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Holiday Make-A-Thon 2011
Join us Friday, November 25th, 2011 at Bucketworks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for the 2011 Holiday Make-A-Thon!
The event is family friendly, fun, and free. (Though donations towards materials will be accepted.)
The guys from Milwaukee Makerspace will be there… so should you!
Some of the activities include:
- Learning to soldering
- Gourd painting
- Knitting
- Hand-painting ornaments
- Gift-wrapping station
See who else is coming (and RSVP) over on Facebook.
Those interested in helping out by volunteering, or who just want way more details, can check out this Atrium thread.
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Simplfying STL Files with MeshLab
So back when I first used the MakerBot at Milwaukee Makerspace, my daughter asked me to make her a cow. (The kid likes cows!) Since my 3D modeling skills were not up to the task (and still aren’t, at least not for a cow) I found a cow in the Google 3D Warehouse and brought it into Sketchup.
It looked fine, so I exported it as an STL file and did a print. A very small print. It looked OK (but not great) and since it was small there wasn’t really much detail.
Since then I’ve looked at other files in the Google 3D Warehouse, but since most of stuff there is for screen display and not 3D printing, things tend to be very complex, at least in the well done models. More complex than might be needed for a 3D print, at least from the Makerbot.
I’m still pretty new at this 3D modeling stuff, but simplifying the model seems to be what we want. In the 2D world I’ve been doing the same sort of thing for 20 years, but in 3D? It’s new ground.
Enter MeshLab!
From the MeshLab web site: “MeshLab is an open source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes. The system is aimed to help the processing of the typical not-so-small unstructured models arising in 3D scanning, providing a set of tools for editing, cleaning, healing, inspecting, rendering and converting this kind of meshes.”
I’m mainly interested in using it to reduce the complexity of 3D models.
Here is the STL file I created from the original cow in Sketchup, as seen in MeshLab.
Here is the same file after reducing the complexity using the Quadratic Edge Collapse Decimation filter. I still feel like it’s a bit of black magic figuring out exactly what numbers to use, and what checkboxes to check, but this is what I used for this one:
I’m fairly pleased with the results (though I haven’t tried to print it yet) but now that I’ve got a (loose) handle on mesh reduction, I’ll dig into the tutorials on YouTube from MrPMeshLabTutorials, including this one on Decimation.
(Of course I still wish MeshLab had an Undo function.)
Oh, and if you really want to 3D print a cow, this recently added to Thingiverse cow is probably the one you want. :)
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Winter can suck it!
It’s been two days of cold weather.
What do I define as “cold weather” exactly?
It’s “cold weather” when I have to enter my car in the morning by crawling through the back door because all the other doors are frozen shut.
On a good day I can get out of my car at work using the driver’s side door instead of exiting via the back door.
I haven’t had a “good” day yet.
But hey, I should only have to deal with this for about 6 more months before it warms up.
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Science!
Don’t worry kids… it’s all in the name of SCIENCE!