Roscoe wrote:
Wow, great looking micro ships, they are just too cool...
Feel free to add your experiences with having them made, and if you have anymore, I'd love to see them too. I'd also be interested in seeing the CAD models you used to have these made, really nice work.
Regards,
Dean
Thanks. I'm glad you like them. I don't have a huge number of photos (I've been modeling in virtual space more than real-world recently), but I have about 100 different classes rendered at
http://www.shapeways.com/shops/objects?section=Seaships. Of course, they aren't textured or anything, so they don't look that impressive...
I started playing around with 3D printing through Shapeways a couple of years ago and have been using Blender for modeling. About three or four months ago someone asked me to make a couple of ships in various scales for wargaming and painting, and so I started making ships as people asked. I've got about 100 different ships now, mainly in 1:2400, 1:300, 1:4800, and 1:6000 scales though with the odd 1:2000 and 1:1200 about.
My overall modeling process is pretty simple standard. The main difference between modeling for a printer (as opposed to just for rendering) is that you need to remember some design constraints. The main ones are that the details smaller than 100 microns don't really show up, and that walls thinner than 300 microns can't be printed (these numbers are for the "Frosted Ultra Detail" (FUD)material, other materials are thicker). Also, I have found it useful to unify the mesh (i.e. use Booleans to join overlapping meshes until there is just one), although this is not supposed to be needed. From there, its just upload and print...
Shapeways has had some delays recently, so sometimes an order will take a week or so longer than their 10 day target, but in general they are pretty fast.
The FUD and "White Strong and Flexible" material themselves are pretty easy to work with. You can cut, drill, sand and scrape them, and they accept paint well, though they may required a little work before you jump right to painting. Some of my experiences there can be found at:
http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=9283&#msg_9283 (painting WSF)
http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=6121 (painting FUD)
I've "open sourced" some models of modern french ships at:
http://www.we-be-smart.org/~afrodri/feel free to use them however you'd like
thanks!