#3-D printer

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

Here’s a sneak peek at the 3-D printer that we’ve been using for our children’s STEAM programs! Each printout takes several hours, so in between programs, we’re printing out the kids’ designs.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

And then … VOILA … a new design emerges!

We still have this printer for a few more months. Visit our website to see when we’ll be giving our next 3-D printing program for kids!

[ncfcatalyst]

Demystifying the Makerspace: Library resources and how to use them

A cloud of mystery looms over a certain corner of the Jane Bancroft Cook Library that houses one of the most versatile spaces on campus: the Makerspace. Libraries across the globe stand to lose patrons in the days of technological advances and innovative inventions that make research, reading and communicating easier. To better meet the needs of students, staff and faculty, university…

[popcornkwantum]

:D I love Nicky so much

I'll be making these into (handmade) stickers and will be giving them out for FREE at both the upcoming Elfia event and at Heroes Dutch Comic Con (summer edition)

I actually don't think anyone from the Netherlands follows me on here but uuuhh if you do plan on going to one/both events, keep an eye out for someone in a badly made Taylor cosplay and you will be granted with one of these bad bois >:)

[smile-files]

i thought it would be nice to share two projects i made in art class this semester!

title: angel of change

this one's a fun collage/sculpture about the positive and negative changes one can go through when starting college! featuring a nervous little peg person on the road, a surge of waves, and a biblically accurate pet rock angel smoking a cigarette

title: wing surfaces of morpho didius

and this is a sculpture of a morpho butterfly! with its ventral wing surfaces (the visible side of the wings) painted realistically, and with its dorsal wing surfaces (the hidden side of the wings) covered with messily-colored butterfly coloring book pages. the idea here is that my fascination with butterflies, despite being very scientific now, is still one imbued with naïveté, playfulness, and childlike wonder :)

[palaeotriakis]

just some sillies i made into stickers for myself :D

[finrays]

Hrrrrgh...

Eat...

[yupuffin]

The cosplay-making scene is kind of funny to me sometimes because a lot of times people will ask me questions like how I make props like weapons, hats or shoes or finish my seams and why I don't do them x established way and it's like. I would love to know where in my tiny apartment I have to share with two other people and a parrot you think I am going to keep a steamer and a serger and a heat gun and a 3-D printer and a stock of worbla and stuff to cobble shoes with idk and a fume hood (since it's not like I have an outside space to use toxic fumey glues, which is basically all of them other than hot glue) and so on and so forth when I'm already fortunate just to have enough space a sewing machine and a small stash of fabric. Oh, and I guess an iron as long as I keep the iron on a shelf and the ironing board folded against the wall.

[liebelesbe]

woe! 3D unicorn be upon ye

[elecman108]

It’s finally done. I’m... feeling a little emotional, honestly. All my D&D character references are now “recovered”, as in redrawn completely, from my broken SSD whose files were all lost.

I... I just want to sit back and put my head in my hands. [Cont’d]

This... It’s every character I have made for D&D since I started playing. The first two I designed - Miri Evenwood and Cecillia - down to the most recent two - Zarris and Joy - all together, all forms, all types, all everything, all at once. I’m just... This was so much work and effort.

When I lost the original file with all these guys in it, I thought that was it. Nothing. But I do post my art here and on Twitter, no? I saved what I could off here and there, and the quality of these guys was... bad. Like, really bad. Most of the pictures I downloaded looked like this:

Fuzzy, illegible, and most details lost. Some were better quality, but...

...the image compression of being uploaded to Tumblr or Twitter was... difficult to contend with. I did have some I shared on Discord, however, those were a little more to work from.

I had some sketches, linearts, in-progress images, and some poor-quality finished works. All out of order, all wildly differing in quality. I sat back and had to think, what could I even do here? My character references, all lost to an SSD that Windows Recovery corrupted the data off of. That was probably the end of the story.

But I am stubborn.

I started to redraw them. Why did I start with Ezra, Axel, and Blaze? I don’t know why, but I’ve held these three close to me. And then I started making the basic line art for each other character, either completely by scratch (see Verda here) or with a crunchy, fuzzy, off-my-twitter-or-tumblr reference to work from.

With each new character I drew the lines for, with each finished reference, I felt like the task ahead of me was monumental - impossible at times. Work got stressful, life got in the way, and whenever I had a few minutes to myself, I was putting character after character through the redux machine and redrawing them by hand.

Some stayed incomplete for a while. Some were started and finished within a... week, reluctantly. I spent a lot of time looking at what I’d done so far, and then back at the ones I had yet to finish or start. At a certain point, I felt like I had given myself a task that I would never complete - a problem I could never solve. Maybe I would’ve given up after a certain point.

