High Resolution 2D Pen Plotting with a RepRap. Happy Leap Year.
3D Printer – MendelMax RepRap Build Day – Sat. March 3rd
This Saturday we’ll have Matthew Wettergreen here from Rice University to learn together how to build a MendelMax 3D RepRap printer.
MendelMax is the new rapid-to-assemble Mendel variant based on an extruded aluminum frame. Very rigid, very nice looking. Stop on by to check it out!
11 am – 8 pm
Saturday March 3rd @ Hive76
Feb 22nd: Meet the Developers of Apostrophe Now!
Apostrophe Now! — based out of Philadelphia and developed by P’unk Ave — is “a content management system designed for maximum flexibility with a minimal learning curve. The interface is ergonomic, all content-editing is performed in-context.”
Do you have or are you building a website, but you are looking for alternatives to WordPress, Django and other CMS engines? Apostrophe may be right for you!
Come meet Geoff DiMasi and Tom Boutell, two of the lead developers, and find out all the nitty gritty about Apostrophe. They’ll give an overview of the system, design goals, and features, and they’ll also dive into the code to show us how it’s all put together. Geoff and Tom will also talk about other things Philadelphia (the founding of P’unk Ave, the founding of Indy Hall, and the founding of Ignite Philly).
You won’t find this info on Youtube or Vimeo. Come on down to your favorite hackerspace to learn all about Apostrophe and an awesome Philadelphia success story.
Hive76
Wednesday, February 22nd, 7:30 pm
915 Spring Garden, Suite 519
P3D: 3D Model Viewer in the Browser, No Extensions Required
P3D.in is a new beta service (currently free, prolly will change) for rendering 3D models in the web browser, no flash or plugins required. I guess it works via HTML5?
They only take .obj files at the moment (which you can export to from Blender). It’d be much much more useful if they automatically imported STL files, and all of Thingiverse, among other sites. I’ve logged a bug report and feature request along these lines.
Here’s a yoda head converted to .obj and imported and hosted by P3D in their demo iframe. pretty cool. (NOTE: I guess it needs a while to load in the browser, apparently. So if it’s not showing up yet in your browser, give it a minute).
CONTROLS:
Left click and drag – rotate
middle click and drag – zoom
Right click and drag – translate
NASA: The Blue Marble, 2012 Edition
NASA today released a crazy high-res reconstructed photograph of the world, 61 megapixels (8,000 x 8,000)… we can finally replace the one from Apollo 17 from 1972.
A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed ‘Suomi NPP’ on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.
Suomi NPP is NASA’s next Earth-observing research satellite. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.
Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board. The biggest and most important instrument is The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS.
Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
Blender used to Render cover of Nature Chemistry
Christopher Wilmer from Northwestern University just got published in a leading chemistry journal, Nature Chemistry. Congrats Christopher! To convey his scientific findings to a broader audience, he designed this artwork that made it on the cover of the journal. Open source science and art FTW…
Check it out!
http://www.blendernation.com/2012/01/27/blender-used-to-make-cover-art-for-nature-chemistry/
And here’s the Nature Chemistry paper.
Cover art Summary:
Randall Snurr and co-workers describe a computational approach for simulating every possible metal-organic framework (MOF) that can be built from a given set of building blocks (metal clusters and organic ligands) — represented conceptually on the cover using Tinkertoys. Some of the properties of MOFs can also be simulated to uncover structure–property relationships or materials suitable for specific applications. The MOF shown on the cover was identified for its methane storage capacity — a property that was subsequently confirmed experimentally.
Paper Abstract:
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous materials constructed from modular molecular building blocks, typically metal clusters and organic linkers. These can, in principle, be assembled to form an almost unlimited number of MOFs, yet materials reported to date represent only a tiny fraction of the possible combinations. Here, we demonstrate a computational approach to generate all conceivable MOFs from a given chemical library of building blocks (based on the structures of known MOFs) and rapidly screen them to find the best candidates for a specific application. From a library of 102 building blocks we generated 137,953 hypothetical MOFs and for each one calculated the pore-size distribution, surface area and methane-storage capacity. We identified over 300 MOFs with a predicted methane-storage capacity better than that of any known material, and this approach also revealed structure–property relationships. Methyl-functionalized MOFs were frequently top performers, so we selected one such promising MOF and experimentally confirmed its predicted capacity.
Last Call: Introduction to 3D Rendering with Blender
Last Call for tickets to this class this weekend.
January 28th, 1-6 pm @ Hive76
If you’ve been waiting to get your ticket, now’s the time to do it!
Download or create a 3D model of your choice and the free and open source Blender (v2.61 or later, http://www.blender.org/) and I’ll take you through the process of texturing, lighting, rendering, compositing, and post-processing to make a photo-realistic 3D render.
You’ll learn the ins and outs of the interface in Blender, a professional strength, free and open source program for 3D rendering, animation, modeling, texturing, compositing, and post processing.
CLASS: Introduction to 3D Rendering with Blender
January 28th, 1-6 pm @ Hive76
Download or create a 3D model of your choice and the free and open source Blender (v2.61 or later, http://www.blender.org/) and I’ll take you through the process of texturing, lighting, rendering, compositing, and post-processing to make a photo-realistic 3D render.
You’ll learn the ins and outs of the interface in Blender, a professional strength, free and open source program for 3D rendering, animation, modeling, texturing, compositing, and post processing.
The class will be broken up into 3 parts:
Part I: I’ll start from the very basics of learning the interface
Part 2: We’ll all go through texturing and lighting a basic scene together
Part 3: Each person will move on to importing, texturing, lighting, rendering, and compositing their own model of choice for the remainder of the class.
Class is limited to 10 people to help ensure you get enough attention.
Prereqs
Hardware: You must bring a computer with Blender v2.61 installed and a 3-button mouse. Any computer that can take Blender v2.61 will work (OS X, Linux, Windows are all fine!), but newer ones will render faster giving you better feedback as you work.
Human: No previous knowledge of Blender is necessary.
Here are a couple links to see some of what you can do in Blender:
rendering:
Soda Cans
Batmobile
OMG Pwnies
Eventually you’ll probably want to do animations and motion tracking (NOT COVERED IN THIS INTRO CLASS):
Motion Tracking on Youtube
Some places to grab legally free 3D models for the class. Smaller file sizes will ensure you will be able to manipulate the interface with zero glitches.
http://grabcad.com/
http://www.blendswap.com/
http://thingiverse.com/
Blender.org
My Little Pwnies
Some more fun with Blender. Introducing… My Little Pwnies. enjoy.
original pony models are here (no longer available, but i have copies if you want lemme know).
Open-Source Photorealism, Blender and the Cycles Rendering Engine
Blender continues to be my favorite open-source 3D modeling and rendering software package. It has seen tremendous growth over the last couple of years, moving from a fledgling modeling project to a blockbuster production quality modeling, animation, lighting, rendering, and post-processing toolkit.
It’s snowballing into a truly stunning software package. So, there’s no better time than now to teach you how to use it!
In about two weeks I’ll be offering an Intro Blender interface, rendering, compositing, and video motion tracking class right here at Hive76. I’m looking at a 2-day class January 28th-29th, probably 4 hours each day. The beauty is you don’t need to have any 3D modeling skills… there are a TON of LEGALLY FREE and INSANELY DETAILED 3D models widely available. Pick your favorite model and I’ll help you work with it over 2-days to get you positioning, rendering, texturing, and lighting. Hopefully on day 2 we’ll have enough time to try some basic animations inserted over video recorded from meatspace.
Any questions, come to our weekly Wednesday night open house and see what we’re talking about.