3D Milling Using Blender

Are you marketing the milling services to anyone that can export to a .obj file? Or just Second Life?

Ideally we would accept any order suitable for our mill and materials in .obj format. For the short-term however we are sticking to Second Life because that’s simply where we are. We may branch out to other systems, but it’s an area where I could see (and encourage) some healthy competition!

From the article, it said that the service would be launched on June 1st. Are you accepting orders now? 

There is unfortunately a bottleneck here of time. Although the suite of digital tools we use is powerful, we’re not able to produce one-click parts. Manipulation in Blender and precise calibration of the mill both require a lot of time. Not to mention the five or six other programs that are necessary to make all this possible. Right now we’re limited to selecting projects that test our limits and pique our interest; we are fantastically overworked! As we progress we hope to acquire another machine, possibly a rapid prototyper. Once that occurs we will have more resources and time to offer clients.

 

Image: This is a test run of the machine knocking out a translation of the sheep from Sheep Island. The block of foam towards the bottom is a reminder of where to start after we paused for the night.

Other than your blog, do you have images of your work you could share with us (to post)?

We have some high quality scans of our upcoming show on the Learning [Sim name in Second Life] campus. These images are snapshots of Second Life that have been digitally altered to allow a Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) mill to sculpt their contours. The result is a woodblock stamp for traditional ink printing. We present them as scans of those prints. They depict situations you will find everyday in Second Life from play to punishment. They question technology’s changing role in the conception of self.

Of course we noticed that you are using Blender to import .obj files. Why did you choose Blender? Any specific tools you find useful/easy to use?

Honestly Blender was our first pick because it is free. We quickly realized the scope of its power as a mesh editor, but Mike and I are vastly under-utilizing Blender’s capabilities.

Could you go over the details of how you import the data and what you do to clean the mesh?

OGLE captures screenshots of any open GL architecture as a .obj file. For some reason we had trouble getting Blender to recognize these files—sometimes they would import, and sometimes not. So we used Ctrl-View to open and re-save the file as a .obj. This satisfied Blender enough to open the file and edit the scene.

There are two steps to clean a mesh for milling. First, holes showing the interior of the mesh must be sealed. This insures the program that creates our tool-paths reads the mesh as a solid object. Second, any extraneous polygons need to be deleted. That’s it, pretty simple (and often tedious) work.

Image: On the left is a screen shot of Second Life. In the center is Blender’s rendering of the .obj file OGLE created from the previous scene. On the right is the end result.

How do you export the mesh from Blender to a lithograph file? I don’t see it in Blender as an export option. Is this a script you wrote or can it be downloaded from somewhere?

In our version (2.41) exporting as a .stl (Stereo Lithograph) is the forth option from the top of the export dialog.

*Editor’s note: Ah, so that’s what .stl can be used for!

Looks like they are off to a good start.  The milling process and technique can only get better, especially with Blender being used as part of the work!