Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Make: Believe // Moddler Studios: 3D printing Toys and Tools”.
Based on my experience doing digital effects for films, i was uh very often frustrated by the fact that it was difficult to communicate, three-dimensional ideas on a two-dimensional screen. Not many people are well versed in being able to look at a two-dimensional thing and then reconstruct it. In three dimensions in their minds and when you’re working with someone, whether it’s an art director production designer or a director very often, it is difficult to communicate all the subtleties of a design and get your approval and get on with your work models. Physical objects, maquettes are, by far the best ways to communicate ideas. That is how we experience the world from the time we were born until the time we die.
There is no ambiguity about the physical object and it is therefore the greatest way to communicate things. Modler has two different 3d printers. One is our large format printer the object eden 500v. It is a polyjet printer, which basically means it’s an industrial strength, inkjet printer that uses resin instead of ink to print the build platform is about 20 by 15. By about eight inches deep, so we can make parts that are quite large uh, either single part or many parts at once.
The resolution is about 600 dots per inch in the x and y axis, and about 1600 dots in the z-axis, which is about a fifth of the human hair per layer. The other printer we have is the envision tech, prefactory mini multi-lens. It was originally designed to do jewelry.
It has a very small, build platform. It’S only about three and a half inches by two and a half inches. It goes about 10 inches deep because it was originally designed to do jewelry.
You know you’d stack up a bunch of rings and print them all at once. It’S very slow, but the surface quality and the level of detail are unmatched in any 3d printer you can buy today. Modler has many different customers and serves many different industries.
Most of our work comes from industrial designers, product design, companies uh, which is which is great. I mean these are people that basically just use 3d cad programs all day long, and so they need to have these these physical objects, so they can hold it in their hands and see how it how it feels we do work for medical device. Companies tabletop miniature companies, game companies, toy companies, a lot of student work, a lot of just individuals who have hobbies or they’re trying to make an invention.
The first movie we worked on was green lantern. We did some plane props that were actually on the desk and some of the shots. We also did work on the avengers, the loki’s staff.
We also have done work on a men in black three. Arguably some of our best work. We got to make three or four guns for uh will smith to hold in his hand and various characters to see uh. You know if it was correctly proportioned and would actually fit in order to do a job. A customer has to give us a file. We make the file printable, we send it to the printer. The printer creates the file, usually you know anywhere from a half hour to 50 hours, depending on part size. We take the part off the off the printer. We send it over here to this cleaning station. Someone will physically remove the support material which is sort of like a gel, remove it from the part we’ll take it over to the water jet machine, we’ll wash off the residue of the support material. We’Ll soak the part in a caustic solution for about an hour we’ll take the part out. We will wash it off again with the water jet, we’ll dry it off and the parts are finished.
So one of the great things about this program is it has the ability to look at geometry and intelligently analyze it so that you can see here when you have broad flat areas, it uses very little geometry and when you get details with a lot of curvature And detail it knows to leave the geometry there. Our world is three-dimensional and that’s how we deal with it. Hi george .