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| 3D and education: why using it with children? |
Mitch Resnick talking about Scratch, the programming language designed for children and young people wich has an astounding success: "Why Programming? It has become commonplace to refer to young people as “digital natives” due to their apparent fluency with digital technologies. Indeed, many young people are very comfortable sending text messages, playing online games, and browsing the Web. But does that really make them fluent with new technologies? Though they interact with digital media all the time, few are able to create their own games, animations, or simulations. It’s as if they can “read” but not “write.”"
The motivation behind 3D Alpha project (http://3dalpha.blogspot.pt/) is the same. We know instinctively that children use the computer, but for what? Sharing on social networks, watching videos, listening to music, playing digital games? As dazzling as the ability to use these services, often opaque to adults (despite the huge efforts of designers to simplify access) such use is only the basic level, that of consuming. Complex, innovative and stunning to previous generations who did not have universes of information at their fingertips, but only consuming.
The key step is to helping to create. Show how to take ownership of the computer to do whatever we want with it. Draw, recreate, simulate, plan, remix, find ways of personal lyrical expression or building projects that may cross the frontier between the digital and the real. Essentially, doing instead of looking. Create rather than consume. Act instead of having a passive relationship with digital media. The great virtue of the computer is its open nature, without predefined purpose, which enables everyone to make whit it what they wish. But if the stimulus is social consumption is very easy to be dazzled by the bright motions and colors of the digital mermaid and wasting our individual creativity skills.
Not that there's anything wrong per se with gaming or simply vegetate while listening to video playlists. But we can do more, create more, invent more. Why not do it? Schools, whose role in the information society is under permanent questioning, assumes importance as a way to ensure that a comprehensive slice of the population has access to technology and learn to use it as more than media consumption. Actually, today it goes far beyond schhol to institutions, free associations, communities of practice, individuals who freely share their knowledge. In our hyperconnected world the school is only one element of a broad range of knowledge sources, and perhaps due to its historic role one institution that is better prepared to help constructing of relevant knowledge.
The path taken by the 3D alpha project is 3D, simulation, the challenging puzzle of digitally recreateing with vertex and surfaces the complex forms of reality. There are so many other ways, robotics, programming, DIY movements such as Make (http://makezine.com/). What they have in common is the idea of appropriating technology, learning by doing and the rejection of the concept of computer as an object of consumption, with economic conglomerates dictating what users can and can not do with their machines, a trend that has increased with the increasing use of app stores and their private gardens, the progressive opacity in our relation to a digital that is increasingly a gilded cage where economic interests dictate what is permissible and acceptable, as Doctorow points out in its "coming war on general computing" (http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html).
This reflection was inspired by the quoted paragraph, the article by Resnick et al "Scratch: Programming for all" (http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/Scratch-CACM-final.pdf). Fascinating, the insight shown in the comparison "It’s as if they can “read” but not “write.”"
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| 3D creation on android tablets/smartphones |
Lately i'm having a lot of fun with TrueSculpt, an android app that literally gives us the power to create 3D meshes in the tip of one's finger. I'ts a simple app that allows mudbox style modifications to a primitive sphere. Exports as an OBJ file, making it useful to create content for other 3D applications. The final results have an high polygon count, making it not very suitable for VRML worlds where size and bandwidth are at a premium. Still, it's a fun app, unique as far as i know in the android environment (iOS has a lot of 3D modeling apps...) and an harbinger of things to come. Find it as a free download in the google play app market and check the google code project here: Truesculpt. |
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| 3D Creative Magazine is Free in August |
This month’s issue of 3D Creative Magazine is free. http://www.3dcreativemag.com/latest.html (info via hiperia 3D news) |
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| 3D editing on the web |
The collision betwen 3D printing and newer web technologies is giving us some interesting experiences on using browser based apps to create 3D content. MakeUseOf has a list of nine of those apps, wich allow for easy exports of 3D objects as obj or vrml files. Shapewright has an interesting experience running in WebGL in wich spaceships are randomly assembled from multiple parts and the end result can be downloaded as a VRML file. |
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| 3D Maze |
Good Night, We are currently developing a 3D Maze where the goal is to finnish all the levels, without the time runnig out. Our first task was to design and create all the three mazes and we would like to share it with you.