But then I didn’t. I refused to give up. I made notes for myself, I reviewed old notes saved to my old phone that barely worked that told me which of my unsaved list I had later dropped or redone. I kept drawing these characters, and about at this time I realized something.

I had been making D&D characters for almost a decade. Some of these guys are from that time - Miri and Cecillia, namely - and some had been in-progress for years before I actually ended up using them - Blaze and Axel came to mind - and here they were. Again. After I had initially lost them.

This was something that gradually made me better at drawing. This was history - my own personal brain’s history, at least - and I was doing everything I could to ensure I kept it. Not only was I determined to have at least one single full-body reference of each character I could ever use in D&D, I remembered my original goal when I was drawing these guys.

One of each race and class combination. Of course, a silly goal, but it allowed my creativity to flow and make some genuinely cool characters. I would always look back on these guys and smile, and now I can do that again - and add more.

And the satisfaction of lining them all up in a colour order was so good.

--

So yeah, from October to December. So much work, and the payoff was absolutely worth the effort and time that went into it. Through every burnt-out evening, from days I spent stuck on the couch unable to move through the pain to days I spent here and there and back again. Through each hour worked at my job, to each our I worked at home and doodled these guys. They’re here again, and they’ll see me through.

And I encourage you to design your own characters. I use D&D as inspiration for these, but I have others, after all...

But at least these references are more stuck towards their names than their full outfits, fuck’s sake. These were my May-August project of recovering files so... This year’s been certainly interesting.

[jcmarchi]

Finding a sweet spot between radical and relevant

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/finding-a-sweet-spot-between-radical-and-relevant/

Finding a sweet spot between radical and relevant

While working as a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Architecture, Skylar Tibbits SM ’10 was also building art installations in galleries all over the world. Most of these installations featured complex structures created from algorithmically designed and computationally fabricated parts, building off Tibbits’ graduate work at the Institute.

Late one night in 2011 he was working with his team for hours — painstakingly riveting and bolting together thousands of tiny parts — to install a corridor-spanning work called VoltaDom at MIT for the Institute’s 150th anniversary celebration.

“There was a moment during the assembly when I realized this was the opposite of what I was interested in. We have elegant code for design and fabrication, but we didn’t have elegant code for construction. How can we promote things to build themselves? That is where the research agenda for my lab really came into being,” he says.

Tibbits, now a tenured associate professor of design research, co-directs the Self-Assembly Lab in the Department of Architecture, where he and his collaborators study self-organizing systems, programmable materials, and transformable structures that respond to their environments.

Play video

His research covers a diverse range of projects, including furniture that autonomously assembles from parts dropped into a water tank, rapid 3D printing with molten aluminum, and programmable textiles that sense temperature and automatically adjust to cool the body.

“If you were to ask someone on the street about self-assembly, they probably think of IKEA. But that is not what we mean. I am not the ‘self’ that is going to assemble something. Instead, the parts should build themselves,” he says.

Creative foundations

As a child growing up near Philadelphia, the hands-on Tibbits did like to build things manually. He took a keen interest in art and design, inspired by his aunt and uncle who were both professional artists, and his grandfather, who worked as an architect.

Tibbits decided to study architecture at Philadelphia University (now called Thomas Jefferson University) and chose the institution based on his grandfather’s advice to pick a college that was strong in design.

“At that time, I didn’t really know what that meant,” he recalls, but it was good advice. Being able to think like a designer helped form his career trajectory and continues to fuel the work he and his collaborators do in the Self-Assembly Lab.

While he was studying architecture, the digitization boom was changing many aspects of the field. Initially he and his classmates were drafting by hand, but software and digital fabrication equipment soon overtook traditional methods.

Wanting to get ahead of the curve, Tibbits taught himself to code. He used equipment in a sign shop owned by the father of classmate Jared Laucks (who is now a research scientist and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab) to digitally fabricate objects before their school had the necessary machines.

Looking to further his education, Tibbits decided to pursue graduate studies at MIT because he wanted to learn computation from full-time computer scientists rather than architects teaching digital tools.

“I wanted to learn a different discipline and really enter a different world. That is what brought me to MIT, and I never left,” he says.

Tibbits earned dual master’s degrees in computer science and design and computation, delving deeper the theory of computation and the question of what it means to compute. He became interested in the challenge of embedding information into our everyday world.

One of his most influential experiences as a graduate student was a series of projects he worked on in the Center for Bits and Atoms that involved building reconfigurable robots.

“I wanted to figure out how to program materials to change shape, change properties, or assemble themselves,” he says.

He was pondering these questions as he graduated from MIT and joined the Institute as a lecturer, teaching studios and labs in the Department of Architecture. Eventually, he decided to become a research scientist so he could run a lab of his own.

