By no means the first printable robot on Thingiverse, but this one is definitely a charmer.  I mean look at that elegant design!  3-DOF (Degrees Of Freedom) is a lot less than the “classic” hexapod design, but that can be a good thing, after all, think of how much easier to program this would be!

There’s plenty of spaces on this that’d probably be compatible with those nice printable battery packs from earlier.  3D printing once again proves itself as a great tool for geeking out with robots!

Not a terribly surprising result, a lot of highly educated visitors though!  I decided I could use this survey as a bit of a benchmark to get an idea of what kind of crowd I was teaching to.

Given that 3D printing, especially home 3D printing is so geek-dominated, it’s not much of a surprise that most of us are coming to 3D from the engineering domain.  It’s nice to see that we have a strong contingent of artists from the more purely digital realm joining though!  We need all the cool game tanks and animated characters we can get!

Probably reflecting the large number of engineers, is the solids vs meshes divide.  I’ll continue to provide some tutorials on both sides of the fence here, since both have strengths, and also since there’s yet really for anything like a One Tool To Rule Them All in this field, although OpenSCAD is certainly a big hit on Thingiverse.

Lovely little wrench here.  Print to fit!  I love how minimalist this design is.  Gets the job done, no frills, tidy-looking design.  Also has a very materials-honest look overall.  Cooperating with the material makes for much prettier designs a lot of the time.

One of the more consistently overpriced-feeling components in electronics are the battery packs, single pieces of injection plastic with perhaps a paperclip worth of metal, sold for several dollars when bought at the corner electronics depot, which just seems like a lot of money to pay for something that seems an awful lot like you could print it…

But now of course now, all you need is your trusty 3D printer and some rudimentary metalworking skills and you can spin your own!  The parametric battery pack just needs some metal contacts and it’s good to go.  Because it’s OpenSCAD, it can be bolted onto your existing robotics project with ease!  (And apparently Hack a Day liked this one too!)

A really nice printout and a sweet design to have on file, this sleek Porsche model adds handsomely to the already long list of printable toy cars available on Thingiverse!  Sweet!

Super thrilled to see that some things from BlendSwap quickly jumped over to Thingiverse!

This gator hails from BlendSwap originally, but now it’s been downloaded and printed out!  Super-neat!

In this series, we’ll cover the Blender 2.5 interface, starting with the big picture and zooming in on key things that can be helpful. Blender’s ease of use has been greatly improved with 2.5, but it’s still definitely something of a “space station” when you first crack it open. In this first entry on the subject we’ll take a hard look at Blender’s overall structure to illuminate why it looks the way it does, and give new users a handle on where they should expect to find things. (If it’s basic survival in the 3D view you’re after, this tutorial still holds, although an update is coming soon.)

At the very top layer, Blender’s display is composed of panels. Rather than give in and move to a Windows-based API for the many sub-displays and sub-menus a program as complex as Blender will require, the developers have created something unique and (to me at least) more elegant than any other interface I know of. Panels cannot overlap. Rather, the Blender main window is subdivided into panels, and any time a panel cannot show all its buttons or icons, they will gracefully flow to the size available. The sides of any panel can be dragged to resize them, and they develop scroll bars as needed. Everything is in a panel, whether it’s a 3D view, the timeline, or a hierarchy editor.

Each panel may be subdivided by dragging the textured-looking corner on its top-right into the panel. Dragging it out of the panel un-subdivides, allowing the user to quickly “glob together” some or all of the available panels:

Each panel also has an icon that lets you change its type, so any one view can be changed into any other.  There are, um, a LOT of different kinds of panel:

However, if your primary focus is Blender-to-3D-Print, you’ll only really care about the 3D view, menu, and Properties panels for now. (If you’re like me, of course, the call of Blender’s animation and video editing capabilities is pretty seductive…) The animation, game engine, node editor and video sequence editor are, so far as modeling is concerned, not important.

The 3D view panel is one of the most complex and most used panels. It can be subdivided to create the familiar 2×2 multiview or simply navigated as-is. On its left and right there are subpanels with their own functions, and it also has sub-modes, including the “edit” and “sculpt” modes which are probably the most important for only 3D modeling. We’ll cover this one in more detail later, but for now, let’s just say it’s where you’ll do most of your shape-creation and move on.

The menu panel is easily mistaken for a special structure. It is not. It’s just another panel. However, its default position at the top of the screen is where it will probably stay, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. This is where you’ll find all the top-level commands, and where Blender 2.5 now throws a lot of its warnings and alerts.

The properties panel over on the right is probably as complicated as the 3D view, but for the purposes of making non-animated, non-rendered meshes, most of its parts can be ignored. In fact, for 3D printing purposes, you probably won’t need anything but the modifier stack unless you’re trying to do simulation-based models.

This sequence isn’t trying to replace Blender’s excellent online documentation, but rather to provide a functional introduction for 3D print use, ignoring things like texturing, lighting, and animation. Next week we’ll dive into the 3D view panel in detail, examining how to navigate and create in Blender 2.5. In some ways this will rehash things I said back in my very first Blender tutorial, but in 2.5 a lot of things are subtly easier, and I’ve learned one or two tricks that will be very helpful to new users.

All this talk about daring do on the 3D printing scene has me thinking about a place I’ve been checking out a lot for a while now, a place where you’ll find a lot of stuff that’s not made to be printable, but which you probably could, if you got lucky with your slicer settings and were thinking ahead a bit on positioning:  Blendswap!

Blendswap is a CGI-universe twin to Thingiverse, where users create and share 3D designs for rendering rather than printing.  Blendswap was used heavily by Sintel, when the actual community of fans of the project joined forces with the art team to create much of the content for the film!  Of course here you won’t find designs made to be printed.  You’ll find designs made to look awesome.  But maybe, if you can get your slicer and your bot to rise to the challenge, you could use it to print things that look awesome.

So, as we are talking of bravado lately, and as you may be fishing around for something to impress your various relations with to show off how amazing your new 3D printer is, why not take a leap and try to print, say, a brick speeder or a space ship or a humanoid robot?

BlendSwap and Thingiverse are two great parts of the same arena: shareable 3D design.  The better the printers and their software get, the more printable the works of artists who previously only worked on the screen will become.

There are a lot of spindles on Thingiverse, but this one might be my new favorite for the marbles. Easy to acquire and inexpensive bearings for a smooth gliding spindle for feeding out filament, or for putting a big round platter on so everyone can reach the mashed potatoes.