Breed 3-D Printable Objects, No Technical Know-How Needed | Hacker News Reader

Breed 3-D Printable Objects, No Technical Know-How Needed

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29 pointstansey11 comments

Just tried it, and even with my horrible 3d design skills, I'm 100% confident I could end up with the object I had in mind in less time by using Blender.

That's because you know how to use Blender, which most people don't. But the site is not for a situation when you have a specific design in mind, instead it is for when you want to explore the space of possible designs and see suggested designs that you might not think of on your own, such as this: http://endlessforms.com/o/372201/

But I also doubt I could produce all of these shapes in Blender. I would have no idea how to do these, for example:

http://endlessforms.com/o/103181/ http://endlessforms.com/o/82117/

Best, Jeff

If the goal is to end up with -something-, sure, it works.

If the goal is to end up with what you pictured in your mind, then it's absolutely horrid.

BTW, part of my problem with Blender is that I -don't- know how to use it. I tried several times on the previous interface and gave up each time. The new one is better, but I still haven't used it enough to have any confidence that I know what I'm doing. So I consider it an apt comparison.

Here is a longer article, with pictures of evolved objects printed in Silver and Bronze:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-endless-web-d-printable....

Must they all be bilaterally symmetrical?

No. People just tend to choose ones that are.

Here are some that are mostly bilaterally symmetrical, but with left-right asymmetry.

http://endlessforms.com/o/69562/ (ghost) http://endlessforms.com/o/60967/ (mad hatter) http://endlessforms.com/o/39225/ (Dr. Evil)

There are some with no symmetry at all....

Nice idea. But gave me Could not initialise shaders VALIDATE_STATUS: null, gl error [1282] on chrome after two evolves...

Sorry. The site is getting hammered right now due to the press articles and Hacker News. We just did a bit of hacking and hopefully it will work now!

I still get it. Maybe is due to bad webgl support for chrome on linux (I have to start it with --ignore-gpu-blacklist).

However I haven't had any problem with any of the other three.js demos, or any other work of its creator, Mr Doob (like Google's Rome).

If you visit http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/, does it work? In particular, does http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/body.html load and let you rotate the body around?

If possible, can you DM me your IP on twitter, so I can see where in the logs you showed up? If it's weird giving out your IP to random people on the internet, you could just visit endlessforms.com / DanielRibeiroDebug , and I'll find the 404 in the log file.

3d shapes/polygon language -> Endless Forms similarly by association VHDL -> Endless Circuits, etc...

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