Awesome Day
Yesterday was a good day. Yesterday I saw something that I created on a computer, 3D printed into the real world. It was a silly plastic mustache for a mustache competition my company held. I work with a man who has a 3D printer and he asked me about making him an 3D file that he could then print for the competition. It was a simple mustache with our logo on it, made to fit around a bottled beverage so that the mustache appears in place as you take a drink.
I’m going with just a small image here since I really don’t know much about logo rules outside of putting it on our formal images. But I just can’t not show this at all, because well look. Those were just computer files the other day. That was the logo, and the mustache didn’t exist at all until I created the paths in Illustrator. I brought everything into Cinema 4D and extruded those paths individually, gave them filleted caps, and exported .stl files for Jon who has the 3D printer. And Jon plugged that in to his 3D printer and even played around with different colors, stopping the printer and swapping materials between the logo line and the mustache lines. We totally pulled digital files into real 3D reality. It’s awesome, and I want to make more things.
Then I also found myself in a unique set of circumstances yesterday to need a figure to place into a Cinema 4D scene for a homework question. Plan A was put on hold, but I had a little time to try something and also just happened to have a friend in town who was so kind as to help me so that I wouldn’t be taking someone else away from their job while I worked on honing this process. I have been wanting to try something with that 123D catch software ever since I heard about it at the Medical Illustrators Conference. So Ernest held very very still for me while I ran all around him taking pictures of him and uploading them into this software. We tried indoors, and we tried outdoors.
We never got it quite right, but I am able to export .obj files for either of those captures and bring them into Cinema 4D and literally place Ernest there on a virtual field. And it’s all just created by taking a series of photographs around him that the software stitches together. It’s awesome enough that we are totally going to try this at least one more time over the weekend while he is visiting here.
So yeah, yesterday basically started with seeing the success of pulling the digital world into the physical one, and went on to make some really fun headway into being able to capture the physical world and merge it into a digital scene. Exciting stuff!