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MakerOS Webinar: Make the Most Profit from Your 3D Printing Business

Web-based collaboration platform for 3D printing and digital fabrication companies MakerOS assists users in developing their products faster, no matter the stage or size of the company. It was founded by CEO Mike Moceri, who has copious amounts of experience in design, manufacturing, software, and business: he co-founded the very first 3D printing retail service bureau, located in Chicago, back in 2013, and followed this move by founding 3D printing and product design agency Manulith the next year.

MakerOS is sponsoring a free webinar, which 3DPrint.com is organizing, called “How to Make the Most Profit from 3D Printing,” which will be held on Wednesday, September 16th, 2020, from 2-3 pm EDT. Any digital fabrication business owner or 3D printing shop manager looking to run a more successful business should definitely sign up for this webinar.

“If you don’t understand your costs, you don’t understand your business,” Moceri told 3DPrint.com.

Let’s say that you have successfully completed a 3D printing job for a client, but instead of the substantial profit you were expecting, you only barely broke even. If you care about staying afloat, you’ll want to determine the underlying cause of something like this. That’s why this webinar is so important—you’ll learn how to keep this from happening and gain a deeper understanding of all the various expenses and costs that go into running your 3D printing business. This way, you will be able to set accurate, fair prices and maximize your profits.

“So what we’ll do in this webinar is we’ll figure out what are the core and most important points of cost analysis. We’ll go into detail on how to determine margins and profits for your operation, as well as the philosophy and rationale behind those calculations,” Moceri explained to us.

“We’ll provide a framework and how to think about your business starting with the costs and then we’ll talk about the philosophical aspects of determining margins and ultimately profits for your business.”

By attending this MakerOS webinar, you’ll come away with the knowledge of how to successfully run your digital fabrication or 3D printing shop. The insights attendees will gain can help steer thinking towards a cost-specific perspective, leading to higher profits, and you’ll learn how to recognize subtle things that could negatively affect your margins.

Every webinar attendee will receive access to a spreadsheet that they can use to make calculations and projections to, as Moceri explained, “see what the most optimal path to profitability is for their business.” In addition, the participants will have the chance to learn all of this from someone who has consulted with industry experts from all around the world and has successfully started multiple 3D printing services…Moceri himself.

Featured on MSN, NBC, Make Magazine, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the D-Business Magazine, which once called him the “Face of 3D printing,” Moceri was once a mentor at TechTown Detroit, and currently serves as a mentor at WeWork Labs in NYC and the Stanley+Techstars Additive Manufacturing Accelerator. He is also an author, having recently published an e-book titled How to Survive the COVID-19 Pandemic as a 3D Printing or Fabrication Shop, along with 9 Lessons for Optimizing Your Product Development Service. You can find both of Moceri’s e-books on the recently launched MakerOS Zone of our website.

What else can you expect to see in the MakerOS Zone? Plenty! There are also free video tutorials, such as “How to Price for SLA 3D Printing” and “Why We Made a 3D Printing Pricing Calculator,” along with the aforementioned pricing calculator itself. The MakerOS Zone also includes articles about the company that have been published on our website, as well as MakerOS articles found elsewhere on the web. Finally, you can access the company’s webinars “How to Optimally Price For Your 3D Printing Service Bureau in 2020,” and “How to Make the Most Profit from 3D Printing,” as previously mentioned. You can register here for the latter, which will be held on Wednesday, September 16th, 2020, from 2-3 pm EDT.

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4DTexture: Holistic Computational Design for 3D Surfaces

Researchers from both the US and China are taking digital fabrication and texture in materials to the next level, releasing the findings of their study in the recently published ‘4D Texture: A Shape-Changing Fabrication Method for 3D Surfaces with Texture.’

4D printing is growing as an area of interest for many researchers, but like 3D printing—and even more so—there is still enormously uncharted territory. Users are able to move beyond the constraints of 3D printing to meet pressing needs for more complex projects like creating new metastructures, surfaces, and new materials and techniques. 4D printing offers more to users innovating beyond the 3D, seeking to fabricate more complex geometries too.

In this study, the authors introduce a new design approach called 4DTexture which they describe as a ‘holistic computational design and fabrication method, leveraging the state-of-the-art 4D printing process to make 3D surfaces with texture.’

