We have a one click export button to send 3D Models from 3DTin to i.materialise. A lot of users have made use of it so far. Also many users have printed 3DTin models using Makerbot and other printers. But I had never personally handled a 3D printout of a model created on 3DTin. Thanks to i.materialise, I recently received one of my 3D models in flesh and blood (… figuratively speaking. actually it is in Polyamide)
You can view/edit the sketch at http://3dt.in/nrsw
This model has special story behind it. Back in November last year, I got an itch to model a chopper like the one they show in the movie Avatar. The prominent feature of it is two side fans that supposedly provide a vertical liftoff while taking off from the ground and a forward push once the aircraft is well above in the air. It was easy to build a fan like that (I mean a model, not real one), but at the time we didn’t have anything like group copy-paste mechanism to create another identical copy of it. Also at the time we didn’t have Shearing and Scaling, which would have come handy. It would have been too cumbersome to make that model without these features.
So in order to make the chopper model, we set out to implement a new feature set. It took a couple of months, but we launched it in January. Shortly after that I started to build the actual model that I had in my mind that triggered this whole thing. It turned out to be quite well. One day I would like to see real chopper parts made on 3DTin, but for now I’m quite happy with the results. 🙂 And last week, i.materialise offered to print it for us for free.
Voila! I received the print over weekend. I was totally psyched to find a model from 3DTin resting in my hands for the first time. It’s marvelous!
Software tools and the 3D printing services like i.materialise have shortened the gap between concept and reality by a great deal. With the developer friendly platforms like Javascript/WebGL we can build our CAD modeling ideas quickly into 3DTin, without worrying about low level issues like memory management or platform compatibility. We can deliever them to you even more quickly by just pushing the new version to our production servers. Once you have built your models, services like i.materialise give you instant options to print them into the material world.
We are running out of excuses to not build something.
3DTin 
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