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When slicing our models for printing we use Simplify3D, but most of the settings we talk about will be available in any slicing software. Orientation of the model on the print bed With STL files in hand it is now time to print you models.  The first thing you have to do is make sure … Continue reading 6. How to slice the models and print them

If you have a large number of name plates to make, it is convenient to make the on the command line rather than using the Blender UI. This process is very similar to process introduced in the making models on the command line blog post. EDIT (Feb 24, 2020): For Blender 2.80 or higher make … Continue reading 5. How to make name plates on the command line

The next step of the model making process is creating printable name plates for each model.  We have created another custom blender plugin to help with the process, name_plate.py available from our GitHub page. EDIT (Feb 24, 2020): For Blender 2.80 or higher make sure to use v4.0 or higher of the plugin.  New features … Continue reading 4. How to make name plates

With the Emboss Plane plugin introduced in the previous post we used the Blender user interface (UI) to create our 3D printable models.  But if you need to make a large number of models, slight variations on a single model, or (in the case of Tactile Universe) both, this process can be slow and tedious.  … Continue reading 3. How to make models on the command line

All of our models are created using Blender, an open source 3D modeling tool, using a custom Emboss Plane plugin.  For those familiar with the Blender interface here are step-by-step instructions for making your own models. EDIT (Feb 24, 2020): For Blender 2.80 or higher make sure to use v4.0 or higher of the plugin.  … Continue reading 2. How to make your own models

All of the modeling software written for the Tactile Universe makes used of Blender, an open source 3D modeling and rendering program.  In this post we will be going over how to set up Blender for the use of our software.  For the most part I will not be covering how to navigate/use the user … Continue reading 1. How to get started with Blender

For all of our models we start with astronomical data take from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.  These data are transformed from their original file format (.fits) into something a bit more user friendly (.png).  During this conversion process we also apply a "stretch" to the data so the faintest features (e.g. spiral arms) and … Continue reading How our models are made