Time and material consumption comparison between conventional printing and 4DTexture method.

Shape-changing principle: the textured structure can be printed without a support structure, which can transform into a 3D textured shape after heat triggering.

While the benefits of 3D printing are and continue to be vast for industrial users, 4D printing opens up new areas for fabrication that usually cannot be explored through conventional technology either. The new technique created in this study allows for actuators to be made with vertical texture structures—later to be turned into more complicated forms. The system runs on Rhino with Grasshopper, comprised of the following for preview and customization:

  • Texture element
  • Arrangement
  • Tendency and transformation type

The workflow: users can (a) design the element of texture and (b) the shape of actuator, define the transformation type and (c) the arrange type of the texture, (d) set the tendency of the texture, then (e) generate the g-code file which can be printed by an FDM printer, finally users can obtain (f) the printed flat piece which can be heat triggered into (g) the target 3D shape.

Experiments were performed on textured structures as the researchers built up a ‘library’ consisting of shapes like hemispheres, pyramids, and hemicylinders. The program offers tools so that parameters can be customized; for example, designers can use offered 4D morphing mechanisms from previous projects or modify the settings if needed. Once the actuator shapes are set, textures can be arranged. Height and size can be chosen, and users can also move textures.

PLA was used with a MakerBot Replicator 2X as the researchers printed sample textures using the defaults for the hardware, producing self-rising, self-coiling, and self-bending objects.

Transformation types: (a) self-rise (b) self-coil and (c) self-bend.

“The transformation mechanism can be controlled by the printing direction, which has been embedded into our system to simulate the behavior,” stated the researchers.

Just as 3D printing has allowed for a variety of different forays into fashion, 4D printing has too, bringing all the benefits of materials that can morph and shift as needed. In this study, the researchers fabricated fashion accessories, a modular toy, a haptic handle, and 3D fasteners.

Fashion design: (a) The flat printed piece; (b) The decorative scenario.

Customized haptic handle: (a) The flat printed piece; (b) The usage scenario.

3D fasteners: (a) The flat printed piece; (b, c) The usage scenario.

“We hope such a system can expand the design opportunity of 4D printing technology with a hobbyist FDM printer,” concluded the researchers. “In the future, we plan to implement a systematic material experiment for improving transformation accuracy and fine-tune the parametric setting with Grasshopper to make the design tool more user-friendly. We also found that the texture structure can serve as a constrained layer which needs further investigation.”

What do you think of this news? Let us know your thoughts! Join the discussion of this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com.

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Sustainable Cabin Built on 3D-Printed Concrete Stilts from Infested Ash Wood

Our house had several ash trees in the front and back yard while I was growing up, and we lost three of them due to various acts of nature. Ash is a very soft wood, which is how we lost one to high winds, and another split at the top because it wasn’t well-supported at the bottom. The third was removed because it had been infected by the invasive Emerald Ash Borer beetle, a nasty little bugger that’s not even native to the US but is here wreaking havoc anyway.

Obviously, ash trees that have been infected and destroyed by the EAB aren’t often used for construction purposes, both because sawmills can’t process the wood, and due to their odd, irregular shapes. These trees are then usually burned or left to decompose, neither of which is a great option.

“Unfortunately, both scenarios release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and so the advantage to using compromised ash for construction is that is that it both binds the carbon to the earth and offsets the harvesting of more commonly used wood species,” said Sasa Zivkovic, the Co-Principal of New York-based architecture studio HANNAH.

The Ithaca studio—founded in 2014 by Zivkovic, along with fellow co-principal Leslie Lok, Alexander Chmarin, and Alexander Graf—worked with a group of Cornell University students to create the tiny but striking Ashen Cabin, located off the grid in upstate New York. The collaborative project was meant to be a small-scale study regarding sustainable construction, and combined EAB-infested ash wood with 3D printing to build the cabin.

“By implementing high precision 3D scanning and robotic based fabrication technology, HANNAH transforms Emerald-Ash-Borer-infested “waste wood” into an abundantly available, affordable, and sustainable building material. From the ground up, digital design and fabrication technologies are intrinsic to the making of this architectural prototype, facilitating fundamentally new material methods, tectonic articulations, and forms of construction,” the studio’s website states.

