Sweet Onion Creations

I’ve been curious to see what Google Earth can do in conjunction with a 3-D printer. So, we were recently asked to go to San Diego and speak with an environmental firm about building topography models for showing off their restoration work. This is usually occurs on sites in desert and coastal areas.

Challenge: Need a small, portable model that can get through airport security and show beautifully smooth topography. A little custom branding would be nice too. (And we’re flying out the next day…)

Timeline:

2:36 pm: Download Google Sketchup to my computer. Begin flipping through Google 3D Warehouse for ideas on what is available for topography.

2:48 pm: Bingo! I find a beautiful mountain topography file, complete with a smooth valley floor that looks eerily similar to the Bridger mountain range around Bozeman, Montana.

2:52 pm: Download the 3d model off Google, import it into the software program, Rhino 3d, using a Sketchup plug-in. The model comes in as a surface. This would be like having a towel thrown on the floor…great wrinkles but no real thickness. So, we have to make it a “thick surface” using some extrusion tricks in Rhino.

2:53 pm: Grab the Sweet Onion Creations logo in .eps format and slap it on the valley floor and make it a 3-D object using Rhino. This is to show that a firm’s logo can be branded on the model.

2:55 pm: The 3-D printer is fired up, fed the file, and is off and running.

3:34 pm: 3-D printer finishes the model and the model is ready for depowdering, hardening, and painting.

Total time: A shade under an hour from digital to physical.

About an hour is all it takes from what is available online to having a physical model being built. Google Earth makes it easy to grab site topography and incorporate it into physical models.

To date, I haven’t seen a lot of people using 3-D printing technology with 3D Warehouse. I know there exists some challenges in getting files out of Sketchup ready to go to the printer but this was just too easy. I’d be curious to hear from anybody else…

Here’s a picture of the finished object:

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Design, Technology Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.