Another useful 3D print for the Aquarium

My daughter has an aquarium in her bed room and some times when we are away we want the fish to get their food automatically, so we have a feeding machine. The problem was though to find a good spot for it. My wife asked me if I could come up with something so I though I could maybe make something on the 3D printer. First thing was so measure the thickness of the glass and start drawing a design in Cinema 4D.

Here is a close up of the design. It is a simple 15 x 15 cm plateau with an edge below with a 5mm gap so that it fits around the glass. I though it would take a couple of version to get an exact fit, but actually the first print was perfect right away :) My daughter chose this green color for the plastic. The whole print took about 20 hours on the Ultimaker 2. So again it was a nice feeling to be able to design and print something useful with the 3D printer :)

Two more Ultimaker 2 prints

 Here is one more print I did on the Ultimaker 2. Looks a bit like the Pixar lamp doesn't it :) I really love it. It was printed in separate parts that you could snap together. Well snap sounds easy but actually it took quite some force and even pliers to get it fitted in, but I think it looks great now. The whole thing is only 15 centimeters tall, so that should give you an idea of the detail. I had most trouble printing the foot. With the white material it just didn't look very good with infill on it. So eventually I decided to print everything without infill at all. So all parts are completely solid. The difference in quality compared to the K8200 is amazing I think.

Here is another print I did. For you who don't recognize it, it is a robot for the famous Terminator movies. I was printed with support that I had to break up and I didn't really clean it yet. Unfortunately it was not completely successful. The part of the head you don't see isn't there ;) After 50 hours of printing the whole thing fell over and I had to cancel the print. I still don't know what happened. I will have another go at it for sure. In the mean time I learned a lot again about working with the Ultimater 2, so I'm sure at some point I will have a full one, but I already love the detail on it.

Very Powerfull 3D Work Station

I promised to write something about the new 3D work station that I put in my new office. Even though I can use the render farm for animations it is nice to have a very powerful PC to work on the 3D projects. Primarily you need a very powerful video card to use the GPU for screen calculations. I installed a Asus Nvidea GTX 690 for this. But also CPU power is helpful since you do need to render out a single frame on high quality to see how it is going to look later on when you render the animation on the render farm. And you don't want to wait for ever. So in this machine is a special work station mother board from Asus called the Z9 PE-D8WS and on there are two Intel Xeon processors of the type 2796 V2. Actually the fastest processors out there. They actually have 12 CPU cores each so that makes 24 CPU cores in one machine!

I also installed 64 Gbytes of RAM and it boots its OS and loads its applications from a super fast OCZ Revo Drive 3. This is kind of a SSD drive on a dedicated PCIe card. The there is a OCZ Vertex 4 for the data I'm working on for the project and a Raid 1 set of two Sata disks for storage of larger files. The Asus mother board is very big, so I needed to buy a very large case to fit it all. And then to keep things a bit quiet I installed a lot of large cooling fans with a special fan control unit that you can see in the picture below. This really is a monster PC that makes working on the most complicated projects a breeze. For your idea this PC scores 2960 CB points in Cinebench where my normal Render Node Servers in the render farm score about 1000 CB.

The fan controller is also very nice. It has a touch screen where you can regulate the desired temperature for each fan. There are sensors attached to this controller on certain spots in the machine, like CPU's, GPU's, drives etc and it regulates the fan speeds to keep this temperatures. This results in a very quiet PC when it is idle and just a little bit of noise when it is at 100% CPU. I also have some software where I don't have licenses for the render farm yet, so for those applications I also use this machine to render frames for customers on RenderFarm.NL. I recently did a series of Vue renders on this machine for a customer. It is not a cheap machines as you can imagine but it does have the power of three normal PC's. I already had a lot of pleasure from it. I hope this post can help anyone else that need to spec a very nice 3D work station. But for animations do contact me for the use of the render farm so you can work on other projects on your work station during the rendering of your animation.

