Re: A new solution to the buying/painting miniatures problem

>
>I would bet the stuff produced by this is fairly soft, but I bet you
>can make a mold off of it.  Talk about rapid miniature development.
>

Hi Folks,

I was at an event hosted by Alias/Wavefront (very high-end 3d modeling
and
animation sofware developers - their product "Maya" is used extensively
in
the movie business, but they also do Industrial Design related stuff) at
their Toronto head office a couple of years ago, and there was a demo of
that system set up and running, punching out sample parts and solid
"business cards".

It was very cool.

They gave me a sample part, which was a label on a chain - and the
"chain"
was made of links that were all printed solid at one time BUT with the
gaps
between them so that the chain was flexible.  Very neat stuff.

As far as coloured finishes go, the colouring is done with standard food
dyes, so while they say "standard RGB - millions of colours", think of
it
in primary colour terms from what I saw.

And the material itself was easily strong enough that one could print a
starship model and use the original to make a master pattern (in silver,
or
whatever) from which to make production moulds for a spincaster. 
Depending
on the design of the ship (ie whether or not it had thin protruding
bits)
you could just paint the models and play with them... as long as you
weren't bouncing them off the floor, you'd be fine.

As far as the software goes (producing the 3d models), as someone else
pointed out, most of the issues with a good 3d model have to do with the
skill of the software operator not the software itself...  And besides,
Rhino is a good sofware package to work with, as far as these things go.
 I
understood from the website that the machines require "solid models"
(which
is where the 3d model's math actually describes the entire object, not
just
the surface of the object), rather than "surface models" (where the 3d
model's math describes just the surface of the object), and Rhino is
known
as a high-quality surface modelling package - but I have no idea if you
can
export Rhino models as solid models...	I would guess so.

Anyway, it would certainly be fun to be able to order custom printed
versions of your own ship designs...

(this of course presumes you're good enough with the software to be able
to
model them effectively... for many of us, the time required to learn the
software would far exceed the time taken to just scratchbuild the
starships
from raw materials... :)

Anyway, thank's for pointing it out.

-Adrian

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Adrian Johnson
adrian@stargrunt.ca
http://www.stargrunt.ca

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