Living in a college town like Bozeman, you start sense when college finals week rolls around. The coffee shops are full disheveled, edgy students hunched over laptops and pounding espresso. Young people everywhere have the thousand-yard stare. No one else has it worse than with architecture students. Late nights turn into late weeks…

So, we received a call a few weeks back from a student in Boston that had seen our short video on YouTube regarding how 3D printing works for architecture models. He was designing his semester project in Rhino 3d and was curious about building a model and lead times.

Now, file preparation continues to be the biggest wild card in the equation of going from a digital design to the physical object. It can be smooth or it can be a nightmare to create a “watertight” 3d representation in the .STL file format. It can be days or minutes depending on how the design was done in CAD.

We set up a rough timeline and agreed to touch base. Well, the file never showed up on time. No big deal…

Then on a Monday morning I get an email and the final file. Now, I was like all students myself and waited until the 4th quarter to turn everything in. However, to make matters worse the model had to be turned in by the following day. In Boston.

We’ve never flipped an architecture model that fast…here’s a screen shot from Rhino:

Here’s the timeline:

• 10:00 - The Rhino file is prepped and sliced up for the machine
• 10:15 - The 3d printer is fired up and begins building the model
• 3:00 - The model is finished. We begin depowdering and hardening the structures
• 4:30 - Pack the model (it’s still warm) and race to FedEx
• 4:45 - FedEx loads the box and we begin crossing our fingers…

I got a call the following morning from the student saying the model had arrived perfectly intact. He was able to sand and paint it and turn it on time that afternoon to his professor.

We were pleasantly surprised. Given the right variables, it’s now possible to take an architecture design from a computer, build it in 3d, ship it, and have it under 24 hours. Hopefully, architects can start to sleep better at night and not relive final’s week when it comes time to build that physical model for a presentation.