3D Printing

I (Krrrl) am taking advantage of this blog to write about 3D printing and my sculpture because, after all, I am writing the blog.

HeatSync Labs in Mesa, Arizona, has the only low end 3D printer that I have ever seen actually work. Thus I brought some 3D prints from Prescott Ogden, who put Stephen Colbert's head on a snap-together polyhedron, after combining 2 designs on Thingiverse. That makerspace seens to be pushing 3D printing pretty hard.

HeatSync prints with a Fakerbot, which is their own variation on a Makerbot:


I used a digital 3D process to make my relief sculpture, such as the Styrofoam mold that was milled by a CNC machine in Guadalajara, Mexico (which Gonzalo made a red sand and resin casting from):


FabLabAbq milled a smaller 3 foot Styrofoam mold in Albuquerque, which we used to cast the pseudo-translucent concrete relief I exhibited at the Sculpture Festival:


I then made a 3D scene of the exhibiton using one of Autodesk's new free online 3D creation softwares -- 123D Catch:


The augmented reality version of my relief sculpture using AndAR is shown below, over a "target" symbol, on temporary tattoos (that I left near my concrete relief):

AndAR is a beta augmented reality software made for (some) Android smartphones. However, I could not get AndAR to work on an ASUS EEE Transformer tablet PC.

My goal is to push a digital 3D file as far as I could -- from large concrete castings, and video, to augmented reality projections.

In the future, one might make small OBJ files for 3D printers and/or custom AndAR images, with the free online softwares 3D Tin or https://tinkercad.com/" target="_blank">Tinkercad; perhaps at Xerocraft, the local Tucson hackerspace.