3D THING fun 3d stuff - Free 3d things

Self Replicating Machines getting closer!

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:58:00 +0000

An experimenter called Nophead has been using his self-built rapid prototyping machine to print the parts for more self-replicating prototype machines.
I posted about Reprap before, what's interesting about this is that people are beginning to print copies of machines for each other.
The concept of low cost / free machines that make copies of themselves is likely to revolutionize global manufacturing.
As the quality and versatility of these machines improves it should become possible to download and print consumer items.
One day, will we be downloading the latest iPhone and printing it out at home?

The downside - It took around two weeks to print these parts out, and of course we can't print out the motors, control circuitry and a bunch of other components... yet.

Cheaper, smaller, faster CNC machines

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:03:00 +0000

Time for a 3d printing catch-up:
The Team at MAKE are offering the Cupcake CNC:

You can download the plans and build one yourself Or buy a kit for $750 dollars / $2500 assembled.
The machine will work with extruded thermoplastic to produce small items.

The print resolution is not bad for the money
They claim there will be an optional cake frosting nozzle kit??
It wont do cnc milling, but it can be used as a stating point to build larger CNC machines.

Batch #4 ships July 7th

Non-Edible plastic cup cakes!

If you have a bit more cash there's Fabathome
This machine is a bit bigger and can work with more materials
KOBA have been using one to create parts from uv-cured adhesive that are
strong enough to be used as bicycle gears!
All plans and instructions are available at Fabathome and but if you want one right now
KOBA will sell you a kit for $3025 or a fully assembled fabber for 3600

If that's all way too expensive, here's the cheapest easiest CNC machine I've seen:
Tom McWire's Easy CNC Machine

Bits of pipe, aluminium channel, skate bearings
and motors from old printers.
Tom also provides instructions for the control circuitry - but you can find cnc stepper controllers on ebay if you don't want a load of soldering.
This little machine can also help you build bigger and more accurate CNC/3D printng machines.
Tom says it can be made for well under $200 dollars!

Spherical 360° Video

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:39:00 +0000

Immersive Media have some rather cool interactive videos on their site - this is the output from multiple camera, stitched together and put into an interactive flash video - don't forget to drag around on the video with your mouse - basically you can move your head around inside a sphere of streaming video.
I know this has been out for ages in still form - but this is something else.

LINK

Awesome 3D in Flash

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:30:00 +0000

Stolen from Gaming Blog Chewing Pixels

Masayuki Kido is the author of ROXIK, a very full-featured 3d engine for Flash complete with bones and gravity.
Here's one of his creations - a cute rainforest world filled with easter eggs and virtual pop-up books.
To try out the physics engine, head over here

Orphan Works. Corbis/Getty p0wns YOU!

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:31:00 +0000

This goes out to to readers In the U.S.A.
Copyright law is changing:
Since the 1976 copyright act you own your visual output. That could be drawings, paintings, photos, 3d renders, telephone doodles. If you made it, you own the copyright.

Imagine if suddenly everything in you've created in your lifetime was out of copyright unless you'd registerd it with a specific legal body?
Even if you've already registered it with the copyright office!?!

A new Bill is trying to make this happen in America. (And Europe too)

Please check out this article at the fabulous animation portal AWN.com

A brief quote:

"If the Orphan Works legislation passes, you and I and all creatives will lose virtually all the rights to not only our future work but to everything we've created over the past 34 years, unless we register it with the new, untested and privately run (by the friends and cronies of the U.S. government) registries. Even then, there is no guarantee that someone wishing to steal your personal creations won't successfully call your work an orphan work, and then legally use it for free.
In short, if Congress passes this law, YOU WILL LOSE THE RIGHT TO MAKE MONEY FROM YOUR OWN CREATIONS!"

And to the rest of the world - Just Like Burgers, blue jeans and Britney Spears, if its over there, it's gonna be heading your way soon.

If you find the article a little dry, listen to this podcast from Mark & Jeanne Simon 's webite

In this are references to Derrida, Dickens and Victor Hugo. Apparently the bill was proposed by a group of Law students working under the influence of some kind Crypto-Marxist University Lecturer who's ideas, ironically, found favour with big stock-photo names like Corbis and Getty.
Image libraries like Corbis / Getty look likely to be the bodies that will control this brave new world of copyright..

Why is all this happening? two reasons:
1: There is LOAAAAAAAAAADS of money in all this
2: Artists don't know as much, think as much or care as much about copyright / legalese as Bill Gates Does.

Anyway, the bill is apparently being "Fast Tracked"

GULP!!

Helmer II - The Renderor

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:36:00 +0000

Janne at sfe.se has drawn up plans for the successor to his Helmer low budget Ikea render farm.

This time the spec is 6 mobos with AMD Quadcore CPUs and 24(!) high end graphics cards - 4 per motherboard

He claims it will have a capacity of 50 Terraflops..

I wonder what rendering software he's using? I guess It's something that can utilise the GPUs of all those graphics cards.

I'm saddened that he's moved away from using Ikea Case-Hardware. I was looking forward to seeing the Ektorp RenderSofa or the Portis RenderHatRack...

LINK

Free online photo to 3d service

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:46:00 +0000

Take some stereoscopic photos - like this sort of thing
Upload them here and the magical pixies at photo-to-3d.com will generate a 3d model for you.

So far I've only had time to try their two minute "poor quality" service - which was pretty low-res - but whaddayawant for free?
The oddly named Dogduck Software team from Sweden also offer a 40 minute high-quality option. At the end of the process you get a zipfile with your model in various formats.

If you have a go, do post your results here..

