Interesting 3D Printing Service

[Redrobes]

Check out my Blender tut then (well first time crack at it kinda blog type thing anyway)... brace yourself for pain tho.... ;[

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ough-a-Blender

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...Hints-and-Tips

[Midgardsormr]

I'm pretty sure Sketchup Pro can export STL, but the free version cannot. SU is less painful to use than Blender, but it's still, I think, US$400 or so for a useful version of it.

[tilt]

cool - I'll definitly check that out - and I'm downloading blender now

[Redrobes]

I have been looking and came across this one:
http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/
which is for taking data sets and converting to STL but its no 3D GUI based drawing / modeling package. Looks good for me tho

[tilt]

yeah... need the GUI, can't do anything without that

[Redrobes]

Crikey this one is worth checking out too. There is a service where you take a few snaps of some building and upload to this site...
http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~visit...creenshots.php
... then it works on it for a while (like up to a few hours on an array of PCs) and then it will spit out the 3D model of it which can be taken into the meshlab app to convert to STL.

Wow ! Some people have been busy !!!

[Redrobes]

Ohh man theres some clever dudes out there. There is a guy who has intercepted the data transfer from photosynth to extract the point cloud from it. For those who dont know, Photosynth is an amazing bit of software by microsoft - yes you really did hear me say it - which takes multiple photos and turns it all into a 3D scene and has some cool demos using Flickr sets to build up pretty complex buildings and places. Anyway, you can render these in 3D with Silverlight - Microsofts effort at doing a Flash kind of thing with some 3D. But the Photosynth site can make these Silverlight web pages of 3D terrains but no export.... unless you intercept the data to it.

http://binarymillenium.com/2008/08/e...hotosynth.html

So from this you can extract the points and put them into that mesh app and generate the STL from it.

If in the future photosynth exports a point cloud (as promised) then it might as well export the STL and be done with.

[Jaxilon]

I downloaded Blender a few weeks back and when I popped it up and just poked at a few seconds I thought: "EEEEEEEE GAAAADDSSS!!"

I think it will definitely take some work to be able to use it.

[mearrin69]

I'm pretty sure that trueSpace 7 can save in STL. It's available for free these days.
M

[Midgardsormr]

Look up the wikiBook Blender Noob to Pro. It got me on my feet with the program fairly quickly, although I swiftly abandoned it in favor of Maya as soon as I got into my 3d classes at school.