Our New Office Space

As some of you might know I resigned in 2012 as CEO from BIT BV, the company that I founded together with my business partner in 1996. Don't worry we didn't sell it, but I didn't like the job of being CEO any more. I like working with my hand more and that wasn't possible anymore in the company. I'm still connected closely but in the background. So in 2012 I started a new company and since then I've been very busy setting up some new services and have been working on several products.

In the beginning of the year we did a little renovation at home, mainly putting in a new floor. Since both myself and my wife work from home now we decided to build a little office at home. In the picture above you see my work space on the left and hers on the right. Here is a close-up of my workspace. It is mainly focussed on doing both maintenance of the Virtiso and the Render Farm hardware/cloud platforms and also on doing 3D design and animation stuff for Van Osenbruggen Productions. I can also work on my videos for here now. I'm currently working on new websites for Virtiso and the RenderFarm so more on that soon and also on what I do there. I know I haven't posted here in the while, but I will try do pick that up again.

Here is some of the input devices I use. On top (almost our of site) is a track pad, left a track ball in the middle a 3D mouse, then on the right my Oculus Rift and below a drawing pad. They all have their use in my work flow even though the Oculus is mainly for fun :). So this is where I spend a lot of my time lately. I also build a very special work station. I will do another post on the soon.

So I can hear some of your thinking. Did he stop making music? No I didn't! To be honest I can't wait to get back to that very soon, but I just had to start up all this new business too. That took a lot of time. Unfortunately as many of you know, you can't make a living from music any more especially the kind of music I make with Synth.nl. I will pick that up for sure soon. I plan some changes in the studio first that I will tell you about as well. OK enough on the office now. I just wanted to share with you what has been happening here lately.

3D Print for the Kids

I didn't use the 3D printer for a while since it actually broke down. I had some material stuck in the extruder and couldn't get it out. When I removed the print head I could push it out, but accidentally damaged the NTC resistor that measures the heads temperature, so I had to replace that as well. Well that is all done now. Another problem I had was that the material didn't stick well to the print bed. After reading and experimenting a lot I finally decided to stick blue 3M scotch tape to the bed and now it prints like a charm :)

But what to print then to test if it is working OK again. I decided it was time to print something for my kids. I have two daughters in the age of 11 and 13 so what to print for them. Well I did print a nice T-Rex puzzle for myself a while ago and back then I found some more of those so I started to look with them for something they would like. And we did find this very nice one. Here is a picture of all the parts and then look what you can make from that :)

A very nice butterfly. Actually it isn't as easy as it looks to put it together. Since the printer has some tolerance some parts don't with and you will have to use a knife to make the connections a but smoother and then still you need some force to put the parts together. The good side about this is that once it fits it won't fall apart easily. By now I have quite some colors of PLA print material on stock so they could choose their own colors.

As you might have guessed my oldest daughter wanted one in pink and the youngest in yellow. A nice project that took my mind of work for some time. I have been way too busy lately to be honest. Printing and building a butterfly like this is a whole day's work by the way. Of course you can do other things while printing, but still you have to keep an eye on the printer as well as somethings things go wrong. Here is a last picture of both of them together.

Biz2Be 3D Logo Animation

I made another 3D Logo Animation. This this for Biz2Be. It was animated in Cinema 4D and it was rendered in High Quality on RenderFarm.NL. The customer uses the logo as intro and outro of his videos that you can find on http://www.biz2be.nl.

Meet Tracy Ray at RenderFarm.NL

As you all know by now probably one of the new companies I'm setting up is a commercial Render Farm. This new company is called RenderFarm.NL and it has a new face. She is called Tracy Ray. Tracy is in charge of all our render cows that are at your immediate disposal. I'm still working hard on the new website but the render farm is already operational, so do contact me (or Tracy) if you have a deadline and need some frames rendered. We support a lot of software already and are always open for new things. Even custom setups are possible. If you know people that are in the media / content creation or 3D animation business then please point them to us. Our contact details are on the website at http://www.renderfarm.nl

Let us know when you have a render job. You can e-mail me at tracy@renderfarm.nl for a quote.

