Playing Around.

d12dozr

I don't think you're going to find any other decent rubber material that can be 3D printed.

What you might look into for that quantity is short-run injection molding, where you can make the parts in plastic, hard rubber, or a few other materials. They'll have to make a mold, which is pretty pricey, but then the cost-per-part is waaaay cheaper than 3D printing or milling.

olishea

Yeah that's an option I was looking into. I just don't want the object to feel too cheap if it's made in plastic. I'll look into what materials protolabs offer for injection moulding, hopefully something funky. I hope 3D printing will be OK but if it's prohibitively expensive, I'll have to change material and manufacturing process anyway.

d12dozr

One thing I really want to look into is glass. How sweet would some funky CAD generated designs look like in glass??

I know they can 3D print a model, then make a mold around that and cast glass, but once again for larger models the 3D printing becomes cost prohibitive.

Must...find...cheap, large scale 3D printer...

olishea

@d12dozr said:

Must...find...cheap, large scale 3D printer...

I think it's called China.

Yeah glass idea is great! Can it be injection moulded any way? Or just cast?

Yeah, no wonder most 3D printed designs are delicate, thin meshes or voronoi structures. If they aren't they cost hundreds, even thousands for a tiny object! The cheapest material is ceramic, but it's limited by wall thickness. So annoying!! To put it into perspective a model just less than 100 cm cubed costs nearly $40 in ceramic. That's actually quite a small object too! You almost have to print webbed/voronoi/trussed models or the cost makes things impossible.

d12dozr

China...no kidding

@olishea said:

Yeah glass idea is great! Can it be injection moulded any way? Or just cast?

Glass can be molded, that's how glass bottles are made. I don't know much beyond what I've seen in "How it's made" Youtube videos though.

olishea

Yeah I think that may be over ambitious! Gotta love How It's Made!

Will post some more renders soon, I've all but ditched the above model. It needs some refining anyway.

pilou

About the Wings3D, maybe you don't know this terrific free plugin?

olishea

Pilou,

That torus video was made for me by request! Also the voronoi cube video was made for me haha

I have been chatting with the developer of that plugin and he's been helping me with a wings workflow. It's not straightforward but I'm getting somewhere. It really is not as simple as "right click, make voronoi" lol it does take a lot of tweaking but results can be stunning. There isn't much documentation either.