Category Archives: Design
Bring Children’s Books Alive: 3D Printing The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a classic children’s book originally published in 1969 and enjoyed by kids across the world.
3D printing marketplace i.materialise hosted a contest for designers to create their favorite storybook character. The winner was design firm timeRemapper who depicted Carle’s caterpillar laid up on a couch after too much pizza.
The winning design was 3D printed by i.materialise.
Shapeways Friday Finds: Anvil Cufflinks, Ceramic Ducks
3D printing marketplace Shapeways featured elegant and innovative designs in its weekly Friday Finds blog series.
Pictured above is a set of anvil cufflinks, available in stainless steel for $60. They don’t weigh enough to give you the arms of a blacksmith though.
And pictured below is a ceramic 3D print of momma and baby ducks.
Via Shapeways blog.
Read more coverage about Shapeways.
3D Printing Silver Jewelry: Perfect Fit, Unique Designs, All Glamorous
We have featured silver jewelry designs before, but we are continually impressed with the new designs that can be 3D printed. On the Shapeways marketplace, 4 silver jewelry pieces were featured as part of a summer catalog.
Silver is one of the more expensive materials to use for 3D printing, so prices for a small piece might be $30 to $100, while a larger piece might be $175 or more. But is the price worth it knowing that you can customize a unique design?
See the full feature on the Shapeways blog.
Micro 3D Printing: How Small Can You Go? Shapeways Shows Us
Shapeways featured some of the smallest, yet detailed, 3D printed designs on their blog.
The very small goods included trains, tanks, robots, Rubik’s cubes, and more.
Check out the whole collection at Shapeways.
Making 3D Printing Accessible: Interview with Tinkercad Founder
Kai Backman, co-founder and CEO of Helsinki-based Tinkercad, was interviewed by Wired magazine last week. Tinkercad allows mainstream consumers to design 3D models in their web browser for free, competing with traditional professional software costing thousands of dollars. Below are some excerpts from the interview.
What inspired you to create Tinkercad?
Tinkercad was born from a very personal frustration. In 2009, I started researching the new emerging 3-D printing technology and eventually bought my first printer by the end of the year. The device was assembled with great fanfare and my children eagerly looked forward to printed toys while my wife expected jewelry or at least some useful household items. Much to their disappointment it turned out that actually designing anything for printing was extremely hard with the software available. I would spend the evening learning one CAD system after another, only to get very little traction and forgetting most of what I learned before the next session.
In mid-2010 it had become clear the problem was more and more acute for a lot of people, so I quit my job at Google, Mikko my co-founder quit his job, and we started the company. We are still on the same road, our vision is to make 3-D design in general, and the design of physical items in particular, accessible to hundreds of millions of people.
On the Tinkercad Comunity
We let users choose how they want to publish their things and a lot of them use a Creative Commons license. This means the tinkercad.com site has a rapidly growing repository of interesting 3-D designs and an equally rapidly growing base of users.
Asked what Kai’s favorite 3D design is in the community, he pointed us to an historic train station on the Harlem line called Brewster Station.
Below is a video walkthrough of Tinkercad that showcases how it is feature rich despite the fact that it runs in a browser.
Read the full interview at Wired.
Tinker Towne photo by kafkan used under Creative Commons license.
