www.gizmag.com: 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys has launched what it says is the first 3D printer that can print both in color and with multiple materials. The Objet500 Connex3 combines droplets of three base materials to produce a variety of different material characteristics and colors.
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This might be the biggest step in 3D fab for theatre that has been made yet. This technology allows artisans to create props and costume pieces in a fraction of the time, and without the need to paint.
Multiple material choices will allow this printer to create flexible and rigid combination parts and allow for intricate designs of with moving parts.
I'm thinking of creative uses for this particular machine. It seems that one could print a working toggle bolt with this machine. While that would be impractical, it demonstrates something that a current 3D printer can not do.
So this is really interesting to me because the other day in my film class we talked about animation. Not just any animation, but a new type of animation that uses color 3D printing. The example from class specifically was the movie ParaNorman. It was a fairly recent stop motion animation film...but if you watch it, you'd never peg it for stop motion. The reason for this is, in older stop motion, and really any stop motion before this film, the animators had one of two options for moving the characters. Some animators made models that could morph and move. The problem was, there was little consistency and it took forever to get the models just right to take the next shot. The other (and more popular option in professional stop motion, as well as the most recent) is a system in which each character has a skeleton with removable parts. But up until ParaNorman, each character would have around 800 different faces. That sounds like a lot, but think of how many separate frames there are between two different faces, and the number of combinations of faces (smiling to sad, happy to bored, quizzical to amused, yadda yadda). ParaNorman animators decided to use a new piece of technology (color 3d printing) to print over 2000 faces for each character AND have all the skin tones match because they were computer generated (before, artists had to paint each of the 800 faces, and thus the paint was simple because it had to stay consistent). This meant the frame to frame resolution was immense and all of the effects were very cohesive. This 3D printer could provide another layer to that animation process, allowing more lifelike skin qualities or other options that animators still do by hand.
I have to say this isn't a surprise to me. When I saw this article, I thought to myself, "wait, O thought these were already available." But I guess they weren't.
This is definitely a huge step closer to people printing their own things at home or work. It maybe a little far off, but it will show up in places like FedEx Office (Kinkos) and other store like it soon enough. I can hardly fathom some of the things that could be printed.
As for using this in the arts, 3D printing would really cut down on the time needed to make a lot of the smaller parts to a set and potentially all the props. And the people who make the props might end up as media/digital design people making things to be printed. Who knows where this will go.
This 3D printer look seems to be a great top of the line 3D printer. If I was a designer of consumer goods this is the printer that I would want to use. I see three really important features that this printer can offer over other high end printers. The first is that the printer can print in many colors, the second is that the printer can print in many materials, and the last is that the resolution is very high even though the print area a large. When you want to make a prototype of a a new product you probably don't want to have to tell the people you are showing it to "it will be like this but in color, and not made out of plastic". A good prototype needs to be as similar to the real thing as it can be. More colors and more materials help us get even better prototypes. It has been possible for a long time to get really high quality prototypes, but they took a lot of time and money to make. Because of this new tech designers won't have to wait as long and can spend more time iterating.
Once again the 3d printing technology is making leaps and bounds, what seems like, every week. The more advanced the technology becomes, the more useful it becomes. Once we get the technology to where it needs to be then they can start working on getting the prices down to affordable levels which would then allow everyone to have their own 3d printer to print household objects instead of buy them.
As it seems that everyone else in this thread has commented, 3D printing is making huge leaps and bounds forward. Their promo video make sit seem like the main goal of this printer is to make prototyping materials easier and quicker, so that when they go to produce the part in quantity they already know what it will look and feel like. It just seems to me, that it is not too far off that mass production of parts and car will be left to the 3D printer entirely.
This looks really exciting. I've thought of 3-D printers as very limited for a long time. Even some of the more impressive things it can produce have seemed impressive (but only because a machine made them). With this new development, we can add some more interesting aspects to some neat designs that simply weren't able to be achieved by the limited color palette provided by 3-D printers. Some of the things it has created are really beautiful as well as functional.
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