Makerbot Tractor 360 degrees animation

And here is a 360 degrees view of the 3D model of the Makerbot tractor as I promised. I hope it will help someone to do a better 3D print from this :)

Makerbot 3D Tractor Puzzle

Hi, I'm currently printing parts on my 3D printer for a tractor. The original design is my Makerbot, but I could not find any construction howto. Besides that I'm currently working on a 3D scene for my virtual render farm and I wanted a tractor in that scene as well and I though I would be fun to use the same one. So I started importing all the different parts from STL into Cinema 4D and layed them out and first of all gave them  some material to be able to identify them better.

Then I started building the thing together. I noticed right away that not everything is a tight fit by the way, but I guess a bit of glue can fix that on the plastic model eventually. For reference I used some pictures I found on the internet from other people that build it. Here is an in between render where I already assembled some sub components like the engine block, chassis, hood, and wheels. The big parts are quite logical, but there also are a lot of small parts where I really struggled where they should go.

In the end I even had 3 surplus parts. I really have no idea where they should go and everything looks alright to me :) In the picture you see the finished model. All in all it took me a Saturday evening to put it together. Printing the parts takes a lot longer, but at least now I know how much parts to print and also what colors and where they should go. I will make little 360 degree animation of the whole thing so other people might benefit from it. And if anyone does have a howto with clear instructions feel free to post the link here. OK back to work now :)

Datacenter Pyramid Animation

A little animation I made for a customer to show the management what happens with their ICT infrastructure if they don't put fire surpression in the power distribution are of their data center. The animation was made in Cinema 4D, the fire was done with Turbulence FD, I used a soft body dynamics for the rest. The Animation was rendered on the RenderFarm.NL render farm.

NewTek LightWave 1.6 now on RenderFarm.NL

From today RenderFarm.NL also supports NewTek's LightWave version 1.6. So If you use this 3D application and you need affordable render capacity for your 3D animations you can contact me on michel@renderfarm.nl. I also did some minor updates on the RenderFarm.nl website that you can find on http://www.renderfarm.nl

First Useful 3D print

Today I finished my first usefull 3D print. The machine you see on the left is our coffee machine. Once in a while it needs cleaning and then there is water coming from the two nozzles left and right. Since there is not much space and it is quite a lot of water coming out of it, my wife usually has to pay attention since she has to empty the stuff she used to put under there half way. But it always is a bit messy. So we came up with the idea to make custom made compartments to hold the water.

As you can see in the picture on the right this is quite a large object already for the printer. It also took about 20 hours to print each of them. I designed the whole thing in Cinema 4D by the way and then exported to STL format. It is really nice to be able to make something like this just from software I already know :) Yesterday we did the first cleaning cycle with them and it worked out really fine. So another project finished.

It might look easy by the way, but I can assure you that this project took a lot of time. I also had a misprint where the PLA on the role got tangled :( So after 15 hours of printing or so, I could start all over again. So far every time I walk away from a print, something goes wrong. So I now plan my prints when I'm at home the whole day. So yes... 3D printing is nice. But it is time consuming and you need to know what you are doing. I'm really looking in to a more professional printer now, to hopefully get better quality and less hassle. I'll keep you posted :)

Another 3D Print - Star Wars Tie Fighter

Last week suddenly I heard a noise and I saw the extruder of the 3D printer I build hanging on only one screw. I tried to fasten everything again, but I had no luck what so ever. So before I could do any more printing I had to take the whole extruder apart, fasten the screws a but more and put it back together. That was a little setback, but unfortunately it didn't end there. After that I had to recalibrate the head distance and I had no luck in that.

The material just didn't want to stick to the heated print bed anymore. I tried cleaning with alcohol, rubbing it a bit with sand paper like I did before, but no luck. Then I started looking on some forums for a solution and I found one. Painters tape! Very cheap stuff that you can just stick on the print bed and after that I printed like a charm. I guess by now you would have guessed from seeing the pictures of a print in progress.