“I had some prior experience in architectural practice, but I was really fascinated by what I was doing at MIT. It seemed like there were a million things I wanted to work on, so staying here to teach and do research was the perfect opportunity,” he says.

Launching a lab

As he was forming the Self-Assembly Lab, Tibbits had a chance meeting with someone wearing a Stratasys t-shirt at Flour Bakery and Café, near campus. (Stratasys is a manufacturer of 3D printers.)

A lightbulb went off in his head.

“I asked them, why can’t I print a material that behaves like a robot and just walks off the machine? Why can’t I print robots without adding electronics or motors or wires or mechanisms?” he says.

That idea gave rise to one of his lab’s earliest projects: 4D printing. The process involves using a multimaterial 3D printer to print objects designed to sense, actuate, and transform themselves over time.

To accomplish this, Tibbits and his team link material properties with a certain activation energy. For instance, moisture will transform cellulose, and temperature will activate polymers. The researchers fabricate materials into certain geometries so they can leverage these activation energies to transform the material in predictable and precise ways.

“It is almost like making everything a ‘smart’ material,” he says.

The lab’s initial 4D printing work has evolved to include different materials, such as textiles, and has led the team to invent new printing processes, such as rapid liquid printing and liquid metal printing.

They have used 4D printing in many applications, often working with industry partners. For instance, they collaborated with Airbus to develop thin blades that can fold and curl themselves to control the airflow to an airplane’s engine.

On an even greater scale, the team also embarked on a multiyear project in 2015 with the organization Invena in the Maldives to leverage self-assembly to “grow” small islands and rebuild beaches, which could help protect this archipelago from rising seas.

To do this, they fabricate submersible devices that, based on their geometry and the natural forces of the ocean like wave energy and tides, promote the accumulation of sand in specific areas to become sand bars.

They have now created nine field installations in the Maldives, the largest of which measures approximately 60 square meters. The end goal is to promote the self-organization of sand into protective barriers against sea level rise, rebuild beaches to fight erosion, and eliminate the need to dredge for land reclamation.

They are now working on similar projects in Iceland with J. Jih, associate professor of the practice in architectural design at MIT, looking at mountain erosion and volcanic lava flows, and Tibbits foresees many potential applications for self-assembly in natural environments.

“There are almost an unlimited number of places, and an unlimited number of forces that we could harness to tackle big, important problems, whether it is beach erosion or protecting communities from volcanoes,” he says.

Blending the radical and the relevant

Self-organizing sand bars are a prime example of a project that combines a radical idea with a relevant application, Tibbits says. He strives to find projects that strike such a balance and don’t only push boundaries without solving a real-world problem.

Working with brilliant and passionate researchers in the Self-Assembly Lab helps Tibbits stay inspired and creative as they launch new projects aimed at tackling big problems.

He feels especially passionate about his role as a teacher and mentor. In addition to teaching three or four courses each year, he directs the undergraduate design program at MIT.

Any MIT student can choose to major or minor in design, and the program focuses on many aspects and types of design to give students a broad foundation they can apply in their future careers.

“I am passionate about creating polymath designers at MIT who can apply design to any other discipline, and vice-versa. I think my lab is the ethos of that, where we take creative approaches and apply them to research, and where we apply new principles from different disciplines to create new forms of design,” he says.

Outside the lab and classroom, Tibbits often finds inspiration by spending time on the water. He lives at the beach on the North Shore of Massachusetts and is a surfer, a hobby he had dabbled in during his youth, but which really took hold after he moved to the Bay State for graduate school.

“It is such an amazing sport to keep you in tune with the forces of the ocean. You can’t control the environment, so to ride a wave you have to find a way to harness it,” he says.

[brainfuzz]

Sometimes smaller libraries are part of a large library system across a couple of counties and your card is good at the big city library and many other ones too. Other times, you may be able to join a library that is not part of a system, and not part of your town, but you can still join because the town is part of your school district and is partially funded by school taxes.

[sillybeanies]

how to make your own beanie buddy!!

first: sacrifice a beanie D: this was a damaged and worn zip the cat. farewell sweet prince. thanks for your service. anyway take that beanie to bits

iron the pieces and trace them to make a pattern (make notes about how to reassemble NOW before you forget!)

Ask your sister to use her work printer to blow up the pattern from A5 to A3! thats four times bigger!!

get some plushy fabric from the craft store and get tracing and cutting (using medical scissors from that surgery you had four years ago)

SEW THAT BABY TOGETHER and then pick apart the head because you messed up AND THEN SEW IT BACK TOGETHER PROPERLY!!

make a little face :3 eyes, nose and whiskers!!

fill that beast with BEANS using your sister's hamilton shotglass (and some fluff for the head and body)

sew her up.... and take some photos!!

optional step: repeat the process to make some siblings!

