DAZ Studio, Bryce and Hexagon Available for Free!

DAZ 3D has a spectacular offer on now for some 3D tools that readers may find of interest. These three software tools retail for over USD$800 and are apparently available at no charge through February. 

 

The tools include: 

 

• DAZ Studio Pro 4 - A tool for designing and animating human shapes and related objects
• Bryce 7 Pro - Can produce breathtaking landscapes and background scenes
• Hexagon 2.5 - A 3D modeling tool

 

It's a great deal, but perhaps not so useful for 3D printer owners, as it appears to be difficult to produce solid shapes with Hexagon, the 3D modeling tool of the set. Nevertheless, Hexagon can export STL format and offers quite a variety of organic shape modeling tools. 

 

Can't argue with free, though. 

 

Via DAZ3D

Stackable 3D Print Design

Tom Modeen is at it again, developing weird but artistic techniques for producing 3D objects with 3D printers. This time he's interrupting the 3D print operation before it completes, revealing the usually hidden inner support structure. By printing similarly sized objects, one can take these partial prints and manually assemble them in different combinations to create different composite objects. He says: 

 

The designs, which are a part of the 'Interrupted Design' series, all have in common that the support grid, usually hidden in the completed piece, that the FDM fabrication process can produce to save on both on material and printing time, has here been left exposed by interrupting the build before it's due. The CAD files that are used for the build have been designed accordingly, i.e. they all include 'extra' (z-axis) residual height in their designs that allow for the build to be stopped early without the design looking stumped...

 

Via Smarchitecture

The New Tinkercad

Tinkercad, the amazing web-based solid 3D modeling tool has recently improved its capabilities. This tool permits creation of basic 3D printable objects without an expensive software and more importantly without a lot of training. Tinkercad uses WebGL, so be sure to use a reasonably modern web browser. What did we notice about Tinkercad? 

 

• Gorgeously smooth workplane movements. It's beautiful!
• Included are all the basic geometric shapes, including geometric primitives, letters & numbers and even symbols
• Intersections vastly simplified by employing "hole" concept
• Send your 3D model directly to several 3D print services or you can directly download the STL for local 3D printing

 

As fascinating as Tinkercad may be, it does have some significant limits. Its features are quite basic and advanced features such as fillets, sweeps, etc. are absent. Workflow is also quite basic. 

 

Does this mean Tinkercad isn't useful? By no means. It's great for quick design of simple parts and jigs that you might need at home. 

 

Via Tinkercad

T-Splines Eaten by Autodesk

If you use Rhino3D or Solidworks for preparing your 3D models you might have heard of T-Splines. It's a special plug-in that permits easy creation of organic shapes and thus greatly extends the usefulness of Rhino3D and Solidworks, at least for some designers. But that may change abruptly. The other week 3D software giant Autodesk acquired all the assets of T-Splines.

 

But you say, Autodesk makes software that competes against Rhino3D and Solidworks. Yes, we thought the same thing. Now if you go to the T-Spline website and check out the products, you'll see this: 

 

T-Splines for Rhino is not available to buy or try at this time while our company transitions. Thank you for your patience.

 

And:

 

tsElements for SolidWorks is not available to try or buy at this time while our company transitions. Thank you for your patience.

 

This may mean the product is being absorbed into Autodesk's product line, or it could be just a delay during corporate switchover. According to Autodesk's press release: 

 

The technology acquisition will strengthen our Digital Prototyping portfolio with more flexible free-form modeling

 

T-Splines technology will benefit designers and engineers that require watertight surfaces for downstream analysis and manufacturing

  

Sounds to us like they may be discontinuing support for Rhino3D and Solidworks, choosing to bolster their own products. Not so good for Rhino3D and Solidworks. 

 

Via SolidSmack and Autodesk

Bodyworks Human Models

Want to 3D print a person? Need a 3D body model to put your head on? Go no further than Bodyworks - an online store specializing in sales of 3D models of people. 

 

All of their products are SolidWorks models, suitable for modification for your own purposes. Prices range from USD$99-149 for body models and USD$249 for human hand models. According to Bodyworks:

 

BodyWorks is a SolidWorks native, adjustable human body model, for use in product design and ergonomic simulation. The BodyWorks model uses a unique joint system that allows for easy and precise adjustment of limbs into the position you desire.

 

If you want bodies, you might check them out. 

 

Via Bodyworks

The New Teardrop

Maker Zaggo has discovered a truly useful design tip for 3D models. The new design helps overcome a deficiency in many low-cost 3D printers: no support material. Support material is typically extruded from a second print head during the print to add support for overhangs and difficult object geometries. The support material is then removed after printing to reveal the complete object.  

 

The problem is that many low-cost 3D printers do not offer a support capability. As such, 3D designs must account for this deficiency by eliminating overhangs & single tower shapes and re-orienting the object. 