As architects are looking to construct houses more sustainably, these kinds of small, off-grid residences are becoming more popular housing options, and Ashen Cabin definitely fits the bill. The tiny residence, featuring walls made of infested ash wood, is elevated by 3D-printed concrete stilts, which form the angular base of the cabin and its heavy, hulking extrusions.

HANNAH stated, “The project aims to reveal 3D printing’s idiosyncratic tectonic language by exploring how the layering of concrete, the relentless 3D deposition of extruded lines of material, and the act of corbelling can suggest new strategies for building.”

All of the cabin’s 3D-printed concrete shapes, including the tall, curved chimney and fireplace, furniture, textured floor, and prismatic legs, have a distinct linear pattern that features jagged edges. By using 3D printing, HANNAH was able to lower its carbon footprint and reduce waste by using less material than would normally be required, as a concrete mold was unnecessary.

Lok explained, “By using 3D printing, we eliminate the use of wasteful formwork and can deposit concrete smartly and only where structurally necessary, reducing its use considerably while also maintaining a building’s integrity.”

Concrete was also used to 3D print a unique seating platform, which can be opened up to use for storage. A bench made of marine-grade plywood, painted black to offer a pleasing contrast to the light siding, extends out from the seat in order to form a single bed.

A robotic arm with a band saw attachment cut the irregular ash logs into curving boards of different thicknesses. Both the exterior and interior of Ashen Cabin are covered with the wavy timber panels, which also define the structure’s four, black plywood-framed windows and were used to create other architectural features, like surfaces and shelving, inside.

The studio explained, “The curvature of the wood is strategically deployed to highlight moments of architectural importance such as windows, entrances, roofs, canopies, or provide additional programmatic opportunities such as integrated shelving, desk space, or storage.”

Focusing on the aesthetics of the cabin, the wood boards will naturally turn grey over time, so that the siding will eventually match the color of the concrete. Its 3D-printed concrete floors feature interlocking designs, and the windows are all oriented so they face the surrounding wooded landscape. The scenery makes it look like any residents of Ashen Cabin will be in their own little world.

Speaking of off-grid living, Ashen Cabin does not have power or running water. The temperature is regulated through its wood-burning fireplace and foam insulation, while a small camping sink, also 3D-printed out of concrete, provides the water.

Discuss this news and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts in the comments below.

(All photos taken by Andy Chen, HANNAH)

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3D Printing Strikes A Chord in Preschooler Music Education

In ‘Digital Fabrication: 3D Printing in Preschool Education,’ Federico Avanzini, Adriano Baratè, and Luca A. Ludovico explore the connection between 3D printing and the classroom through preschool music lessons. While music lessons act as the vehicle to show the level of educational value, the researchers use it to present a rich example, beginning by pointing out how important music education is to preschoolers—and featured in numerous research studies previously.

There are links found between better spatial-temporal reasoning, along with early reading skills. Other recent studies have shown that preschool children have ‘implicit harmonic knowledge’ with broad potential. The authors examine cognition, and especially as it is derived from the sensorimotor function—with preschoolers offering ‘paradigmatic examples.’ Smaller children learn through ‘perception-action in the environment,’ along with enjoying information arrived at from other senses too.

“It is often difficult to distinguish between exploration and play: during the sensory-motor development, very young children need to explore first to be able then to proceed to playful behavior, which is one of the most important activities for their development; by playing, children start to explore the world and to acquire and master new skills which can be vital for them,” explain the authors, along with reminding us of the importance of ‘open-ended’ nature in interactions, as kids are able to create new ways to play with an object—delighting in their discoveries.

While 3D printing has much to offer, preschoolers tend to lack the required modeling skills for creating parts and prototypes. Today, there are numerous different software programs developed precisely for preschoolers, allowing them to design and fabricate small items. In designing a 3D printing education, however, the authors realized some complications due to accessibility and affordability, along with space for hardware to be kept. They were also concerned that lack of suitable materials could be an obstacle too.

A raw 3D model of a mouthpiece

“Nevertheless, 3D printing offers relevant opportunities of young music learners, allowing them to build low-cost and customizable didactic objects,” state the researchers.

Providing a library of models is helpful to preschoolers—along with some designs they can begin customizing. Simple models can also be a great way for parents and new tutors or teachers to learn about 3D design and 3D printing. Examples might include everything from sounding objects to actual instruments. There may be percussion toy instruments, miniature xylophones, marimbas, and more.

