IZation Labs

Ladies and gents, Shapeways just knocked my socks off.

A new material has been added to the selections at Shapeways. It’s name: Sandstone. It is the newly appointed cheapest material to print in, beating out Strong, White, and Flexible by a third of the price. It only costs one dollar to print a cubic centimeter of this stuff.

The truly amazing thing, as alluded to in the title, is that the material can be printed in full color. That’s right. Full color. Some of you might be thinking ‘So?’ or ‘Hmph. About time’. Others who know a bit more about the mechanics of 3D printing are amazed and overjoyed at this next step in the right direction. The logistics and technical difficulties in pulling off full color printing amaze me, and the new ways things can be printed rocks my world.

FULL COLOR. My mind is blown, Shapeways. Well played.

Go here to learn more about this newest material and it’s capabilities.

–Lace

I’ve been doing more and more modeling in the ‘just for fun’ category, and many more of these have made it to Shapeways and are now printable. Six of the most recent items are shown below with their most base level prices, determined by the material used for production. Plastic = cheaper, metal = more expensive (yet cooler).  No matter what material you purchase, I still receive the same markup (typically a dollar or so, with my models). Click the name or the image to view the model at the IZL shop at Shapeways, and as always, you can click the link just above to get more info about the IZL Shapeways Shop and how it works.

Alchemic Necklace

This work was made using a reference image from one of my favorite animated series’, Full Metal Alchemist. It’s the necklace that one of the key characters use to ‘fuel’ the kind of stylistic alchemy that she prefers. Bonus points if you can tell me the name of the character.

This model is of sufficient size to be worn on a chain around the neck. ($5.00 USD)

Click here to see the rest of the new models

Here is a short video I made a few weeks ago that grew out of a tutorial I was following to make ‘plants’ grow. I also made use of Blender’s built in Python camera changing script for the first time. There are some problems with the frame switching between shots that I need to figure out, but I felt this render was good enough to post.

It took four or five days to render this out, as I used some badly implemented concepts to make the ground look better which took up far more processing power than If I had just modeled the ground to begin with. Final product is close to what I was aiming for anyway.

–Lace

Here he is, my first official full size character model; BahtHead. Well, watch the gif below, anyway, and you’ll see his current state in the last frame. I’ve been making renders along the way (didn’t start on the head until it was nearly done) so you can see the different additions and occasional subtractions I’ve made to his structure over time.

I know he’s not finished, there are plenty of places that I’ll still tweak. Next up, I have to snap on some rubber gloves and start watching some hardcore rigging tutorials. This should be interesting.

The head is, to my knowledge, printable, but I haven’t done a test order yet. The body won’t be printable for a while still.

Comments and suggestions are more than welcome! I need the input! You there! I’m imagining that look on your face. You have something to say, to suggest, don’t you? Spit it out!

–Lace

In spite of holidays looming and exams taking up much of my time, I’ve been working on some models instead of visiting with family like I should be. Not only that, but I’ve also been modeling with 3D printing in mind, so many of them are now at Shapeways! For more info on 3D prints, click on the new IZL Model Shop link up above.

Most of these models were done in a single sitting, though one or two are still works in progress. All were done in 2.49b. There is a model or two that I’ve done in the new 2.5, but… suffice it to say, they aren’t quite ready for daylight yet.

On a personal note, my favorite is the robot head.

–Lace

Just a very quick update, the official release of the new Blender Alpha is tomorrow! For those of you who haven’t been following along, 2.5 includes tons of new features and a redesigned GUI!  Go here for more details!

via — BlenderNation

–Lace

After following a fantastic tutorial by Jonathan Williamson (no relation) I put together this rough animation of a working piston. All of the modeling, animation, and rendering was done using just Blender.

The end of the piston is parented to an empty, and the empty is parented to the through rod which is connected to the flywheel. The in-out movements of the piston and cylinder are calculated automatically. The only thing animated in the video is the flywheel’s turning along it’s y-axis. I’ve been wanting to play with this for a long time. Next up, a steam engine!

I’ve another video rendering out right now. It’s taking awhile, it’s HD and render time is half an hour or so per frame. Can you say ‘not optimized’? Oh well.

–Lace