 

One persistent problem is the ability to print holes, where by definition there must be an overhang at the top of the hole. The standard solution has been to print a teardrop shape that reduces the overhang. Unfortunately, the standard teardrop shape does occupy quite a bit of space and thus might not be usable on some designs. 

 

Zaggo's innovation is to chop off the pointy part of the teardrop. This re-creates an overhang, but it's actually ok because most modern low-cost 3D printers can actually handle short overhangs if they "bridge" to another side. The new design takes advantage of this bridging capability. 

 

If you're interested in trying this new shape, check out Zaggo's post on the Pleasant Hardware blog, where he includes the OpenSCAD code to make it. You may also be interested in trying his very useful Pleasant3D software for 3D model manipulation. 

 

Via Pleasant Hardware

SimCity or RealCity?

Yet another surprise source for 3D models has emerged: the game SimCity. SimCity, for those of you who have somehow never encountered it, is a simulation of a city. By tweaking various civic parameters, your city may thrive and grow - or die. It's a great tool for learning some of the basics of city operations. 

 

One of the great things about SimCity is that as your city grows different kinds of buildings appear, just as they might in a real city. Like a city government that merely sets policies, you see only the results of your decisions. If you're successful you'll soon have a big city with lots of interesting buildings. 3D buildings. Hm. 

 

Thingiverse maker Skimbal had the wonderful idea of creating a kit composed of the buildings in SimCity 2000. While it would be terrific to somehow extract the models directly from SimCity, that's not what's going on here. Instead Skimbal simply prepared 3D models of the buildings straight from memory. (Aside: this suggests that Skimbal played SimCity perhaps a bit more than the average gamer?) 

 

He's prepared and uploaded a set of 16+ buildings, roads and other material into a "kit" from which you can quickly assemble a pretty decent replica of your carefully engineered SimCity.

 

Via Thingiverse

Uformia - Saving The World From Polygons

Our rant regarding STL the other day provoked some interest from the not-yet-well-known company Uformia of Norway. While we all agree that there are serious problems with STL format, some are starting to do something about it. One group with an interesting approach is Uformia, who are developing a new approach to 3D modeling specifically designed to work well with 3D printing. 

 

We spoke with Turlif Vilbrandt, Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Uformia to ask about their product, Symvol™ for Rhino - Maker. 

 

Fabbaloo: What led you to develop this plug-in?  

 

Turlif Vilbrandt: Our technology comes from over 20 years of research and development, trying to answer the fundamental question: how do you accurately represent reality in a computer (and get it back out again - i.e. additive manufacturing).  To illustrate the depth of this problem and the limited solutions that exist today for modeling *real* objects, you can ask yourself a simple question: "In what modeling package today can I model/design a Venetian vase with all the material (and color definitions required) to truly capture even the basic information required to truly understand it?"  The answer of course excludes nearly, if not all existing consumer software as it is all based on the modeling of boundaries or 2.5D (i.e. 2D surfaces bent in 3D space with texture maps applied) and tells you nothing about the whole or inside of the object. Of course the design and modeling of a Venetian vase is a very simple example compared to an object from nature such as a human heart. The very basis of modeling a 3D+ world in 2D surface is fundamentally an incorrect starting point. Our platform models all objects as true 3D volumes and can include the definition of any number of properties (such as material or color) anywhere in the volume - including the blending of those properties.

 

Fabbaloo: What problem are you solving? 

 

Turlif Vilbrandt: Symvol™ for Rhino - Maker Version BETA represents the beta version of our first, "hello world" modeling tool, which offers an introduction to real volumetric modeling (Maker has a limited subset of functionality - for example it does not include the modeling of properties). We are not a voxel modeler or a blob-modeler, or a CSG modeler, or surface modeler (however our underlying platform can convert meshs and voxels).  

In addition to a host of advantages over other 3D modeling approaches, any object in our system, no matter the complexity, is inherently watertight. This of course is well-suited for 3DP and similar to CSG (FYI - true CSG is actually 3D and can be seen as a subset of our approach) as discussed your post "An End To The Dreaded STL Format?" from 2 days ago, can slice and send data directly to 3D printers (which Maker can do now).  Currently 3D printers are not being used in many cases at their full resolution and capabilities only due to STL and the current modeling software limitations. See these images for an example of a simple microstructure that STL for example has a lot of trouble with.

 

 

Note that this structure has no flat surfaces - it is a continuous perfect surface that can be sent to any 3D printer at its maximum or near maximum resolution from Maker.

 

Fabbaloo: Why the focus on 3DP?

 

Turlif Vilbrandt: Looking a bit further, one can see the elusive "3D print button" (that even grandmother can use) is possible, but not while we are are all still using 2.5D - so keep your eye on Maker.

 

As with most things, there is more than meets the eye. In this case, we must begin to think about what happens inside our printed objects - the part we can't see. 

 

Via Uformia (Hat tip to Cherie)