It's here! It's here!
About six weeks ago, I designed a mug using Blender. Well, okay -- the end result is a sake cup. Anyway, I wanted to make something for my and Mark's tenth anniversary.
First I used Inkscape to make a shape that I could virtually spin into a mug. I knew from past experience that when I tried to make objects in Blender with medium-complex topology that I got a lot of weird edges and orphan vertices and mesh faces. Also, it's sometimes hard to know how thick everything is in Blender and easier to start out with a known proportion in Inkscape.
Once I had a shape I thought I could work with, I went into Blender.
I used Blender's spin function as a kind of lathe to make a mug and then I used some Boolean Nots to cut oval wholes in the side. (I'm cutting out the parts where I goofed up and made things that didn't work.)
Then I went to the Shapeways web site and uploaded the build... and I discovered that ceramic materials are, um, kind of expensive (but not as expensive as bronze, steel or gold). Ceramics are the only food-grade material they offer.
Then I waited. And waited. And waited.
When Shapeways told me the build was ready, I tracked the shipment.
When I got the package, it felt kind of light.
But I was excited! There was a lot of packaging. I was glad that the ceramic mug was so well protected.
There were about three layers of bubble wrap. Getting smaller; the reality of how big six centemeters is began to sink in.
And TADA! The finished product in white. This one's for Mark. I'm getting a black one, which --although identical -- was harder to print and has been delayed.
I'm psyched that this came out so robustly, and yeah, it holds a tablespoon of liquid. I'd envisioned sipping hot cocoa or maybe sake (if I drank sake) from it, but I'm pretty sure we're the proud owners of a very artistic medicine cup.
I finally got a moment to set up the camera and the 3-D printed mugs. As promised, here's some photos.
I tried drinking out of one--or rather, pouring into one--and it's easy to splash things all over. They hold a tablespoon of liquid.
Talking with E. S., and she added absinth to the list of things one could drink out of these.
I'm pleased with the way that they turned out; the end product is very close to what I designed, so much so that I can see that I could have easily added more faces and vertexes to the design and the print would have come out more like a cylinder and less prism-like.
