If you’re a maker, 3d printing is an incredibly useful tool to have in your arsenal. Not only can it help bring your projects to life faster, but it can also offer unique results that would be difficult (or impossible!) to achieve with traditional methods. In these blog posts, we’ll provide you with some essential information and tips regarding 3D printing for makers—including the basics of how to get started, plus creative tutorials for spicing up your projects. Whether you’re already familiar with 3d printing or are just starting out, these resources will help take your game-making skills even further!
Joshua Harker has been a maker and artist his whole life. He worked professionally as a product and toy designer for a few years before turning to 3D art. Within the last year and a half, he’s created the first and fourth most funded sculpture projects on Kickstarter, and sold thousands of beautiful works of art, all created with 3D Printing. I spoke to him about his process and his views on the current state of the 3D Printing industry.
New 3D scanning and 3D printing technologies are allowing us to obliterate old limitations. They’re giving rise to disruptive inventions, unseen production methods and dynamic products. 3D technology is a lot of fun, too. Take foosball. Foosball is fun.
The Photon, an affordable 3D scanner, has already quadrupled its $80,000 Indiegogo goal, with still two weeks to go. Almost as gratifying: the Photon has generated a flurry of proposed uses for the device beyond the original “maker hobbyist” market they were targeting. The Photon is the first product from Toronto-based company Matterform, founded by friends and collaborators Adam Branejs and Drew Cox.
What would your reaction be to moving into an apartment and finding an old broken IKEA lamp? Normally you’d throw it out, but not if you’re Industrial Designer Samuel Bernier. Instead he designed and 3D printed a series of intricate lampshades.
Social Coding company GitHub has released a free, in-browser viewer for STL files in full 3D. In comparison to the iterative, collaborative environments for working on software, hardware has a lot of ground to make up, and GitHub’s doing great work to push things along. I’m eager to see how this grows and how it’s used in comparison to popular services like Thingiverse.
The MakerBot Replicator 2X is now available in the Maker Shed! This model is optimized for ABS printing and has two extruders, opening up a host of printing possibilities. In addition to printing two colors, you can use one extruder to print a support structure for the other, or print two small objects at the same time.
MAKE publisher Dale Dougherty looks at the current state of the 3D printing industry and asks: “How soon do you think we’ll get to one million printers and what will drive those sales?”
