Yup! That’s right folks, I have a DIY 3D printer in the mail. It has been almost a 2 month wait, but I can’t wait to start playing around with it.
I plan to stain and varnish the wood pieces to give it a nice finish that will make it look sharp. Putting it together will be a lot of fun. Lego for grown ups. 
This is the future of in home production:
Some day I will get my hands on this or the Makerbot
For a large part of my time the last 2 weeks have been focused on learning Blender. A free open source 3D tool that is incredible powerful and complex.
The learning curve is aided by Lynda.com’s exceptional tutorials for Blender and Lee Brimelow’s tutorial on GotoAndLearn. When creating 3D in flash, Lee’s tutorial shows you how to build a model in Blender and bring it into flash using Papervision. Very helpful in understanding the process from beginning to end.
One trick I have found helpful is after you have exported the UV map outlines in Blender (UVs –> Scripts –> Save UV Face Layout), in Photoshop keep the layer with the outlines on the top and change the layer blend mode to “Color Burn”. This removes all the white and keeps the outline visible.
Otherwise, Merry Christmas Everyone!
In order for me to personally justify the future investment into a 3D printer. I need to give myself reasons that it will be worth while.
The other weekend, I decided to replace the auto lock mechanism in my Mazda. The replacement part was $55. Once I got into the door and removed the broken module I opened it up to inspect the guts of the unit. It is a fairly simple device that includes a small electric motor, gears, springs, a switch and a plastic piston that moved the lock.
The piston was connected to a gear and it had snapped in half. This piston was a simple cylinder with a pin that could have been modeled and then printed on a open source 3D printer like Cupcake CNC or Rep Rap.
Now I just need to get a better understanding of Arduino and 3D modeling before I can seriously justify the cost. But until then, I can keep dreaming.
I have been working on a module for physics to visually explain Conics. I choose to use Papervision to construct this learning module in flash.
The first issue I discovered was rough edges when a plane intersected the double-napped cone model. This problem was very obvious when the intersections where at angles that cut into the vertices of the model. This was around the time when the QuadrantRenderEngine class became available with Papervision 2.
So when I finally got back on track with this project, I was pleased to get the new QuadrantRenderEngine to work with the conics module. The plane cut through the model just wonderfully and cleanly. Until I rotated the model and plane to discover the render engine only helped the top side of the plane, not the back side. There underneath the plane was breaking up just like before.
So what to do? I tried 2 separate one-sided planes (opposite facing) and animating them separately, but this result was awful because of the inconsistent animation paths. Tried a cube, but that didn’t seem to work.
Until I finally realized that I could group the two opposite facing planes into an 3D object and animate the object as 1 item. Using the DisplayObject3D class, I was able to group and animate the 2 planes together.
Papervision certainly has its learning curves. But I am starting to figure it out.
Every day I find new reasons why I love the open source community so much. Yesterday, I stumbled upon Makerbot.com, a small company that has created an open source hardware device that will print out 3D images with the equivalent of using a hot glue gun. The device is called Cupcake CNC. Check out the Google talk video, it is really neat to think of what the possibilities could be with this device.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zirHL_rRBu0
Now, all I have to do is save $1000.
