Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

Makeprintable fixes files for 3D Printing, offers Blender plugin

0

If you have ever tried to 3D print a model, you may have discovered that this process not as easy as you might think. There are many 'design rules' to follow: objects need to be 'watertight', they need to have a certain minimum wall thickness, some printers cannot print loose parts... In short, if you turn a digital design into something physical, the rules of the physical world kick in (surprise!).

Especially if you download a model from a generic, non 3D-printing repository, you'll find that it can be quite hard to get your models to print.

It looks like this may become a bit easier with MakePrintable, a new web service that aims to simplify this process. The service just entered a public beta and it caught my eye as they offered a Blender plugin as one of their first integrations.

I talked to Michael Makdah from MakePrintable to learn a bit more about it.

Can you tell me a bit about the company and the team? Where are you guys based?

Our Journey started in Amman Jordan, until we joined the Alchimest accelerator and moved our base to San Francisco, were we get ventured backed by Alsop Louie, Dolby, and DFJ Athena.

We are MXD3D, as it is the mother company, MakePrintable is one of MXD3D’s products. We have another product brewing in the kitchen called GamePrint.

What is your business model will MakePrintable be a free service?

MakePrintable is fermium service, We are looking into offering more functionality, and features for a subscription or per fix basis.

Do you have an API so other services can integrate too?

Yes, we do!

What made you decide to select Blender as one of the first 3D platforms to support?

Blender is everyone’s favorite design tool! We love using it with our designs, and see the value in it.

Did you develop the Blender add-on in-house, or did you hire a developer? Can you tell a bit about that?

We do all our engineering internally. We have a team of engineers who are very capable of delivery. A large number of our engineering team are founders of an Open Source association in Jordan.

It seems like the Blender add-on will upload the model to the server and process it, but not automatically download it back into Blender when it's done. Any plans for this?

After we are done with our beta, and launch V1 of MakePrintable, we are planning to integrate with blender in a two-way integration so content will be directly reflected back inside of blender.

After fixing a full colour texture-mapped model, all colour information was lost. Will you be supporting full colour prints?

We have it on our short-term plan and will be released during our beta.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×