We will share the progress and final version with you as soon as we implement it. |
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| 3D Model: Curtiss Hawk P6E |
Explore and download the 3D Model in 3D Warehouse:
See the making of:
Cheers, Paulo Belo |
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| 3D Printing Tools |
Some tools that are quite useful for 3D printing:
Meshlab: this amazing and free software is packed with dozens of 3D processing tools. I mostly use it to convert between VRML/OBJ/DAE to STL (the standard file type for 3D printing), and also to remesh. The quadric edge decimator is a very powerful polygon reducer.
Meshmixer: this autodesk-acquired project is described as "a free tool for making crazy-ass 3D stuff without too much hassle. Or boring stuff too". I need it for the boring stuff: solidifying meshes. 3D printers need meshes without interior geometric intersections and Meshmixer has a couple of tools that automate this process. Way better than hunting for rogue lines in Sketchup or risking boolean operations. Essentially, turns a model created with several parts into a single part. Just import the STL, and in the edit tools choose Make Solid. Meshmixer automatically creates an outer shell and deletes inner faces. It does tend to overdose on triangles, though. Some fine tuning with mesh sensitivity is required, because Meshmixer does strange stuff to surfaces. After creating solids from your objects it's advisable to give them a pass in Meshlab to do some remeshing operations, since the make solid operation does not spare polygons and that may become problematic upon printing. For example, beesoft, the controller/printer/slicer for the beethefirst tends to crash with large files. Available RAM on the computer I've hooked to the printer helps this, of course, so I'm not blaming the slicing software. Remeshing to reduce polygon count is, I feel, a good policy either in the virtual and physical worlds.
netfabb: This is by far the most powerful and useful tool in a 3D printer's arsenal. netfabb is a STL validation program with mesh correction tools. The professional version takes very good care of problematic meshes. The free version is more restricted, but still has some very powerful and esay to use mesh repair options. How easy? Just pressing the red cross button will taje care of most problematic mesh. Solidifying tools, alas, are only available in the pro version. Netfabb repairs meshes, slices them closing the geometry (useful for, for example, creating an horizontal basis for the object), resizes and rotates. Upon exporting also checks for optimization, ensuring that the resulting STL file has only one outer surface. I've learned the hard way to always check my STLs in nefabb before printing, even if they appear to be valid. How hard was the way? Imagine filament spaghetti storms on the printing table or clogged extruders... I've had instances where a valid STL akways failed to print until I corrected them with nefabb's tools. This software became invaluable to my 3D printing workflow. |
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| 3D Printing Tutorial: from 2D to physible |
A quick tutorial, to show how to create 3d printable objects from 2D vector drawings. We're using Inkscape to create 2D drawings using shapes, bézier curves and boolean operations in SVG file format, and Tinkercad, a 3D modeling webapp, to quickly extrude with milimetric precision. The end result can be exported as STL/OBJ/VRML for 3D printing, or any other modeling and animation program. Its, as far as I know, an old modeling trick from Blender. Currently, I'm testing this with my 7th year pupils for halloween. Check the tutorial here (in portuguese): 3D Printing with Inkscape and Tinkercad. |
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| 3D Printing with Sketchup |
Took me a while (organizing projects with classes and the pitfalls of systems management isn't easy), but finally my 7th year pupils are printing their cutlery projects. Drawn in Visual Arts class, they modeled the objects using Sketchup (very carefully, 3D printing requires solid objects and Sketchup's workflow is prone to errors in this particular need). After the obligatory conversion process (Meshlab to convert from collada to stereo litography, netfabb to correct errors in the STL file), our 3D printer quickly gave us these objetcs. |
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| 3DF Zephyr Free - 3D Scanning from Video by using just a Smartphone |
Since Autodesk 123D Catch has been discontinued 3DF Zephyr Free is a possible alternative for 3D scanning.
Info and tutorial: https://3dscanexpert.com/free-3d-scanning-video-smartphone/ Enjoy, vcard |