3D models of musical instruments obtained by the extrusion of 2D shapes

“Even if a scaled model of a complex musical instrument can be hard to find, simplified 3D shapes can be easily obtained by extruding 2D contours without affecting the efficacy of the didactic experience,” stated the researchers. “Besides, 3D-printed objects can foster an early learning of organology, i.e. the science of musical instruments and their classification, including technical aspects of how instruments produce sound.”

The corresponding printed objects

Kids may also be drawn to more alternative educational fun like 3D printing action figures playing their instruments together. Such models could be challenging to find, but they encourage children to enjoy role models playing music, and especially in 3D printed or figurine form. Scale models and figures can be easily re-sized in 3D printing, and different materials can also change the way an item looks significantly.

They also included a case study regarding common western notation (CWN), a method for encoding notated music, as well as the concept of the piano-roll model where details like pitch and timbre are linked to 2D geometric shapes and more. 3D printed solid blocks can be created and placed on a baseplate. Ready-made blocks should help children link shapes to music parameters.

The role of the teacher/tutor is key as they assist in 3D design and 3D printing, guiding the young users, and challenging them to learn.

“Examples of didactic activities may include the recognition of musical instruments and their subparts, the exploration of sound generation techniques, the design and fabrication of sounding objects, and the investigation of alternative forms of music notation,” said the authors.

“For future work, we are planning to further investigate these proposals and implement them as learning practices to be experimented and assessed in preschool and out-of-classroom contexts.”

The momentum 3D printing has in education today is fascinating—not only due to the enthusiasm obviously experienced within the classroom, from innovations being created like prosthetics to online learning for 3D metal printing, to vocational schools engaged in SLS printing.

What do you think of this news? Let us know your thoughts! Join the discussion of this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com.

[Source / Images: ‘Digital Fabrication: 3D Printing in Preschool Education’]

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WASP Launching Long-Term ‘3D Printing for Sustainable Living’ Construction Project

In September, WASP, or the World’s Advanced Saving Project, debuted its new Crane construction 3D printer, in Italy. It’s actually a modular 3D printing system, or “infinity 3D printer,” with different configurations to choose from, and was presented to the public in Massa Lombarda, where the 3D printed village of Shamballa is being constructed.

In October, a two-day program was held, starting with a conference titled “A call to save the world,” surrounding the introduction of WASP’s Crane 3D printer and its innovative 3D printed Gaia Module. The livable, tiny 3D printed house is the first structure that the WASP Crane 3D printed, and was made out of actual raw earth, with straw and rice husks added to the interior for insulation.

“Everyone in the world will have a fine, healthy, sustainable, self-sufficient and ecological home for birthright,” WASP wrote in a press release. “The earth is our witness, took form in Gaia.”

Now that the 3D printed architectural Gaia model is complete, WASP is beginning a brand new technological phase “in view of Expo 2020,” and kicking things off in 2019 with a long-term program called “3D Printing for Sustainable Living.”

GAIA represents an important case study for understanding just what’s possible when using 3D printing in the construction industry. The 3D printed earth module is an important part of WASP’s new program, which focuses on developing construction process using digital fabrication and 3D printing in an effort to move towards an all-new concept of building houses.

“As already announced in the conference “A Call to save the World”, WASP runs for a collaboration with partners belonging to every sector, from architectural design to the university research, from humanitarian associations to national ministries, able to fully share the project,” the company wrote. “It proposes a strategic program of constructive activities, expressly designed for on-site 3D printing and developed through the use of local raw materials.”


The program centers around an advanced, eco-sustainable model of construction, especially due to the lower cost and higher interior comfort the walls in the Gaia model provide with their combination of raw earth and natural waste as construction materials.

Some of the partners expected to work with WASP on its new project include a few universities, humanitarian associations, banking institutions and foundations, both public and private authorities, and several ministries, including Education, Health, Environment and Protection of Land and Sea, Infrastructure and Transport, Labor and Social Policies, Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Food and Forestry Agricultural Policies and Tourism, and Economic Development.

The project is based on six main macro-areas, starting with the promotion of human and material resources from the territory. This area features the capitalization of human knowledge, the use of renewable energy sources and materials found on site, the democratization of technology for the purposes of production, and using local manpower, rather than people with advanced training.

