The most prominent 3d printing event in Eastern Europe is coming!

Additive manufacturing and 3d printing is an amazing technology with unrivaled capabilities. There is no need to provide anything less than the unvarnished truth. When additive manufacturing’s advantages are wanted and needed, the facts will not dissuade potential users. Yes, it may lead to specific technologies being eliminated from consideration, but that is for the best for everyone involved. If you are interested in 3D printing, come and join the Budapest 3D Printing Days 2014 to get some really close experiences about this fascinating technology.

Whether you just want to see a real 3D printer in action for the first time or share your success with an advanced application, the best way to experience this technology is in person. In the company of engineers, designers and 3D printing experts around the globe, you’ll find out how to make the most of additive manufacturing in your scene.

When starting with this article, I was wondering about the 3D printing bubble – the theory surrounding the exponential rise in popularity the technology has seen in recent years, in particular the saturation of the desktop 3d printer market – is becoming a victim of its own success. Because the realm of 3d printing is no longer consigned to the underground-hacker-maker RepRap 3D printer community and/or industrial powers of this world, and because everybody from Barack Obama, Jay Leno to that chap from Made In Chelsea seem to have one, is 3d printing loosing it’s ‘coolness’?

If you want to get a bigger view from the exponentially growing scene, you should visit us at Budapest 3D Printing Days in June (check out the program), where you can see all the applications and innovations of this mysterious brand new domestic home manufacturing system. The organizers have developed a special program for professionals who want to learn and/or want to start with 3D printing, but don’t know where to start,  as the applications for this technology are so broad. The event will showcase the countless possibilities of 3D printing technology and gives a preview of where it is headed in the near future.

3D printing technology has advanced greatly in the past couple of years — it’s now used to create body parts, robots, jewelry, and houses. In June at the Budapest 3D Printing Days, vendors will showcase their creations, ranging from art and human body part reproductions, to life-size industrial prototypes, wearable art and fashion at the Design Terminal in Budapest.

3d printed generative bracelet by parametric | art

GigamaX3D and parametric | art will be partnering with Design Terminal’s Budapest 3D Printing Days (the most prominent 3D printing event in Eastern-Europe) with a short-but-sweet conference session that continues our mission to inspire people to design and make – with a little help from generative 3d design and open-source affordable 3d printing.

The event will see presentations from many different users in the form of: Varinex’s György Falk, György Simó from Freedee, David Lakatos from Formlabs, David Pap from Fablab Budapest and Peter Varo from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest and Peter Szabo (me) from parametric | art and GigamaX 3D Printing Technology.

In addition to the presentations and workshops, visitors to this year’s Budapest 3D Printing Days will be able to experience the various applications of the 3D Printing technologies, from industrial to commercial and domestic use, while showcasing fresh innovations from the region.

GigamaX 3D Printing
http://gigamax3d.com

GigmaX3D are specialists in desktop 3D printing with a wide range of open-source affordable 3D printers, FDM machines for the consumer and prosumer user community, including custom built FDM 3d printers for special applications. They also carry premium quality 3d printer filaments in a wide range of thermoplastics, including special materials like conductive ABS or luminous glow-in-the-dark plastics. In action at the show will be RepRap 3d printers, Flashforge machines, colorful 3d filaments, 3d scanning and showcasing 3d printed design objects. New to the line-up is the professional 3d printer line of Leapfrog, which are dual-head, multi-material desktop 3d printers with the largest build volume on the market that is capable of printing in PLA and ABS but also Laywood, Laybrick, HIPS or Nylon – and can use dissolvable PVA 3d printer support material. 

The small design studio, parametric | art will showcase some of its most unique designs including generative 3d printed jewelry, organic 3d printed lampshades, parametric geometrical 3d printed objects all made with affordable (and sometimes modded or hacked) desktop 3d printers using special materials like wood or sandstone. At heir booth at the Budapest 3D Printing Days they will wowing visitors with live demonstrations of their latest projects including generative 3d modeling with free and open-source tools like Grasshopper and Meshlab, and showcasing the 3d printing capabilities of custom built affordable desktop 3d printers. 

