Repper's delight

For our theater play that takes place in 1920 I was in charge of making an old gramophone replica.
It didn't need to actualy work, but had to be realistic enough to convince the audience.
I made it by mixing laser cutting and engraving, 3D printing, and more traditional techniques (cardboard, wood marquetry, painting).

Many people think that FDM 3D printing is not well adapted at producing nice and detailed 3D sculptures because of the visible layers.

Let me show you here that with some post-processing (sanding and painting) you can achieve very fine detailed sculptures.

Almost 7 years ago I published my first version of the "Sceaming hand" Santa Cruz's emblematic design.
And honestly when I look back at it I think it doesn't deserve the more than 250 likes I received on Thingiverse (at the time of writing).
It's now time to make a better one...

This is the next example in my "Printing something BIG" serie.
I could have printed this 36 cm tall object in one go. My printer (a Creality CR10S Pro) is big enough.
But cutting it in parts saves printing time and material.
So once again it's something I strongly recommend.

I know that I haven't published much these days (months... year).
Because most of the time I have nothing to say or just nothing enough exciting to share (IMHO). Or just because (and most probably) because I'm just too lazy to publish my experiments...

But then I felt in love !
And my new lover's name is Neobarok...

Yesterday I had some little spare time between two projects so I decided to train myself at using Meshmixer and Sculptris.
I had no precise idea of what to do before I reminded a famous René Magritte painting from 1934 that would be a perfect subject for Meshmixer.
Along with a bit of Sculptris, I thought it should be possible to achieve a good result in a short time.

In just as little as 3 hours of time I had a new sculpture ready to be printed...

Peu de temps après avoir commencé le projet "InMoov" je me suis référencé sur la carte des "builder" (fabricant) d'un InMoov.
Nous sommes quelques un dans le monde.
Mais en France curieusement nous ne sommes que 2 (référencés en tout cas, et à part Gaël le "papa" de InMoov qui est à Paris).

Mon autre "collègue" est à Marseille et s'appelle Ambroise.
(Ben quoi ? Y'a rien d'extraordinaire à çà !)

Mais ce qui m'a mis sur le cul, c'est qu'il ne possède pas d'imprimante 3D...
Son robot, c'est en papier qu'il le construit !

Ni une ni deux j’envoie mon meilleur reporter sur place.

Interview exclusive de Amby : un artiste en papier !

Now that you understand what drawing with Gcode really means, you know that only vectors can be turned into stroke paths.
In a vector graphic editor such as Inkscape you can fill a closed path, but that filling will only exist on your screen.
Even if you tell Inkscape to fill in some path, you will only get the path's outline plotted when converted into Gcode instructions. That's because only the outline is a path but the filled area isn't.
So if we want our filled areas to be pen-plotted, we must first find a way to convert them into stroke paths.

Let's see how...

I will need something to hold a pen in place of the original extruder if I want to use my Rapman as a pen plotter.

As usual, I'm gonna design that part in Sketchup.