Comment by froo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by froo | Hacker News Reader

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I've got a unique perspective on things as I've looked into both sewing AND 3D printing for different hobbies. Sewing as a young kid, 3D printing as I got older.

As someone who owned and learned how to use a sewing machine at the ripe old age of 10, I can't help to find fault in this guy's argument.

Admittedly I was building Rokkaku's, Speedwing Stacks and Parafoils out of ripstop nylon and carbon fibre (well, the parafoils didn't use carbon fibre), but that's not the point.

I recently looked into 3D printing for producing components for another hobby of mine (tabletop wargaming) and the fact is that it is stupidly expensive at the moment in terms of both purchasing a machine or getting someone to print for you. I ended up just learning to sculpt and scratchbuild with polystyrene card.

Now to address some of his points.

  1. when someone develops a 3D modeling application that anyone can use and many can master

http://www.blender.org

  2. when someone develops a post consumer recycled 3D printing material

I'm fairly sure you can recycle acrylic and print with acrylic, so where's the disconnect there? My chemistry isn't up to scratch so can someone please clarify?

  3. when printing metal and circuits becomes cheap

Got me there, I never researched printing either of these things, so I can't comment.

You can't actually recycle plastics like you can aluminum. Each time your reheat and remold the polymer it breaks down and eventually becomes unusable. Even when recycled plastic is used in industry it is typically Pre-consumer. e.g. when you go to the movie theater and get a "Watchmen" soda cup, sometimes they misprint whole batches. Those are ground up and mixed with virgin plastic before they ever leave the factory.

ok cool. What about some sort of dense/hard wax then?

For sure, you can actually get wax printers now, but the properties of wax keep it from being useful in conditions where heat or durability are concerns. Currently, they are used to make patterns for metal casting in the jewelry industry.

Blender as an example for 3d modeling application anyone can use and master? I suspect the author and you have seriously different understandings of usability, to put it mildly.

Blender isn't actually very complicated to use once you get used to the way it was designed.

It's menu's might be a bit confusing to begin with, but I had the same sort of experience when switching from office 2003 to 2007, until I got used to it that is.

I will clarify 2 for you; yes, my school has two 3d printers. one uses acrylic. both can't print more than a 15cm by 15cm by 10cm object, and both are huge. secondly, blender was a bad chioce; but I can't think of a better one off the topof my head.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with you, how is blender a bad choice? Have you actually sat down and tried to use it for an extended period of time?

I learnt modelling under 3DS max, purchased and worked on a copy of Maya 2008 and only recently have switched to Blender to work on a different project (mostly to try and prove a concept)

While Blender does have it's own nuances (eg, the menu's change based on context) it isn't any worse than the other tools in the case of workflow for model creation. Nothing overly noticeable anyway. In fact, they advocate learning and using mostly keyboard shortcuts which is handy.

However on the animation side (different kettle of fish understandably) it has a vastly superior workflow and I can produce content at a faster rate, which I would estimate to be 2x faster?

But really, the difference in price between Blender (free) and Maya (starts at $2k per license) and many of the other Autodesk (Autocad starts at $4k, 3DSmax at about $3k) the difference in price is astounding. Even Zbrush which is a fairly artist friendly tool starts at $600

Besides, Blender is open source. If you don't like something in it, change it...

Solidworks.

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