The workshops and seminars are free with a registration and open to show visitors how 3D printing works, with a live demonstration so exhibition visitors can experience it first-hand. Technicians from parametric | art and GigamaX3D will produce various objects and projects for visitors to pick up and assemble. The parametric | art booth will also have a gallery space where products made during the exhibition will be displayed. 

There are also opportunities to find out how the boundaries between designer, manufacturer and consumer are disappearing, with a growing movement of ‘hacktivists’, who share and download digital designs online so they can be customized for new uses.

Several workshops and seminars will give you a broad insight in the 3D printing market. You can attend one, but you can attend them all as well. GigamaX3D will do a seminar about open-source 3d printing solutions, you know, the movement which started with Adrian Bowyer’s RepRap 3d printer machine and is the first successful open-source and open-hardware project on the globe. If you want to create your own digital 3d designs for 3d printing, you should attend at the workshop by parametric | art, where you can learn basic 3d modeling tips and tricks and get an insight of generative and parametric 3d modeling techniques.

 

© photo by: Federico Gaudino

The event is divided into three thematic days. The lectures and conferences will cover the past, present, and future of 3D printing presented in text, image, and video. The best way to understand 3D printing is to see it in action. If you want to meet us, create something unique with the help of our designers and technician, or simply just want to buy an affordable desktop 3d printer or some special plastic filaments for you 3d printing machine, visit us at Design Terminal during the Budapest 3D Printing Days from 5-7 June! Peace;)

3D printed generative jewellery with affordable desktop FDM printers

I remember that it wasn’t a long time ago that 3D printing was a little-known term of the high-tech industry. And now, today it is a household name and an accepted technology entering its next major development phase. Right now, we can see 3D printing and all the hybrid additive manufacturing solutions for production taking off and we believe will fundamentally change the world of manufacturing.

http://gigamax3d.com

In the last couple of years, the global media has given 3d printers a fair amount of attention and the industry now has great expectations placed on it. Perhaps the greatest asset of 3D printing is that it is an enabler . for both corporations and individuals. In fact, 3D printers is being used in three types of manufacturing and fabrication processes: personal manufacturing, augmented manufacturing and alternative manufacturing.

http://parametric-art.com

The oversimplification of 3D printing in the media and in conversations does the job of grabbing attention and drawing focus to the highlights of this fabrication process’ capabilities. That big picture has involved more and more people and attracted more interest in 3D printing than ever before. But of course, for an average customer, the details are missing. Without them, you can make poor decisions and you may conclude that 3D printing isn’t quite right for you. But you might know that the devils is in the details, and as the idiom indicates, getting to them may be a challenge for you.

http://parametric-art.com

The jewelry industry already understood the importance of harnessing the power of 3D technologies and additive manufacturing for the benefit of the industry in general – and training the next generation of jewelry designers. Parametric design processes like computational algorithms and data based design are the new tools for young designers, and the digital design combined with fully digital fabrication allows them to create some really amazing pieces using a CAD software or only coding.

generative lampshade designed by parametric | art 3d printed by GigamaX3D on a Leapfrog Creatr Dual extruder 3D printer

There are some breathtaking projects around, you have to check out Nervous Systems Kinematics Home app to create custom generative jewellery pieces which can be downloaded and 3d printed on your personal 3d printer at home. Of course, you’ll need a desktop 3D printer with a resolution of 50-100 micron to be able to make high quality prints, nobody wants to wear something barbed. Post processing might be necessary, ABS prints can be smoothed in acetone vapour to get a shiny finish (fine details and contours often disappear during the smoothing process).

