Macro 3D printing is some cool stuff — but it’s extremely time consuming and can be very expensive. Introducing We The Builders, a 3D printing crowd source site which creates large scale projects the whole country can enjoy.
Their first project was George Crowdsourcington — a 1:1 copy of the Baltimore George Washington statue made out of 110 individual pieces. They chopped the model up into 4″ cubes and created the website in order to organize and distribute the files. One of their sponsors, Tinkerine Studio, reimbursed the shipping costs for makers who helped print out parts! Since his creation, Crowdsourcington has traveled all over the country, making stops at 3D printing shows in New York, mini-Maker Faires, art galleries, science centers and more — he even did a short residency in the Adafruit office in Manhattan!
It was quite the success, so they’re starting a new statue called the Distributed Ben Franklin. This one has a whopping 198 pieces, and they hope to have it built in time for the Silver Spring and World Maker Faires.
[Todd Blatt], one of the organizers has done some other pretty cool projects in the past — including the Tickle-Me-Elmo: Carbonite Edition.
I had to go digging to find a photo that showed the true size of that print. They should have included a banana.
https://plus.google.com/photos/+ToddBlatt/albums/5979233388545332497/5981432184968148962?pid=5981432184968148962&oid=101160511147073331023
They should have used Chopper or something similar to be able to assemble it easier.
http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Luo_2012_CPM/
From the picture we can assume it’s roughly 10″ thick with an area of 4x4x4 = 64 cu in or ~0.037 cu ft… x 110 = ~4 cu ft. At 10″ that’s about 5 sq ft. Assuming its roughly equal height and width and if put in a rectangular prism would only consume about 50% of the space…
I would say it’s 2’2″ tall and wide, 10″ deep. How’s that for a banana?
Wll chopper work on meshes, or just nurbs-based cad models? Where can I find the program? I’ll look into it. We tried using cc3dprinttech’s ‘chopper’ clone but it is only goot for autocad, inventor, and solidworks models, and the Distributed Ben Franklin model has way too many polygons for those programs
How many polygons are we talking about?
Materialize’s Magics can do this as well.but it’s a manual process rather than optimized algorithmically.
Chopper might be open to releasing the code? I don’t see any links but it would be great if they open sourced it.
Do you have a link for “cc3dprinttech’s ‘chopper’ clone”?
Excellent, giant sculptures of plastic.