From S.V.G to M.A.P.

Welcome back you guys!

It has been a very busy and productive week here in the lab with the group. We are so excited about how the final process has been going. So, let’s just do a small recap from the last blog post, we did start the slicing production. Yay! We did find out that it was challenging to scale the prints all the same size because of the plane cutting process in Meshmixer, but other than that, everything has been coming along well. We divided our map into 9 pieces, similar to a tic-tac-toe board. Out of our 9 prints, two had to be redone on Ultimaker 3’s. However, the prints that were successfully printed turned out great!

For our final project we have been working on a video tutorial to document our process and explain how we got to our final product (link below!). For our video we have used the softwares: Quicktime, Garageband, and IMovie. Together the video consists of screen recordings, voiceovers, and general how-to images. The team spent a lot of planning time figuring out which methods would be the most helpful for our viewers to follow our instructions, as we had a difficult time finding user friendly/beginner tutorials in our learning. We used this video format to be able to reach more viewers efficiently. Furthermore, we’ve made a lesson plan on Thingiverse for those who want to follow in our footprints or print off our map! Our main complication with this process was figuring out how to scale the map accurately and in turn, explaining that process to our viewers. Secondly, we are unsure as to why our prints have only been successful on Ultimaker 3’s. Lastly, due to the long printing times for each piece (roughly between 12-20 hours), the piece colorings all vary. If our group had more time and access to larger quantities of monochromatic filament, we would have like to make the entire map one color, a factor we hope our future map makers will improve upon! We would like to give a special thank you to Innovation Services in Carrier Library for all their help with our video production and final prints.

Our group is so excited to finally see our project coming together in these last few weeks of the semester! Although we have hit several bumps in the road we consider the project a success and hope to see others follow in our footsteps or use our process as a stepping stone to something much bigger in education.

If you’re interested in printing our Massanutten model check out our Thingiverse “Things” on our profile @3D_Education or through the link below!
Massanutten SVG Images-Thingiverse

Here is the link of our tutorial video on Youtube: 3D Map Print Tutorial

Image from: http://www.statefansnation.com/2017/03/your-looks-like-we-made-it-finale-at-clemson-open-thread/#sthash.GPtmXCNU.dpbs

Educational Dukes

Three girls just trying to make a difference in the education field.