Making things with lasers and plastic and 3D printers is a much more serious affair for the geek now. I was never a huge fan of wood work or plastic moulding at school but I do love the fact that I can mess with things on a computer and then have them realised. There has been a lot of talk on 3D printing with things such as the makerbot and the RepRap and the Mendel. But I've wanted to try Shapeways for a while now and I figured it was time.
My sister like animation and art amongst other things, and studied at the University of Salford. For her final piece, she decided to do a proper retro gaming, escape into reality short that I really enjoyed (in fact, my crappy voice acting makes an appearance). So, I figure, why not actually bring one of the characters to life.
I had awful trouble with getting the model to work. Firstly, the original character has a lot of spindly bits. I went with one of the bulkier characters but even then, some of the areas needed to be increase to meet Shapeways' 3mm rule. They go into a lot of depth about this. I had to export from Max into Blender where made a few changes. I've never been happy with the bones in Max anyway. After that it went into meshlab and then netfabb! 4 Programs in total to get it right but I wanted it to be damn sure.
Shapeways are expensive I feel but then they are shipping from the Scandaweiganland. I think, for something really special, it's worth it. Im hoping to get hold of some personal data like an eyeball or an xray I can convert. Would give me a good excuse to learn the marching cubes algorithm!
