polycarbonat, a laser and some bisphenol

if you ever wondered why we don't allow our users to use certain plastics with the lasercutters check what happens after a few sheets of "non toxic" polycarbonat.

Raplab Seminar-week FS13 announcement

Under the title "Homo Faber" the Raplab-Team, together with the students, will explore traditional woodworking techniques from the Victorian age. We follow the book "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker" first published in 1839. The book was part of a series of books under the title "Industrial Trade-Books" which where intended for young, at that time boys, who considered starting an apprenticeship as a Joiner or Cabinet Maker.

Seminar week - Cnc milling a slitdrum

This years seminar week, under the patronage of professor Schwartz and his chair for structural design, was all about rhino, the cnc machine and sound. the students where confronted with the challenge of manufacturing a slitdrum. We started our first day with a introduction of rhino, and Daniel Bachmann, our Rhino-Tutor, showed the Students some of the basic modeling techniques to get them started. At the second day, they got a lesson in music theory where they learned how to calculate basic intervals and how to construct scales that result in a meaningful pattern. equipped with the basics they went on to design their own slit drum made of common Fir and a Merbau (Kwila or Borneo Teak) top.

Jamin'

Listen to the sounds yourself and compare the structure of the tongues. It was very exiting to us to see the tonal quality of the drums develop during the assembly. The bare tops sounded quite dull and lifeless. Glued to the box, the whole drum became more resonant and an improved overtone spectrum, typical to the sound of a slit drum. Once we decoupled the bottom of the drums with felt from the tables, we once again noticed a dramatic change leading to the final sound of the drums.

The "Ensemble" in action

"Security"-lecture and workshop introduction for first year students

This years new students got a steep introduction to model building by the whole raplab-team. It started with an introduction lecture (45') about the art of model building and and various small topics that one should consider during the process (craftsmanship, measuring, scaling, history etc.) and ended with a comprehensive two hour hands on course in the wood workshop where every student got the opportunity to build his own wooden caliper.

In addition to the introduction every student got the book: basics modellbau, from alexander schilling a dust mask, ear and eye protection for free.

Slides from the lecture:

Pixar's OpenSubdiv

Pixar just open sourced their famous Catmull-Clark Subdivision Method created back in 1978 by Ed Catmull (Now President of Pixar Animation Studios) and Jim Clark (Founder of SGI and Netscape).
1998, Tony DeRose (Director of R&D at Pixar) added a method to define crease values on edges and vertices to allow hard edges on a smooth surface. This algorithm revolutionized the way of 3D modeling over the last decade, replacing NURBS.

The 1978 basic-method was freely available but the creasing and other methods were patented and only available through licensing. Instead of licensing major 3D Software companies produced their own solution to creasing. That was fine until now. Nowadays 3D-Data needs to be transferred between different 3D Packages, leading to massive incompatibilities when it comes to subdivision models and their creasing values. Artifacts occur and the only frustrating solution is to remodel the 3D-Data to match the host application.

With Siggraph 2012 Pixar released the whole Subdivision Code for free! This means all 3D-Software developers can now implement the code into their product and we may be able to move our assets between any of the actual 3D-packages.

A big thanks to Pixar for that!

Get the Source and more Infos here

Quote from the Readme at Github:

OpenSubdiv is a set of open source libraries that implement high performance subdivision surface (subdiv) evaluation on massively parallel CPU and GPU architectures. This codepath is optimized for drawing deforming subdivs with static topology at interactive framerates. The resulting limit surface matches Pixar’s Renderman to numerical precision.
OpenSubdiv is covered by the Microsoft Public License, and is free to use for commercial or non-commercial use. This is the same code that Pixar uses internally for animated film production. Our intent is to encourage high performance accurate subdiv drawing by giving away the "good stuff".
OpenSubdiv is entering open beta for SIGGRAPH 2012. Feel free to use it and let us know what you think.
For more details about OpenSubdiv, see Pixar Graphics Technologies.
Note that this beta code is live and will undergo significant churn as it approaches release. Expect that APIs will change as the code is continually improved.

ETHZ Disney Research Lab: Physical Face Cloning

Disney Research is working on a Physical Face Cloning pipeline to create ultra-realistic animatronic figures.

Together with Cornell University, the ETH Zürich Disney Research Lab captures Facial movement and  transfers the expressions on an animatronic face. The results are super realistic and seem to have bridged over the uncanny valley!

Escher for Real: 3D-Printed Impossibility

For some years already Gershon Elber from the Israel Technical University's Computer Science Faculty 3D-prints the simpler "impossible" forms of M.C.Escher. Now he created a special CAD software and printed out Escher's Relativity and Belvedere, how cool is that?

Get a glimpse of his work here