123d make leg

Three weeks into the semester and the students have some things happening; good to see. I'm trying to push them a little to work a bit faster. Calvin just cut out  and assembled this leg: made from a 3D scan, sliced in 123D Make, cut on our CNC router with code that he generated with RhinoCAM. This will be a wood "buck" that he'll use to create a leg covering.

autodesk 3d print utility

Aaron just sent me some info about an Autodesk 3D Printing utility that works with Makerbot and told me I might want to check it out. I downloaded it just a few minutes ago and here are my initial thoughts. At first I thought it was going to be just like the Makerbot software, but now that I have a file open, I see that it's quite a bit different. It shows supports which is a cool feature. It also makes auto repairs to the stl as it opens the file. When I go to print though, it just opens the repaired file in the Makerbot software. Then you have to go ahead and slice the model in the Makerbot software. I think this software might take the place of Netfab. The hollow feature and thicken feature might be useful in the future. You can see from the screen shots above that Emily's bull needed several repairs, whereas Aaron's scanner part needed none. You can also see the list of printers (or rather printer software) that the Autodesk repair software is compatible with.

I'll look more at it later tonight though and report back if I find additional features worth noting.

porsche 356/123d make

I've been playing with Autodesk's 123D Make. I drew this Porsche 356 and then sliced it in 123D Make. I'm going to be making some new work this summer that uses this program to make a wood buck to check the fitment of aluminum sheetmetal panels that I weld together to make the final shape of my sheetmetal object. I had introduced my students to this free program this past semester, but hadn't had a lot of time to play with it myself. You can see above that the software allows you to take any obj/stl file and slice it into interlocking, stacked, or radial planer forms. You can spec out your material thickness and also tell it what size your sheet goods will be that you will cut the planer sections from. In this case my sheets were 16" x 12" for cutting on our laser cutter, but you could make it whatever you want. You can decide on how many planer sections you want in the x and y and you can move those planes around if you want more density in a certain area of the form. It generates a nested layout of all of the planer sections that you can export as a vector based pdf, eps or dxf. You can also save the assembled planer sections as an stl if you want to import this into another modeling program to pull curves from or edit. This is a great way to fabricate a quick 3d model of something and I think it is going to work great for making full scale wooden forming bucks for metal shaping. Combine this with a large CNC router, CNC plasma cutter, or waterjet and you could make some large forms.