastic Mind

Generator.X 2.0 Photos

We came across a large (270 photo) and truly amazing collection of photos taken from the recent Generator.X 2.0 event. While not all exhibits were created with 3D printing, all used modern fabbing techniques. Via Flickr

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OptoIsolator

Ok, we admit this is only marginally related to 3D printing, but it is interesting enough that we thought we’d point it out to readers. It’s a work of art that includes a mechanical eyeball that literally follows you as you move near the exhibit. What’s the 3D print connection? The black case was printed… Continue reading OptoIsolator

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Generator X 2.0 Revisited

Remember back to early December? We posted about the GeneratorX 2.0 workshop, an exhibition of designer works who used various digital fabrication techniques to produce amazing items. ArtDaily reports on a presentation entitled “Beyond the Screen”, where participants from the GeneratorX 2.0 workshop will show their works. As we’ve suggested many times before: there are… Continue reading Generator X 2.0 Revisited

3D Vase with a Difference

In the past we’ve posted on specific and unusual objects printed using 3D print technology. This is another one – with a slight difference. This object, the Kisos flower vase can be purchased! Yes, the maker, Umamy, offers a limited run of these beautiful vases for sale on eBay at a cost of USD$400 each.… Continue reading 3D Vase with a Difference

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Electric Light Shoe

Freedom of Creation is at it again – this time creating an astonishing 3D shoe for a Japanese marketing campaign. The project was quite complex, as one can see from the incredible detail in the shoe object. From the press release: After seeing the concept from StawberryFrog, Janne Kyttanen and Mads Thomsen conceived a microcosm… Continue reading Electric Light Shoe

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More Acoustical Objects

Architectradure reports on yet another experiment with sound making devices produced by 3D printing technology, following up on our recent acoustical post. In this experiment, designer and engineer Amit Zoran has produced a unique guitar by assembling parts designed with software and produced by a 3D printer. Using specialized software, Zoran designed chambers suitable for… Continue reading More Acoustical Objects

Rapid Prototyping used to Create Sound

Jun Murakoshi is a researcher in Department of Design Science, Graduate School of Engineering, Chiba University, Japan. Among his works is this interesting device made via rapid prototyping technology: the “noisy instrument”. According to Jun, the device: is a wearable instrument for listening the noise like seashell makes.   One can imagine future experiments where… Continue reading Rapid Prototyping used to Create Sound

Fabbing = Teleportation

Well, it happened faster than we had anticipated, but there are now people teleporting objects using 3D printing technology. De Zeen Design Magazine has a very interesting post and pictures of emailed objects that have been printed on a 3D printer, thus effectively accomplishing teleportation. We’re not quite sure about the scanning part on the… Continue reading Fabbing = Teleportation

Not Quite a 3D Library

Over at the Adobe Design Center Think Tank, Allan Chochinov posts an interesting analysis of “fictional products” from the design point of view. Fictional products are those which don’t actually exist but parallel existing products. Consider a speculative version of a future iPod, for example. Chochinov points us to online services where designers of such… Continue reading Not Quite a 3D Library

Considerations for 3D Printing

We frequently scan the Internet to find the latest on Fabbing, and lately we keep finding many postings regarding DesktopFactory’s sub-$5000 3D printer. We’re guilty of that ourselves.Many of these postings imply that 3D printing is going to be relatively straightforward. Just purchase the now-inexpensive printer and you’re good to go! But it’s not like… Continue reading Considerations for 3D Printing

Designer Uses 3D Printing

As many designers have discovered, 3D printing can be very useful to render an actual three-dimensional model of their imagined item. From idea to sketch to drawing, the next stage is a model. But rather than using the traditional tedious process of manual construction, contemporary designers are frequently finding that a 3D printer can be… Continue reading Designer Uses 3D Printing

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Make Your Own Watch!

Frederic Hakoune uses 3D printing technology to produce his own watch – and it works. Well, he didn’t print the clockwork mechanism itself, but the housing certainly looks good. Frederic posts pictures of the entire process, from design blueprints, the actual printing operation and of course assembly. Via Facebook

OGLE 3D Model Extractor Available

The folks at Eyebeam OpenLab have produced (and released as open source software) OGLE, a very interesting package that: allows for the capture and re-use of 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications running on Microsoft Windows. It works by observing the data flowing between 3D applications and the system’s OpenGL library, and recording that… Continue reading OGLE 3D Model Extractor Available

Generator.X 2.0

Generator.X 2.0 is a “a workshop and exhibition about digital fabrication and generative systems” in which 15 designers will be selected to participate. Using modern digital fabrication techniques, including 3D printing and laser cutting, the artists will explore the possibilities of these new manufacturing mediums from an artistic and architectural point of view. Applications close… Continue reading Generator.X 2.0

Wired Writes Up 3D Printing

WIRED magazine has published an article describing how 3D Printers will (and are) being used for various interesting purposes. In the article a worker at Frog Design (famous for designing the iPod and other Apple enclosures) uses 3D equipment to produce a unique ring for his fiance. The article goes on to describe how they… Continue reading Wired Writes Up 3D Printing

Design Studio uses Fabbing

Article describing how 3D printing is being used in modern design studios. The story of Janne Kyttänen, who owns the Freedom of Creation company in Helsinki, which produces award-winning interior accessories using 3D printing techniques. You must check out FOC’s portfolio of design products. Lights, accessories and even textiles are produced with several rapid manufacturing… Continue reading Design Studio uses Fabbing

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