Plastic is lighter than wood.Originally Posted by Kchrpm
Plastic is lighter than wood.
Anyway, going back to comparing 3D printers to PCs..., do you think somebody has created the 'Apple II' equivalent yet?
Or we've moved beyond that and waiting for the Mac now?
The Apple II equivalent is either the Ultimaker or the Prusa...top names in the industry, though the Ultimaker (for the same size and features) costs 3x as much. There's lots of other, smaller companies doing well, but none of them offer anything beyond hardware and maybe a basic slicing program for the models. The rest of the settings and testing and finding or creating models is up to the end user. Both of them are still using jog wheels and lcd screens, no full color display to showcase the models or touchscreens.
There are a couple of more industrial machines with touch screens, but there's not much extra they can do.
For in-home use I think the ultimate is an app for the average user to download onto their tablets or phones. Apps that compliment hardware items like these are usually free and are a great marketing tool that let curious buyers see what the machines are capable of.
Since we're doing a web-based and tablet interface, having an app is also something easy to implement.
Note: there are a few other printers on the market who have cloud based apps and a few models to print, but they are not pre-sliced and rely on "cloud slicing" to print....and it's not great quality from what I've seen.
Yeah, I really think 3D printer popularity issues are more due to software rather than hardware.
Imagine if I can just use my phone and put on some markers and then just walk around and scan my car into a cad file and print that out?
Or put the phone into a vr goggle and with some easy to do VR tool and start building my own 3D objects and be able to manipulate it in 3D? (If my scanned car ended up with some rough edges, I can virtually sand those out?)
Also, back to my Apple II comparison, I remembered that couple of my cousins ended up getting them when they 1st came out... and they all got them because their dads wanted to expose them to new tech, not because they really need one.
Face it, nobody really needed a pc back then, and for sure nobody really need a 3D printer now. The compelling reason now will most likely be educational for now...
In the future, when it's ready to print out car parts, surely you'd get most of the folks attention here!
For now, you can perhaps appeal to lego enthusiasts here by showcasing some specially designed lego blocks...
If I were a lego enthusiast, I'd definitely get a printer just for that!
In the future, when it's ready to print out car parts, surely you'd get most of the folks attention here!
For now, you can perhaps appeal to lego enthusiasts here by showcasing some specially designed lego blocks...
If I were a lego enthusiast, I'd definitely get a printer just for that!
These kinds of printers can already print out car parts....skip to 15:26
I follow https://twitter.com/FioraAeterna on twitter, I think she writes graphics shader compilers for a living and does a lot of cosplay, she's always talking about 3D printing to produce bits and bobs for her costume. She has 16k followers, maybe you could see if she'd like an extended loan of your new machine and talk about it ?
Another comparison to make with early PCs is the evolution of user interfaces. 3D printing right now is in that era where we are still working it out.
Computers have been powerful enough to do amazing tasks for a long time, but it’s only in the last five years that the software has been able to unlock that power for the average user. I put that down to the explosion of touch screen devices, and the interfaces and ease-of-use crossing back over into the PC space.
Microsoft is doing a lot in this department. The creators update for Windows 10 has got a lot of new ideas crammed into it; I was playing around with the new photos app while trying to import images from my phone the other day and the amount of things it does in organising your photos without even breaking a sweat is mind blowing. The hardware has been able to do it for years, but the software designers are only now catching up with the ideals of what we want computers to do for the average user, and it has been a long iterative process that is far removed from the lab coats and spec sheets field of hardware development.
What I’m getting at is a 3D printer can be capable as anything, but it’s next-to-useless to the home user without some sort of deep knowledge about how to engineer a useful part using the correct materials, printing in the correct direction to allow for stress, the right amount of thickness and so many more things that I wouldn’t know about unless I do five years at university. Which is where the vetting process for parts comes in, of course.
But I want to address Billi’s dreams of taking photos of an object and printing out a replica. If you play a game like Star Wars Battlefront, every prop, every ship, every costume that exists physically in the Lucasfilm archives (so exclude clone troopers and ships who were all CGI in the films) was scanned into the game using photogrammetry. It seems like an easy thing to do: take a lot of photos at every angle then allow the software to stitch it all together. But that was preceded by months of preparation beforehand, and followed by weeks of cleaning by an army of 3D modelling, lighting, rigging, and materials experts.
Hardware is capable of automatically generating complex models for us. Heck, the iPhone x’s Face ID scanner and internal gyros would be amazing for full colour photogrammetry, but I guarantee you that no piece of software exists that is smart enough to produce a model that is a decent enough reproduction of the real thing if the user wants to just take a few photos and print it out. That sort of functionality is more than five years away, and I hope that some smart cookies are working on it. For now we have novelties like Paint 3D in Windows 10 (elbows at MR2 Fan, hint-hint!) which is fun for kids to play with.
Let me go into some detail about why Billi's idea, while great, is a bit complicated.
scanning technologies like photogrammetry are great, but they produce surface models. Most video game assets are also surface models. They have no depth, like making a cube out of folded sheets of paper. That's fine for being in video games, but can't work for 3D printing, because anything you send to a 3D printer slicing program has to read a solid object. Any model has to be "water tight" with no gaps.
So first you have to get the raw data, then yes there are programs that can convert photos automatically, then you have to go into a program like MeshMixer and usually it has to be done manually to fill gaps and make a solid object.....
THEN you can take it to a slicing program where you modify a bunch of settings and test to see if it prints correctly.
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