3D in your browser

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:43:00 +0000

A 3d Engine for your browser?
Alternativa3D seem to have cracked it with their new 3d platform. You don't need any obscure plugins, just plain old flash. So it should work for anyone not living on planet 1997 Try the demo

If you know your way around flash you can download the relevant files (for personal non-commercial use) and create your own interactive 3d content.

LINK

Other Things

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 10:22:00 +0000

Many thanks to Music Thing for linking to 3d Thing!
I now find myself part of the unofficial Thing Network:
Music Thing
Video Thing
Retro Thing
Big Thing (oh, actually that's a Duran Duran Album)

Music thing = magnificent musicians and their geeky gadgets:
Awesome Sword Guitar!
Brian Eno is the Sound of Microsoft

Free 3D model: Glasses

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:31:00 +0000

Here's a pair of NHS spectacles as worn by our mascot the 3d Thing.
In the archive: Lightwave and OBJ format.
Trouble importing to your 3d program?
Got a model you'd like to see here?
Leave a comment and maybe we can help.

DOWNLOAD

Rise of the Self-Replicating Machines

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:00:00 +0000

Long live the new Flesh!
29th of May was a red-letter day for rapid prototyping and 3d printing:
We've finally made a machine that can make a machine that can make a machine that can...
This is a photo of proud parents Adrian Bowyer and Vik Olliver with examples of their Reprap machine - an open-source rapid prototyping project that's realtively easy to build. You can buy most of the parts "off the shelf" - those that you can't can be made with the machine itself.
My opinion - It won't be long before you can print out ANY product at home, mobile phones, sneakers etc. This is where it's at - a factory on every desktop. Cue massive economic state change across the globe as the big manufacturing industries wonder how to stop this crazy thing!

How long does it take to build one? - Well Adrian appears to stop only once for a sandwich while he asembles a Reprap "Darwin 1.0" in this timelapse youtube vid:

LINK

For when you need a normal map A.S.A.P.

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:53:00 +0000

Crazybump extracts all kinds of maps from photos - Bump, Normal, Specular, Diffuse etc.
I know you can do most of that that in Photoshop, but check out the video demo at the Crazybump website, this thing looks extremely fast and convenient.

LINK

Billy Ray Shyster

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:11:00 +0000

Does the VFX industry take itself too seriously? Not at the University of Texas.
I have fond memories of this clip from the Siggraph reel in '97, and now, thanks to youtube, you can see some of the worst computer graphics ever rendered..

Related: this pretty stupid paper from Siggraph 1986 (They had computer graphics in 1986??)
Ray Tracing J ELL-O ® Brand Gelatin (warning - PDF)

Latest trends in HDRI / 3D projectors

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:38:00 +0000

Here's a Google Video Talk from all-round Computer Imaging Legend Paul Debevec. It's an hour long, but worth it, so grab a cuppa and get learning.
If you're new to all this High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) stuff this is a great place to start.
In the first part of the talk Debevec covers the basics of HDRI, then he shows you some of his cutting edge image andperformance capture research. Then he demos what he's got in store for the future. (How about a Princess Leia-style 3d projector?)

3D scanning for all

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 29 May 2008 06:20:00 +0000

Ever wanted your own 3D laser scanner?
Well here's how to make one with ordinary household items!
You will need:

Computer
Webcam
Laser pointer
DAVID Laserscanner freeware

You print out the calibration bg and "paint" your laser over your object to be scanned - David fills in the gaps and builds a mesh from the point cloud data. There's a 99euro software addon that will join multiple scans together - which is super-cheap as this was once the territory of high-end scanning hardware and software like Rapidform (which, being the best, costs up to $30,000)

Whoah - dude scanned himself in and then cnc'd himself into a statue!

Make your own tiny, cheap Ikea Render Farm (Render Hamlet?)

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 29 May 2008 05:27:00 +0000

Janne wanted a cheap, compact renderfarm that would run cool, quiet on low-power.
He took a stack of cheap mini-atx motherboards, some Intel quad-core cpus and stuck the lot in some Ikea furniture.
Result: "Helmer" a 186 gigaflop renderfarm.
Price: Janne claims around the same as a "standard pc"
Full details of how to do it yourself in the link :)

His next project will be supercheap 12 teraflop box.
To put this in perspective....Pixar made Monsters Inc with a 2 teraflop farm!
How many flops do Pixar have now?
they must be into the squazilloflops...

More 3D to real-world Amazingness

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:23:00 +0000

Following on from the Pepakura post, here's another great
thing from Japan:

Plushie is a free app that lets you draw a simple 3D character and then calculates a sewing pattern for you to print out and sew a plush toy!

Plushie's Author, Yuki Igarashi has done some other really cool projects for her P.H.D. More here

Turn your 3D models into toys

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:43:00 +0000

Here's a great piece of software from Japan:
Pepakura will take your 3d mesh and atomagically unwrap it into one of those cardboard-cutout kits you'd find on the back of a cereal-box.
Print out the result on your inkjet, glue tab A to tab B, repeat.. Rapid Prototyping for everyone!

Could this piece of sofware be the secret weapon behind
Superstar Video Director Dougal Wilson's Klonhertz promo (below)?

This Week's Free 3D Model

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:40:00 +0000

This week's exclusive Totally Free 3D Model is:
A metal suitcase, Lightwave Format:
http://rapidshare.com/files/118296576/TF3D_AluminiumCase_LWO.zip.html

What model do you want to see next week?
And what's the best 3d format for these things?
Leave a comment with your opinion.

images

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Sat, 10 May 2008 22:08:00 +0000