Category: Technical

Sine we first released our Tactile Universe add-ons two years ago Blender has undergone a significant update.  Blender 2.80 vastly improved the user interface and many other changes under the hood.  It took a bit of time, but today we have released V4.0 of our add-on that is fully compatible with the latest version of … Continue reading Tactile Universe add-on V4.0

As part of our STFC funding we made 20 kits of galaxy models.  Early on we realized that 3D printing all the galaxies would take over 20 weeks of non-stop printing, so we started looking into ways of mass producing our galaxies. To help with this process we partnered with Ted Turnbull who is part … Continue reading Scaling up production and working with resin

In a previous blog post I covered how to design and print holders for our galaxy models. This method works great if you only need to make a few holders, but as we need to make 20 of them, we decided to look into faster means of production. After talking with friends over at the … Continue reading Making boxes with a laser cutter

If you are making a large number of models, it is useful to have a way to neatly store and transport them.  To this end we have created a Blender plugin to create a holder for our models. holder.py is available on our GitHub page. EDIT (Feb 24, 2020): For Blender 2.80 or higher make … Continue reading 7. Making a Model Holder

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