Thanks to the uber geeks

I wanted to keep geekdom appraised of the progress on this little project.

I met with the applications engineer at Stratasys this morning and toured
their plant. They have these really cool machines - they like 3D inkjet
printers. They can put down a layer of ABS or polycarbonate and then build
on top of it. The machine also puts down a layer of support material where
needed - meaning that the next layer up can be built away from the layer
below and attached elsewhere. When they're finished, the piece gets dunked
in water and the support material liquefies. One of the samples they gave me
was a "brain gear" with lots of interconnected moving parts all built in one
piece.
(OK, so maybe it's not news. Can I have my eyeballs back now?)

Anyway, the have converted my jpegs into bitmap files and reformatted them
into .STL files using Majic RP software. We're just waiting for machine time
to see how the first test run turns out.

Thanks, guys.

Barry Kleider
Photographer. Arts Educator.
612.722.9701
email: bkleider@sihope.com
Web: www.barryphotography.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "DWAYNE SANDALL" <sandall@shaw.ca>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca>
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 9:42 AM
Subject: Re: Re: calling all uber geeks

> Sam,
>
> That's the progam I couldn't think of!! I used that to build 3D models out
of data from a scanning microscope, that ended up on a CD-ROM called 'Images
from the Edge" - boy, oh boy do I ever miss the somewhat whimsical days of
university research - and I mean whimsical in the best possible way - ie, no
clients calling you at the 11th hour wanting things re-done or else their
entire marketing campaign will go belly up :-)
>
> I think I need a sabbatical from work to go back and muck around with all
the things I did as grad student - I wonder how fast the G5 is compared to
the old quadra 900 I had then :-)
>
> Dwayne
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Sam Wang <stwang1@bellsouth.net>
> Date: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 7:20 pm
> Subject: Re: Re: calling all uber geeks
>
> > Hi Dwayne,
> >
> > I played with the generation of 3D from greyscale as well, way back
> > then. The software I used was NIH
> > Image, a freebie written by Wayne Rasband of the National Institute
> > of Health. It was used
> by scientists
> > all over the globe in processing images. Though not having been
> > updated for a while, it is still very
> > useful and can be freely downloaded from:
> > http://rsb.info.nih.gov/nih-image/
> >
> > It can't replace Photoshop since it's primarily an 8 bit image
> > processor, but I can guarantee that you
> > loads of fun, plus perhaps an insight on why medical images look
> > the way they do. Besides generating
> > great looking 3D pictures of greyscale graphics, it also has a very
> > cool histogram feature - it makes
> > histogram of any straight line that you draw. So, a student of mine
> > wrote a macro and saved slices of
> > such histogram and made a 3D photo-sculpture out of them.
> > Unfortunately he had to cut the pieces by
> > hand, but that was gosh a long long time ago, when monitors showed
> > just black and white pixels...
> >
> > Sam
> >
> > >
> > > From: DWAYNE SANDALL <sandall@shaw.ca>
> > > Date: 2004/04/20 Tue AM 11:20:48 EDT
> > > To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.us
> ask.ca
> > > Subject: Re: calling all uber geeks
> > >
> > > Barry,
> > >
> > > Here's my thinking on this, along with a couple of questions.
> > First, the questions, if I recall correctly,
> > an stl file is a 3D file, and if that is correct, then what I am
> > guessing you want to do is make a 'textured'
> > surface print? The rest of my comments are based on this
> > assumption, of making this textured print.
> > >
> > > I think the answer you are looking for in this case might be in
> > the realm of terrain mapping. When I
> > was in architecture school in the early/mid 90's I would take arial
> > or sattelite images and be able to
> > make a 3D terrain model into which I could insert my 3D model of
> > the building.
> > >
> > > Here's a bit of the theory of how it worked. The arial photos
> > would be in greyscale, adjusted so that
> > pure white was the highest point of the ground, and pure black
> > would be lowest, and the shades of
> > grey would be somewhere in between. The software would int
> erpolate
> > the pixels and build a 'mesh' that
> > would approximate the surface.
> > >
> > > Although the only time I made any physical 3D
> > > prototype was of a building model, and it was pretty cool to see
> > something come out of the screen
> > into a piece of platic.
> > >
> > > Once, late at night in the school's computer lab, for kicks, I
> > had taken a photo of my face and made a
> > mesh out of it.. it was pretty weird looking, but then again, some
> > say I am too :-)
> > >
> > > As for software, I am a bit out of touch in this realm, as I last
> > did anything like this in the late 90's,
> > but being the pack-rat that I am, I probably have some of the
> > software backed up that I could refer to
> > and point you in the right direction.
> > >
> > > I hope this helps,
> > > Dwayne
> >
> >
> >
>
Received on Wed Apr 21 13:45:04 2004