The second project area is sustainable construction processes with low environmental impact, including such items as lowering construction costs, CO2 emissions, the use of concrete, and transport operations, as well as using natural waste and better planning out the construction life cycle. Recycled materials, like natural waste from the agricultural chain and rubble, make up the third area, while the fourth is centered around the digitalization of the construction site through features such as digital data acquisition through 3D scanning, site monitoring, using on-site measuring to lower the amount of mistakes, and constantly defining the correct spatial coordinates.

Multi-purposes construction is the fifth project macro-area, which includes coordinating the use of multiple methods of digital fabrication like CNC technology, embedding supply facilities during initial construction rather than after, adding natural ventilation and thermal insulation right onto the walls, and using controlled material deposition to achieve high performance construction. Digital design is the final project area, and will focus on features including integrated design with BIM software, sharing digital contents available on the Internet, using a material optimization algorithm for construction, and making construction projects fully digital.

With this new project, WASP hopes to become a leader in the housing market, due also to its network of collaborators that will help to foster and share the project. The company knows that are some real opportunities in the future for green building, and also plans to develop a new eco-district in order to implement its “3D Printing for Sustainable Living” project goals and set up new constructive strategies that can be replicated in multiple environments.

Discuss this news and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts in the Facebook comments below. 

[Images provided by WASP]

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Cunicode Uses Code to Generate Beautiful, Unique 3D Printed Art

It’s truly amazing what can be done artistically with 3D printing. The medium allows for plenty of design freedom, and some artists have even taken the approach of using Gcode to generate unique works of art. There’s something fascinating about using code to create art; it’s a true melding of creativity and technology, and nothing like it was ever possible until recently. 3D printing art studio Cunicode was founded in 2011, and is run by Bernat Cuni, a product designer who specializes in digital fabrication. Through the studio, he collaborates with other individuals and service providers to create digitally-generated works of art.

Cunicode’s latest work, Permutation, is a collection of stoneware. Each piece is composed of nine basic units placed around a cylinder. They were designed in Rhino and Grasshopper and 3D printed by BCN3D Technologies on a PotterBot 3D printer. The number of variations that can be generated by the code is truly staggering. For example, one piece, titled “P114.3,” could have been made with 148,791,629,670,981,130,805,037,453,479,575,340 different combinations. That’s one hundred and forty eight decillion, seven hundred and ninety one nonillion, six hundred and twenty nine octillion, six hundred and seventy septillion, nine hundred and eighty one sextillion, one hundred and thirty quintillion, eight hundred and five quadrillion,  and thirty seven trillion, four hundred and fifty three billion, four hundred and seventy nine million, five hundred and seventy five thousand, three hundred and forty. Yikes.

Ironically, there’s something ancient-looking about the pieces themselves, their combinations of lines, dots and swirls resembling some kind of old written language. One could make a philosophical statement about art coming full circle, about the newest form of art mirroring the oldest, about digital fabrication creating similar works to what humans created thousands of years ago. If you don’t want to get that deep, however, you can still appreciate the ceramic pieces for their beauty.

Cunicode’s other projects are just as fascinating. In one, called art.faces, eight famous paintings were selected, and the designers allowed the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to “perform a direct regression of a volumetric representation of the 3D facial geometry from a single 2D image.” In other words, the faces in the paintings were turned into 3D representations. They’re almost eerie to look at, as though there’s something alive about them.

Another work, Tree Ring, takes photogrammetry data captured from a live tree and turns it into beautiful rings that look like metallic slices of a tree trunk. Others include 3D figurines made from children’s drawings, GPS tracks turned into tiny 3D printed mountains, and experimental jewelry and coffee cups.

Some people are still skeptical about 3D printed art, but in my opinion, there’s no question that digital fabrication is just as valid an art form as any other. Deep knowledge of the technology is required to generate art like Permutation and Cunicode’s other works, as well as the creativity to harness the technology to create something both visually appealing and brand new. It takes just as much craftsmanship to create something digitally as it does manually – and thankfully, the idea that 3D printed art isn’t true “art” seems to be fading.

If you’re interested in creating an experimental project using digital fabrication, Cunicode is accepting requests for collaboration.

Discuss this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts below. 

[Images: Cunicode]