This evening’s session was hugely exciting! We had been set a task to bring in a small model to try out on one of the Maker Bots, so we started off by loading one of our own files onto the machine. The Maker Bot (pictured below) is a desktop 3d printer that prints using ‘Fused Deposition Modeling’ or FDM for short. It uses an extruder, which is similar in principle to a hot glue gun. Plastic filament is fed in through the top, is melted, and finally “extruded” out of a small nozzle into the layers that build a 3D print.’ [1]
Anatol, the course tutor explained thoroughly how meshes need to be prepared for print and loaded our models into Materialise Magics, an STL editing programme that can help detect and fix errors in 3d meshes and also outputs models into slices/layers that can be understood by the printer.
The picture above shows asteroid Bennu printed at just w18 × h13 × d15 mm – that’s 0.085% of it’s actual size (if my maths is correct!). I was surprised by the amount of detail and undulation in the surface that is captured even at this scale. Here it is displayed on a mirror. Mirrors are a key material in my practice – I reference them as highly scientific instruments used in telescopes and crucial to space imaging. I was interested to find out these NASA are created by radar astronomy. Even though a mirror is not used in this particular technology there is a nice link with the use of reflections: ‘Radar astronomy is a technique of observing nearby astronomical objects by reflecting microwaves off target objects and analyzing the reflections.’ [2]
While our models were printing we were introduced to stereo lithography and shown the 3d scanning facilities: another route for creating 3d files for printing. I will be attempting to scan a sculptural object over the next couple of weeks.
[1] Learn the basics of 3d printing, https://www.makerbot.com/learn/
[2] Radar Astronomy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_astronomy