[cupcakeslushie]

Febuwhump Day 9: Bees “Human” Weapon

“Weapon? I have a whole arsenal now!”

I figured I would continue this prompt! Next

Poor Jace is off camera peeing his pants. Like Kendra wasn’t scary enough before she brainwashed a 3-D printer for any weapon imaginable.

[krisp-xyz]

Was experimenting with halftone effects after watching this video and it almost has spiderverse vibes honestly. I actually learned some neat things about why printers use CMYK instead of just CMY so I thought I'd share !!

So in our optimal little computer space, Cyan (0,255,255), Magenta (255,0,255) and Yellow (255,255,0) all multiplied together gives us a perfect black (0,0,0) Awesome! The issue is that ink colors irl arent exactly perfect like this, and color is a bit more complicated irl compared to how computers represent it, so they aren't the greatest at combining into black if they aren't those perfect CMY values:

Left: CMY

Right: CMYK

(thats not even black, its a dark blue in the original image but dark colors just look so much richer)

An important step to make sure you arent doubling up on the black values though is to divide the image by it's own "value" (the max of all 3 color channels) that way the value is equal to 1 everywhere, and you're letting the black ink take care of the value on its own.

Left: CMY (normalized value)

Middle: K (black)

Right: Combined

Now obviously the grids of dots cant be aligned perfectly with each other because you'd just get a bunch of black dots in unwanted areas, but if the grids are misaligned, then some dots become more prominent than others which tints the whole image. This was an issue because older printing methods didn't have great accuracy and these grids were often misaligned.

The solution was to rotate these grids such that they can move around freely while getting rid of that tint effect if they aren't perfectly aligned :D

(I have no idea how they came up with these angles but that might be something to look into in the future who knows)

SPEAKING OF MISALIGNMENT

I wanted to implement that in my own filter to get some cool effects, and I discovered another reason CMYK is better than CMY for lots of stuff !!

With CMY, you're relying on the combination of 3 color channels to make the color black. This means if you have thin lines or just details in general, misalignment can make those details very fuzzy. Since CMYK uses a single color of ink to handle value, it reduces color fringing and improves clarity a lot even if you have the exact same misalignment as CMY!

Left: CMY

Right: You guessed it! CMYK

(yes these comparisons have the exact same color misalignment, the only difference is using a fourth ink color for black)

ANYWAY I just thought there was a lot of cool information in this tiny little day project, I also just think it looks really neat and wanted to share what I learned :3c

EDITING BECAUSE THERE'S ONE MORE THING I WANTED TO ADD

So, I talked about how to get K in addition to CMY instead of just CMY, but how exactly do you separate CMY from an image in the first place?

Well, CMY is a subtractive color space, meaning the "absence of color" is white, compared to RGB where it's black. This makes sense because ofc ink is printed on white paper. You can use dot product to get the "similarity" between two vectors, and this can be used to separate RGB actually! Using the dot product of a color and red (255,0,0) will give you just the red values of the image. This is cool though because if we get the dot product of our image and the color cyan (0,255,255), we can get the cyan values from our image too! If we first divide our colors by their value to separate the value from them, then separate CMY using those dot product values, and using K for our final black color value, our individual color passes end up looking like this:

While it's called a "subtractive" color space, I find it more intuitive to treat white as the absence of color here, and then multiply all these passes together. It makes it much easier to understand how the colors are combined imo. Notice how cyan is the opposite of red: (255,0,0) vs (0,255,255) and magenta and yellow are the opposites of green and blue respectively! This means you can actually kinda get away with separating the RGB values and just inverting some stuff to optimize this, but this example is much more intuitive and readable so I won't go too deep into that. THANKS FOR READING I know it's a very long post but I hope people find it interesting! I try my best to explain things in a clear and concise way :3

oh thank you I realized I should probably add an eyestrain tag

[finrays]

The thing about having accidentally brutalized the end of your face with the corner of an open door is that… if your nose isn’t outright broken? It doesn’t hurt unless you touch it.

Which has led to me absently going to clip my hairclip to it several times today, as I am wont to do when I’m not paying attention, and bringing myself to a SCREECHING halt at the last minute like “Wait a minute…”

[theelvishfiddler]

I just wanna say, I would gladly buy any of your tmnt comics if you ever choose to print them somehow!! Your art is such a big inspiration for me, and I hope I can get to your level some day 💪😎!!

Oh, speaking of printed comics :3

I ordered a small test batch from a local printer! It won't be available for sale online, not for a while, but I'll have copies for sale at Ottawa Comic Con in like... just over a week from now :D

Also, that is incredibly cool to hear, thank you! I always view my work as "learning in progress", but I'm always happy to hear my work has inspired others (〃´ω`〃) i wish you lots of learning and fun on your journey!