http://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/kinematicsHome/

When it comes to getting the best out of 3D software and a desktop 3D printer, we can keep in mind that this technology is still a complementary tool, it supports and enhances traditional techniques (like lost-wax casting for example), not replacing them.  It’s a technology that gives the jeweler a new set of tools (both for design and fabrication), but it’s not a replacement for traditional skills. When we are talking to a designer and they want to design a conventional wedding ring, they would not need to take advantage of the things 3D printing offers because on many cases, traditional manufacturing techniques are better placed to do so. According to this, we can say that a 3D printer won’t put a traditional jeweler out of his job. The whole new process of 3D printing only saves designers from having to model the initial part of the design from scratch.

designed with Nervous System’s Kinematics Home App 3D Printed with pink and black PLA by parametric | art

designed with Nervous System’s Kinematics Home App 3D Printed with Laybrick (sandstone) by parametric | art

It is a really nice idea for students of for those trying out the technology, to push the technical boundaries of jewelry design and manufacturing with new digital tools as a pattern language. Fashion design, industrial design, architecture and jewelry already adopted the parametric design language which allows the designer to generate a huge amount of variations and iterations for a defined situation depending on fitness values and genetic algorithms. There are some open-source tools for generative design, which makes this game much more fun!

gyroid pendant by parametric | art

A dear friend of mine has designed the generative 3d printed jewelry pieces shown in the pictures I’ve inserted, I think they all look really unique, and they all came out from an affordable desktop FDM 3D printer. Most of them are 3D printed on a Leapfrog Creatr Dual extrusion 3D printer, some of them have been printed on a RepRap Huxley or the Velleman K8200 3D printer. In some cases, he has made some test prints on a Makerbot Replicator2 as well. I bet you’ll like all the stuff of the parametric | art 3d printed generative jewelry collection, for some design, there are already uploaded design files (.stl) on Thingiverse, so you only have to download and scale it, and then 3D print it!

‘chiselled’ bracelet by parametric | art

‘gyroid’ bracelet by parametric | art (rendering)

‘gyroid’ bracelet by parametric | art (3dprinted)

The illustrated 3d printed jewelry pieces are great examples for the quality which can be reached with a well-calibrated 3D printer and using premium quality 3D printer filaments. For the chiseled details and overhangs, you’d better print these kind of objects with high resolution (100 micron or finer) and use water-soluble PVA 3D print support material to avoid the trouble while removing supports manually.

‘vorocuff’ bracelet by parametric | art

If you want to design and 3d print your own generative 3d printed jewelry (for example like the voronoi bracelets on the picture above), you don’t need to buy any expensive stuff. You don’t need a professional CAD software which are really expensive, there are plenty of open-source and free tools which you can use as well. Just like I described in a former blog post about 3d modeling for 3d printing, you can use Meshlab, Grasshopper for Rhino and Meshmixer for the modeling work and Netfabb or similar software for optimizing and repairing you meshes before generating the g-code. If you want to learn this stuff, there are some really nice workshops offered by Gigamax 3D printing technology.

DIY 3D printer workshop
GigamaX3D x parametric | art

Actually a dear friend of mine runs gigamax3d.com and GigamaX3D facebook page.
They are the official european distributors of ESUN filaments and Velleman 3D printers. They sell nice quality ABS/PLA/HIPS/PVA 3d printing filaments with 1.75 and 3 mm diameters in 1 kg spools in 16 vibrant colors, which I’ve already tested on my Replicator2 and they are all good (I’ve had some serious troubles with 3d printer filament diameter issues before).

3d printed with purple PLA filament
http://goo.gl/eHuKrM

They also carry consumer and prosumer desktop 3D printers like the Leapfrog Creatr or the Tricolor Mendel RepRap model and also offer print on demand services and training/education workshops. A lot of RepRap parts and electronics are available on stock as well. Gigamax 3D printing workshops offer an impressive scope of standalone desktop 3D printing technology, the Leapfrog Creatr dual extruder model, tricolor Mendel, K8200, Reprap Huxley to name just some of the best ticket items being put to use and build by this busy little center.

GigamaX 3D Printing
http://gigamax3d.com