3d Printing Workshop at Codebase

This past month I haven’t been feeling particularly well, so unfortunately I couldn’t go to Edinburgh College of Art (as an artist in residence) as often as I would have liked. I’m hoping that I can catch up in the coming weeks. I’ve tried to use this time to work on my research and data collection. Aside form that though, 3D printing is indeed the big challenge in this practice research project, and only because it’s something I’m still quite unfamiliar with. Luckily I’ve been doing UI and UX design for an audio software start-up called Signum Audio at their Codebase space, and yesterday we were given laser cutting and 3D printing tutorials from Eagle Lab. The session was thoroughly enjoyable and hands-on, so we got to set-up the printers ourselves and load the filament (for the 3D printer). We also tried laser cutting on acrylic and cardboard.

It was really interesting to see that Sharon, the engineer who ran the class, worked backwards in order to teach us the process. So we first did the test prints, then observed how these were set-up on various software, so one software can slice a 3d file before printing, another can eliminate any errors, particularly present when working with 3D scans. There are also a number of converters for when a 3D file is not supported.

I was quite disappointed that it still seems difficult to print multicoloured objects on 3D printers, so that’s something I need to think about when taking my illustrations from paper/screen to 3D space. That said, there are a number of possibilities that I had not thought about, such as different materials, translucent materials, as well as a combination of 3d printing and laser cutting.

As soon as the class was over, I quickly downloaded Blender, which is a free 3D software and which has been recommended to me by various friends who work in 3D. I have used 3D software before, from Maya to 3Ds Max and Cinema4D so I’m quite familiar with terminologies and basic interfaces. Thing is, this was quite a while ago so a few tutorials in Blender should get me up to speed with 3D.

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