3D Artist magazine has announced a creature creation competition to win a 3D printer, and a new crowd of designers from the visual artistry side of 3D are arriving!  3D Artist also provided a link to a tutorial for preparing your models for 3D printing which covers manifold geometry and the practice of shelling to save print material (not quite as important on printers with material as cheap as coils of $43 a kg ABS), as well as a link to the skeinforge home page.

Some more help for those of you going for maximum printability:

* Avoid “overhangs” of greater than 45 degrees (except when you can get away with them)

* Learn a bit of Noodlemancy (although with modern extruders small details aren’t quite as tough)

* Learn from the masters

* Make sure you’ve got STLs, any helpful model files or documentation you can think of added in!

How easy it is to print your model won’t just be important in the contest (it will) but it’ll also play into whether you start seeing your model pop up on desks, shelves, and dashboards around the world after you upload it!

Thingiverse has just been re-launched and is even more awesome! Thingiverse is a powerful sharing platform for digital designs where all the content is free and the future is bright.

Back before Thingiverse.com, people were able to download music, movies, and even books, but there was no place to share and download things. Then Thingiverse, a universe of things, was created in 2008 and digital design has never been the same.

Thingiverse users share their digital designs for real things and become superstars to the other users on Thingiverse. Every day, Thingiverse has new things community members have shared. It’s truly amazing. There are thousands of things on Thingiverse, and millions of people visit the site to be inspired by the creativity of Thingiverse users.

And today, there’s a new and improved Thingiverse!

• It’s easier than ever to share your digital designs and be a superstar
• A new front page giving top billing to the latest featured Thing
• A new look and better organization for Thing pages and User profiles
• Simplified Thing editing – it’s all in one place
• Improved search and navigation make it easier to find what you’re looking for
• On the backend, we’ve improved the architecture so everything works smoother.
• Refined features for attribution and derivatives
• A thing can now have multiple ancestors – bring on the mashups!
• “I Made a Derivative” button makes it clearer what to do when you make a derivative of another Thing
• Post those beautiful photos of your prints with the “I Made One!” button
• The backend of the site has improved to make sharing easier.

Check out the new Thingiverse now! Don’t let your creativite work suffocate with loneliness on your hardrive. Get your designs off your computer and up on Thingiverse. Share your designs today!

One feature request that we commonly see at the Thingiverse help desk is to build an improved search engine into Thingiverse. Our first search feature was powered by Google and – while this was easy to implement, and could turn up all kinds of content on Thingiverse – it was very clunky to use.

Our new and improved search will help you find any Thing on Thingiverse! We take your search terms and scour the names, descriptions, instructions, tags, and even creator names for every Thing, and serve up the Things that best match.

Looking for “upgrades“? Or maybe you only want “Thing-O-Matic upgrades“? Our search is designed to help you narrow in on the thing you want, fast.

We’re pretty excited about this new feature, so please give it a try!

Hey Thingiverse users! The Crabitat at MakerBot is live (as seen above) and we need new shell shapes to try out and see if they’ll move in. Join the project to help help hermit crabs. Please upload designs and tag them with “Shellter”.

More info!

By popular demand, Thingiverse now has a Thing Publishing Checklist!

We want each thing on Thingiverse to be as useful as possible for the community, so we’ve added the following checklist to ensure that each new Thing, at minimum:

• Has a name (“Untitled” doesn’t count!)
• Has a description
• Has at least one file which is not an image

This is a small change, but we hope it will help cut down on the number of Things that are accidentally published before they are complete.

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

Thingiverse/Makerbot web warrior and all-around impressive coder Marty McGuire is going to be at SXSW Interactive on a panel about Flattr, the monetization service he brought to Thingiverse!  In addition to creating awesome plugins on Thingiverse, McGuire also impresses me on a regular basis on Thingiverse with his sweet Unicorn goodies.  If you’re going to be at the conference, be sure to stop by and drink in all the awesome at the panel!

If you’ve been following this blog, or have kept an eye on the DIY 3D printing world, you’ll remember the DMCA drama from last week. I’m happy to say that there is a new and interesting development: Ulrich Schwanitz has decided to drop his DMCA claims and place his design in the public domain! I am not privvy to the reasoning behind it, but perhaps he was inspired by the thousands of other open designs here on Thingiverse?

I would like to publicly re-iterate my words of encouragement to Dr. Schwanitz to post his designs to Thingiverse. I’d like to show him what an awesome community we are, and that making money is still possible while giving away your design. So if you see a thing or two by him, please be nice!

We have re-enabled both of the designs in question, so feel free to print them to your hearts desire. With this recent development, the whole “Copyright Challenge of a 3D Printable Model” chapter of 3D printing comes to a close. As my mother used to say: All’s well that ends well.

For better or worse, we’ve hit a milestone in the history of digital fabrication. We’ve just received our first DMCA takedown notice for a copyrighted object. Due to the DMCA we are required to respond to takedown notices in a timely manner or risk losing protection under the “Safe Harbor” provision. Since we’d like to continue to be a place where people can openly share their designs with the world, we have complied.

If you are unfamiliar with the DMCA and/or the Safe Harbor provision, there is an excellent FAQ at Chilling Effects. In this day and age, knowing is half the battle.

As a result of this, we’ve also had to learn more about the DMCA. To this end, we’ve updated our legal page with a new DMCA specific policy. Thanks to our friends at Etsy, we were able to quickly add the appropriate language to that document. Please take a read and feel free to give us your feedback and opinions in the comments.

In the interest of openness, you can also read the email that prompted our new policy below the fold. You may have noticed that this design has been getting a lot of attention on Boingboing and imaterialize.

» Continue reading “Copyright Policy”

Tony Buser’s Thingiview.js is an in-browser 3D file viewer powered by WebGL.  If you have a WebGL-enabled browser, you can view 3D files in your browser almost as fast as viewing them with a desktop application.

Now, Thingiview.js is available on Thingiverse! Just look for the little  cube icon next to the thumbnails for any STL file.  For example:

As a bonus, and as shown above, you can embed Thingiviews into your own pages! Each Thingiview page has an “Embed This Thing” button, which gives you the HTML to copy-and-paste into your site. You can even customize the colors!

If your current web browser doesn’t support WebGL, you might want to try the latest Google Chrome, which has WebGL support built in, or check out the latest Firefox and Safari betas.

The ability to preview 3D files in-browser has been on our wishlist for a while so it is great to be able to get this feature into the hands of the citizens of Thingiverse!

Please keep in mind that Thingiview is an experimental feature. If you run into any files that don’t work, please let us know!