One metalized, 3D-printed Millennium Falcon with dazzling detail and little accent paints is great, but two of them?  That’s just– pointing out exactly why 3D printing is an amazing technology!  Good show!

Singularity Hub, a kind of blog outpost for those who peer particularly deeply into the murk of the future in hopes of spotting real game-changers like immortality, artificial sapience and nanotechnology, has a great piece on 3D printing, making note of the (impressive) upswing in use 3D printers of all kinds are enjoying lately.

I thought it was interesting that they mentioned the rapid expansion of the professional 3D printing sphere, because it shows that while there’s a lot to be excited about in terms of the hobbyist end of things, the general phenomenon of drift– from standardized to custom-by-nature digital fabrication is happening in little pockets everywhere.

Hardware turning into software.

In addition to snap-together buckles, we now have belt tensioners as well!  The plastic fiddly bits on a backpack are now covered, as well as a lot of other strap-based projects and tiedowns you could ask for!  Plus, this photograph is really rad.  I love it when the photos are good.

Back when the Colbert spot first hit, a little software outfit threw up a quick post about their software that generates point clouds and meshes from iterative fractal patterns, and I’ve finally been able to play around with it a bit and I think with some practice you could really do neat things with it, although there’s definitely a learning curve associated with fractal geometry.

Also, converting to a printable mesh is going to require some passes with meshlab or a LOT of patience in Blender, because fundamentally there’s nothing that says a fractal result like above isn’t going to have islands and holes.  But, the “demo” version is free to download, and from what I’ve seen the limitations on it aren’t really preventing 3D printing work for most cases.

XenoDream also informs me they’re working on building some nice printable demos to put up on Thingiverse!

Simple to model, but of obvious entertainment value, it’s the Extending Gripper Toy!  I’d love to see it sprout ergonomic handles and snaptogether pegs, and Linkreincarnate did sound interested in giving it some more parametric smartness…

Sculptris is a neat little tool for clay-like modeling that takes care of a lot of the annoying chores associated with using sculpt tools in a traditional mesh-based modeling environment, along with providing a lot of nice extras that apparently were worth the author’s being bought out by the makers of ZBrush.

It’s now free to download, and can spit out model files when you’re done sculpting.  The material settings are fun– it’s just surreal sculpting what looks like solid gold as though it were soft putty.

Via Blendernation

Nice application of math to create surfaces of revolution in OpenSCAD!  OpenSCAD has been seeing a pretty amazing number of really significant new primitives lately.  Really impressive.  I think it’s best days are still ahead, but the momentum is getting pretty awesome.

Two stories popped up on my radar this morning that illustrate the difference between Open Source EULAs and Closed Source EULAs, and given the way open source licenses are built into Thingiverse, I thought they were worth sharing.  First at the Blender foundation, Ton Rosendal takes a close look at the Autodesk EULA– the terms might surprise you.  Then we have Microsoft’s SDK for the Kinect, which is also more restrictive than I would have thought.

When your products are closed source and you’re dependent on holding on to IP, you can’t afford to really participate in the Open Source world.  At best, like Microsoft, you can tag along and hope there are developers willing to play in your sandbox.

Microsoft and Autodesk are both to be applauded for their efforts to court and engage the innovative open source community, but I think they’re going to need to have a long talk with their lawyers (and with a few members of the open source community) if they want this to be more than a one-sided and strained relationship.

A lot of people still don’t have a good grip on what you can do with home 3D printing, and making hand gestures and talking about something called a “forty five degree rule” is, I imagine, causing more than a few people to wonder about people like us, which is why I (and probably lots of you) carry around an Example Print, a little widget that shows off the ability of 3D printing to really make pretty phenomenally complicated little things.

This one would make a pretty blindingly epic example print, because not only is it a snap-together plastic assembly, not only is it slick and pro looking and made with herringbone rome gears which are nigh-impossible to make any other way, but it illustrates the principle of gear reduction, in the palm of your hand.

It is also exceedingly nerdy, which is awesome.

So the geodesic dome vertices are really great, but assembling them can require forethought, consideration of where you are in the structure, and many other things that start to sound almost like work.  A big advantage to this collection of platonic solid vertices is that you can build these big structures without paying a lot of attention, since the structure is regular.

I would have really loved to use one of these as a blanket fort as a kid.