Xzin's 3D Printing Side Business (Beta)

[Stabface]

Looks... edible!

[welwyn]

miniature eve ships.. now thats a good idea! they would make ideal presents for some people i know! ill try getting some models off of the install and send you some to see if they would work on your machine. dunno if that would be legal with eve though lol.

[Xzin]

I couldn't sell them but a few for free or for friends would likely fall under fair use.

And no - not edible :)

[algol]

They do look a bit like gummi candy...

I notice it starts with a flat base and there's never a point that doesn't go all the way to the base layer. Is that just the designs you used, or does it have a problem with the solidification rate or cohesion being too low to allow freestanding portions?

Also - pics of the machine!

[Xzin]

In these pics, I had not yet removed the support material, which supports the models. You can't jet into empty space and have it hover so you have to have something. The support material washes away.... the above pic is how it comes out of the machine and the support material is not unlike a gummy candy in consistency. It is able to be crushed or broken fairly easily though.

[Xzin]

Removed the support material and dyed the EVE model black.





Ony still needs her wings. I removed them to reduce costs and print time. Reattaching is easy - they dovetail back in.

These are REAL quick and dirty pics - they do not do the models justice at all.

[Hachoo]

I can tell they don't do the models justice, especially the megathron which has all sorts of cool facets...man if you're artistic or could find someone to paint the megathron that would be sweet!

[algol]

You can't jet into empty space and have it hover so you have to have something.

Obviously not, but there are a number of ways to handle it. The wash-away substrate is one of the cooler tricks. When I was playing with it, it was a photolithography method inside a working fluid - provided support so you could pretty much shoot a point at an arbitrary z-level, but you had to worry about vibration jiggling the fluid and making your layers wash away if you weren't careful about isolation and tweaking the energy of exposure so it solidified fast enough (this was ~50-100 nm stuff though, so methods for a large scale 3DP have to be different).

Pretty sweet results so far.

[Xzin]

Yes, that is stereolithography. It's far more expensive though and the results are not any better. Other methods use powder beds or calculated support structures.

I will try to get some better photos up.... need to find my tripod to get the EVE ship in more detail - not enough light.

[yarr]

what type of modeling software do the pros use?

I was curious whats the "Adobe Photoshop" of 3-d modeling. Are there any decent free programs to do this type of stuff with?