I received an email from Michael Frumin over at Eyebeam alerting me to some fabbing efforts of his. I’d not bothered to really look at the geometry I’d captured in Google Earth some time back, but his comments on the OGLE website (Link) point out an issue to which I’d be especially sensitive:
The 3D buildings OGLE’d from Google Earth are not ready to be 3D printed off the bat. Each building is a composition of multiple vertical volumes that have walls and a ceiling but no floor. By computationally (i.e. hacked up OBJ-file-processing perl script!) copying all of the roof polygons to floor polygons, we got the job done:
A script that offsets a copy of the polygons so that thin-wall models can be fabbed instead of solid chunks is hopefully somewhere on his “To Do” list. I’ve not had much time lately to even visit the OGLE forum so maybe that’s been discussed. Will need to make time to surf over and see what kinds of cool things people have been doing.
{Image source: Eyebeam OpenLab}
thanks for the shout out sven. that kind of script that you mention isn’t on my todo list for a couple reasons:
1) its really much harder to code.
2) maya has a pretty functional ‘extrude face’ function
3) thin-wall models wouldn’t really help in this case — if the thing has a roof, our printer has to print support material from the ground up to support the roof. this isn’t really any cheaper or faster than just using the printers ‘sparse’ mode to fill chunks with a honeycomb structure instead of completely solid, as I did in this case.
As i’ve offered before, you are welcome any time to come down to eyebeam and try a couple small prints to get a more visceral sense of how the thing works.
I’ll make it in some time I’m sure. Thanks again for the invite.
I’ve seen honeycomb supports. By “solid chunks” I’m really differentiating between an effectively solid part and a thin-wall part. Someone using an SLS machine, for example, doesn’t really worry about support structure the way you need to with that particular Dimension.