3-D Printing
Friday, 29th October 2004
Quite a few people have sent me this link (or similar) along with comments like “look, isn’t this great – you’ll never have to build a model again”
Now I’m not denying that it’s cool, or that it has its uses – product manufacture, prototyping and the like ? but I?m not sure I can see it being used for architectural models. Not just yet anyway.
For a start there are a lot of technophobes and technocynics in and around the construction industry. There are also a lot of control freaks. Add the two together and you get people who know exactly what they want, how they want it and aren?t going to trust a machine to give them that. There are also a large number of architecture students who are quite happy to get model making experience (and staying up all night working experience) for very little more than the cost of the materials ? which is generally less than $100.
And just as CAD programmes (AutoCAD, AutoSketch, Microstation, VectorWorks, 3DStudio etc not to mention all the engineering ones that do all your calcs. for you) have changed how buildings are designed and built I think the use of this technology would too. Imagine if you had to design your buildings so that they could be printed in 3D? everything has to be supported from the bottom or the sides (or the top or sides if you print upside down I suppose.) So you can have ceiling fittings or furniture ? but not both. Stairs and balconies are probably quite hard to model too. And heaven forbid if want a model that comes to pieces so that you can look inside it. Very soon, you have to put as much design effort into building the model as you would into the building the real thing. And it?s not worth the time or the money.
IIsi 50MHz:
Er, MIT’s 3DP process has the parts “supported” by unfused powder during the job, which is free to fall away when completed, IIRC. Not like the laminate printings, which require physical access to the innards to remove and discard the unglued supporting materials. The process easily allows stairs, hollow objects with at least one hole for the substrate powder to exit, and complex stuctures to be formed. Looks like you can form completely separate parts, too; they just won’t stay in their relative positions when the substrate is removed. (-;
FWIW: http://www.mit.edu/~tdp/
One of their licensees has also added 24-bit colouring to the process, resulting in resonable facsimiles of completed products (Z Corp, I think).
You can even print seamless interlocking moving parts such as linked rings with no need to saw, bend, or break open any of the parts to slip another through the loop. Now, as for printing openable models, it should be fairly simple like the way cutaway views are created from full 3D CAD files for brochures. Just choose the part to print–first floor, for example–and then print the next part to accompany it. Slide your parts together or stack them, just as you would a hand-built model with removable panels, sections, floors, or roofing.
Perhaps I oversimplify, having not done much CAD or architecture in over 10 years?
Tuesday 25th, July 2006
at 9:04 am