Make: | Make:: The folks at Disney have been exploring some really interesting techniques for fabrication. Their latest is this interesting method of 3D printing with fabric.
The process is best described as an automated system for assembling laser cut layers of fabric. Their machine resembles a tiny assembly line more than a standard 3D printer.
7 comments:
Not going to lie, I thought this would be a lot cooler when I saw the article title. This is not that inventive, or useful. I also feel that it would be easier to just cut and glue the fabric together than have the support structure around the object. My only argument for using this printer rather than hand crafting would be speed, but 3D printers are incredibly slow. I think that hand crafting a layered fabric would be faster. Even adding in circuitry shouldn’t be that hard to do. The reason that 3D printers are so effective and interesting is because they print with materials that are hard to manipulate and they are an effective tool that reduces that issue. There is nothing that hard about layering fabric into a sculpture. Now if the printer could print patterns for complex tailored outfits, I would be impressed. Although, the latter is not that difficult, it would be helpful.
3D printers are an exciting and also terrifying thing to think about. It is insane that our society has come this far, to where we can literally create 3D objects from a printer. It sounds like something HG Wells or Ray Bradbury would have predicted the "future" would have. With that being said, larger corporations like Disney can really use this to their advantage in expanding their brand more rapidly and more effectively with this technology. I do wonder how the use of this technology would impact their relationships with their current manufacturers. Interesting to think about. Very curious to see what other companies jump on the band wagon and begin utilizing this technology.
Chase Del Rey <54-102> 54102 <54102>
Yes Disney! Finally something I can be more proud of. I am fascinated by 3D printing and even though I haven't used it yet, I would've never thought to use fabric as a material to use with the 3D print. It's crazy what these printers can do, but I'm surprise it can take different material and not mess it up. I'm actually very curious to know what the processes is to make that happen and how did they figure it out. I hope when I work with Disney over the summer that maybe I can talk to someone who can tell me more about this process. It's exciting to see this new ideas come alive and it's nice to know Disney isn't stealing this idea. But come to think of it I don't think we'll ever know exactly what is going with Disney and how they do things. But I can't wait to join the IDeAte program and learn to use all of their machine and be able to work with them as much as I want.
Yeah, I have to agree with Sasha, I thought this was going to be a lot cooler. But now that I'm thinking about it, I think it may just be that I am incredibly desensitized to this kind of technology thanks to CMU. This, of course, is an incredibly cool development that I'm sure will be very useful not only for Disney, but perhaps for toy companies as well. I can appreciate the intention of fabric toys for children, since they won't be able to hurt themselves or break it. While this could be accomplished with stuffed animals, it is cool that we have a machine that can produce something quicker and probably cheaper. I do wonder though what exactly *Disney* is going to do with this, other than sell it to other companies. Should be interesting to see what happens.
Although machine doesn’t seem anything like a standard 3D-Printer the process of subsequent layering to create a form is exactly the same as any other 3-D printer the exception here of course is the use of fabric. While the process of layering fabric to create a 3-D solid object is innovative and neat I don’t foresee this process for 3D printing catching on any time soon or having any real use other than a neat niche of printing. I mean why would you ever want an object made out of a hundred stacked layers of fabric? Better yet when would you ever need one? I can see how this process could be used to make toys, but with the limited resolution you can always see the stacked layers, and I think it would be more effective to just create a plush toy with smooth seams. Also the machine uses a large roll of fabric to cut out all of the small layered pieces, in turn wasting so much fabric per print, a cost that could build up quick. While this process is neat there is truly no real use for it other than it being a cool superfluous way to 3D print a flexible object.
This article is pretty cool in that they have developed this new technology, but I still think it needs a lot of development to succeed. I think there are a lot of possibilities with this technology, as they demonstrate the possibilities of interactive toys that the article mentioned. This could be a very cool method of combining a tactile experience with a virtual one, and I think it has possibilities as toys for sure. However, there are some things that irked me about their prints. The craftsmanship, while exact with the laser cutter, was a little bit weird in places. You could see the support/attachment material sticking through in places, and it looked a bit like the fabric was peeling or shedding old skin (yuck!). Also, when they played with the bunny to demonstrate the flexibility, the fabric layers peeled apart at the edges, which makes me nervous that the connective layers wouldn’t hold for very long. It would make me more confident in the product if the layers were sewn together? Or maybe using a thinner fabric for the layers to make the designs look smoother, and more like the actual forms?
I get it . . . FABRICation . . . Ha. While some of those models are cool, they don’t look like they are very good, as in high quality or very high resolution, and it didn’t look like the adhesive material worked very well around the edges. One of these 3D printed toys covered in an outer skin of fabric might be cooler, as it would give it a more polished finish, and allow it to be more durable. What I think might be a better use for a machine like this would be something that makes similar objects out of sheet metal and welds or brazes them together. You could probably get away with out a lot of support material, and you could make objects with complicated internal cavities, more so than with the fabric. You might have a harder time with some of the embed electronics, but oh well, now you have a metal 3D printer.
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