The model I printed came from ThingiVerse and it is a tie fighter from Star Wars. I really like the look of that model. It consisted of three separate printable parts that you eventually have to glue together. But before I got to this point there was some more trouble. After the first print was finished, the material was stuck to the painters tape so well, that I couldn't get it off. I printed in PLA and that is quite fragile, so I could not use too much force since then the material would break.

So again I went to look for a solution and I found one. The tip was to use a spraycan with compressed air, put it up side down on purpose so that the stuff coming out is frozen. This cools the object to quickly that it shrinks a bit and pops loose. And guess what? It worked :) I will go and look now though for blue painters tape since they say this is less sticky. So that is worth the experiment. All in all the model is done and I really like it. But again I found out that printing on a DIY 3D printer is not so easy as it looks. Ah well most important thing. It still works. Up to the next project.

First 3D Printer Output

Last time I promised to show you the first thing I outputted on the Velleman K8200 3D Printer. Well here it is. It is actually kind of a puzzle that you have to put together. It was originally designed for laser cutters to be made of wood or metal, but someone transformed this into an STL and put it on ThingiVerse. This site is filled up with nice projects, but I decided this would be a nice first test. So here is a picture with all the finished parts.

And this is what it looks like when you put it all together. It is actually a Tyrannosaurus Rex model. I think it looks quite neat. I printed it in transparent PLA and in thick layers that turns out to be a bit white. It is made with 50% infill and the nice thing is when there is light on it you can see the honeycomb structure inside. I think it is quite cool. Well this was the first print as I promised. A very decorative and non functional make :)

And here is another picture of it. I probably should have taken it from the other side, but I didn't think of that ;)

I did print a lot of other stuff in the mean time, but nothing is quite finished yet. I'm still very busy with other stuff and don't get to printing too much unfortunately.

I will try to update you all soon on that, but first things first. Work is taking up a lot of time at the moment.

Autodesk 3D Studio Max now on RenderFarm.NL

I'm happy to announce that now also Autodesk 3D Studio Max is installed on the Render Farm. We installed versions 2014, 2013 and 2012. We also did an initial test with a customer, but unfortunately we are seeing some problems with path references. My own knowledge lies with Cinema 4D so we are looking for a solution at the moment. If you have experience with 3D Studio Max and Render Farms and can help us out, do let me know. I will give some premium time on the Render Farm in return. We also added some new servers. We have 114 dedicated CPU cores at your service and the Render Farm scores 18.360 Cinebench R15 points at the moment. We also just updated Blender to version 2.69. You can contact me on michel@renderfarm.nl if you are interested in rendering on the farm or have experience with 3D Studio Max and Render Farms.

Velleman K8200 3D Printer (Part 6)

I know it has been a while since I wrote on here and that some of you are waiting on the final part of this series about the Velleman K8200 kit. I have been very busy lately with my new company Virtiso BV and didn't have much time for anything actually. But today finally I found some time to catch up on here. First of all here is a picture of the finished printer doing its first test prints. As I wrote before though this didn't go as I planned.

On the picture on the right you can see what happened on my first test prints. I was quite puzzled and had no idea what to do next, since the manual ended here. I started reading a bit on several forums and started asking around. The first thing I learned (and it is in the manual now) that you really need to roughen up the print bed a bit with some sand paper. It is just to smooth as it comes. Secondly you really need to clean it with some alcohol. This has to be 70% the least, but more is better. This is because when you touch it with your fingers it will become greasy.

And then I think the hardest part was calibrating the print head Z distance. The head needs to be exactly 0,25 mm from the bed. And in every direction. So you need first to level the print bed with the screws below and then you need to turn a screw that touches a microswitch to calibrate it. I tried to do that on eyesight, but that really is impossible. You need a tool like you see in the picture on the left. I don't know what it is called in English though but it consists of small metalic blades that you can use to 'feel' the distance of the head to the bed. When you can put the 0.2 5mm blade just in between and you feel some friction it is OK. Then don't forget to securely fasten the calibration screw since it will come loose from vibration.

