Take a look at this picture. What is special about it? Well, it is made automatically from a 3D computer model, using a 3D printer. That’s right, a printer that produces a 3D object. These have been around for a long time, often called “rapid prototypers”, but have been very expensive. At last they are becoming affordable. This “print” is a sample kindly given to me by Remco Hosman who has just started a bureau service for printing in Amsterdam. The printer uses conventional inkjet technology to build the object layer by layer, and can print in full colour!! (See videos of how it works here.) A close up shows the layers on certain areas:
The print has a solid feel to it, a bit like concrete. Now I am thinking of having a model of our new office (done in SketchUp) printed…
(In case you are wondering, the model is that of Suzanne, the test model for the fantastic Blender program.
Here is a Plugin for SketchUp for creating an STL file for easy 3D output:
http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2008/10/file-3d-print.html