3D printing: an amazing yet very comprehensible, accessible, game-changing technology:
- already being used by the creative community
- limitless potential to take your virtual model, with elaborate topology and great physical complexity, and turn it into a physical object.
3D printing: best of both worlds ~ the freedom to work digitally, and get a tangible objects to hold.
Principle of 3D printing to recreate the virtual form:
- ‘bacon slicing' a virtual model
- sending these digital cross-sections to machines which reproduce each unique slice
- one layer on top of the one before
- gradually adding more material in layers to the top.
Currently there are several different types of 3D printing (additive manufacturing):
- Each technology is different from the next (with only one such process resembling a traditional 'printer’).
- Virtual models can be 3D printed in a growing number of materials
- metals and plastics, wax and nylon, glass and ceramics, paper, edibles and bio-materials!
- Most accessable process extrudes material through a nozzle to build the layers. Most common is plastics but even chocolate can be printed in this way!
- The oldest process uses a liquid (photo-sensitve) resin which is hardened by laser, layer by layer.
- Others use powdered material that is ‘glued’ or fused together by laser, layer upon layer.
- Another process uses paper or plastic sheets cut into exact profiles and glued to the previous profile, layer upon... I think you get the point!
- The ultimate additive method? building objects up with grains of material, tiny building blocks, with each grain deposited accurately by nimble robotic fingers.
Available for both industrial and desktop manufacture, the ‘consumer 3D printer’ movement encourages more people to engage with it:
- now more affordable: you can even build your own 3D printer at home!
- easier to access via online facilities with more compatible 3D file formats available:
- Companies like i.materialise, Shapeways, Ponoko and Sculpteo make direct access as easy and as smooth as possible
- most of the technical stuff such as repairing ‘non-manifold mesh’ and adding supports to any overhanging parts are done by the provider as part of their service
Whichever process, material and service you choose, the 3D printing job starts with a 3D digital model... and this is where we come in!