And then you need to calibrate the software settings as well depending on your material and print object. It took me about as long to calibrate the printer as it took me to build it. So do keep this in mind. Printing in 3D is not as easy as it looks at first sight. It takes time, skill and a lot of patience :) Then I had another problem that turned out to be the USB driver on windows. I finally swapped to a RaspBerry Pi running Octoprint and in the picture on the right is the first part that was finally printed successfully. What it is I'll show you in a later post ;) This concludes the building series. I hope to post some stuff that I printed over time on here. I'll keep you updated when I can.

Biz2Be 3D Logo and Under Construction Page

For a friend who is starting a new company I'm currently doing some 3D work. First of all another design company made a new logo for him in 2D. I got the vector file from him and we made some adjustments to the bottom text and then I made this 3D logo for him. I think it turned out quite nice. Then he asked me to make an 'under construction' page for him to put the logo online while he is working on his website. I though let's make something nice. I rigged the little character to take this position and added some nice contruction elements to make a complete 3D scene out of it. You can view the full version by clicking on the picture or visiting his website http://www.biz2be.nl (as long as it is not done yet). I hope you like it. And do contact me if you have a job like this :)

Blender on the Render Farm

Even though I'm a very happy Cinema 4D user, the first thing I bumped into when I tried to find customers for the Render Farm is that not everyone is using Cinema 4D of course. There are many 3D design applications out there. One of them is even completely free since it is open source and it is called Blender. You can download it and install it and start working with it right away. I was actually amazed how powerful it is. Anyway: last week I installed Blender on the Render Farm and I did some successful testing with it. So if you use Blender (or C4D) and you have a large animation to render give me a shout and maybe we can work something out. I'm sure I can render it much faster on the render farm than you can do yourself on your own PC. More information on Blender here: http://www.blender.org/

Installing C4D R15 on Render Farm

Yesterday I got a nice package in the mail. The new version of Maxon Cinema 4D R15. As you all know I have been busy with 3D animations for a while. This version really looks great again. They even promise render speed increases of up to 300%!! I can't wait for that. Rendering in high quality always takes to long. For that reason I have been building a render farm over the last years that finally is taking shape. I hope to make a commercial service out of this somewhere this year as well. I'm already talking to some potential customers. I will tell you more about the render farm very soon, but if you are interested in a lot of CPU's then don't hesitate to contact me already, since the render farm is already operational. OK back to installing this new version on a lot of servers.

Velleman K8200 3D Printer (Part 5)

Another very critical and not so easy part of building the K8200 3D printer is assembling the hot end. This is where is plastic eventually will be heated to 190 degrees C with PLA and even higher with ABS. To keep the temperature steady a tiny NTC has to be inserted in a very small whole in the heater. The wires are about as thin as a hair and you have to solder them to the thicker wire, put heat resistant tube around it and make sure none of the leads touch each other and don't touch the copper either.

If you make a mistake here or don't insert the NTC resistor properly in the whole your temperatures will be off and your prints will fail. You need a lot of patience here :) On the right is a picture of the whole hot end. It is actually up side down. Eventually the plastic flow from the little hole on top of the copper nozzle. This is the print head and it will be about 0,25 mm from the print bed. Another remark is in the manual that you need to tighten all of this very good to prevent leakage that will be unrepairable and will cost you a new hot end. So again. Patience and check and double check everything.

The it is time to install the control board and solder all the wires. Not a very exiting job but again you need patience and some soldering skills. The manual is quite extensive about which wire goes where and shows a lot of pictures. So if you follow along carefully you can't go wrong there. When you are finished you wrap everything up neatly with some tie raps and you can do some sanity checks with your multimeter to see if there is no short circuits anywhere.

And then you are done building, but not finished by far. The first step is calibrating the stepper motor voltages. You need a multimeter and a very small screw driver for this and again patience :) Then you test the switches with the multimeter and measure the NTC's. And then the famous smoke test. Hook up the power, watch the leds and see if nothing smokes. When that is done it is time for some actual testing from the software and seeing if all the motors run and if the calibration works. So far so good. I'm happy to say that everything was working for me the first time. But the story isn't over yet :) The hardest part turned out still to come. More on that soon.