We worked with Birch Aquarium and Scripps’ Sandin Lab to create a prostetic shell piece for a turtle in need. She came in to Birch partially paralyzed with a big gap in her shell. We were able to use photoscan […]

Sketchfab allows us to embed 360 photo viewers in browser now. All we have to do is make a sphere, apply the panorama as a texture, and move the camera inside of it. These photos comes from the CaveCam collection now hosted on the Geisel Library Digital Collections site.

There’s even a few templates which make the process SUPER…[Read more]

This was an old project from October 2015. We were working with a startup to try turning sonograms into 3D printable models. The process was pretty simple, import the photo into Photoshop, and create a depth map in 3D settings. Then you adjust the z height until the super high peaks look to be about the right height.

Unfortunately it was very…[Read more]

We’re working with 3D point clouds, combining them, colorizing them, and formatting them to maximize their portability. This 2014 lidar scan contains almost 40 million points. We used a program called CloudCompare to combine 20 data sets into one continuous model, and trimmed away the duplicate points and errors.

Placed on sketchfab we’re…[Read more]

Microfluidics deals with the behaviour, precise control and manipulation of fluids that are geometrically constrained to a small, typically sub-millimeter, scale. (wikipedia)

You may need to mix very small amounts of fluids at precise ratios, and one way to do this is to embed tiny paths and chambers within solid pieces of plastic.

We’ve…[Read more]

You can spend hours sanding and polishing clear PLA 3D prints and never get to a real transparent finish. We’ve started experimenting with a product called XTC-3D, a resin which is just viscous enough to fill all […]

We recently purchased an Asus Zenfone which offers IR emitters and sensors as a means to scan and track the real world. There are some apps that allow you to do real time scanning. Each of these point clouds took about 2 minutes to make. I’ve still got a lot of tweaking to do to see how good I can make them, but I think these kinds of scans might…[Read more]

Jorenne is learning to sculpt with meshmixer, it’s a fun workflow.  Like digital clay. It’s definitely not as powerful as Maya or Blender, but it’s a hundred times more accessible.We chose to try recreating UCSD’s favorite derpybird. We 3D printed with a wood blend filament and painted it up with sharpie oil based paint pens (from the book…[Read more]

UC San Diego is known for the Stuart Collection, one of which is Do Ho Suh’s Fallen Star on top of the Jacob’s Engineering Building. We created a 3D model of this sculpture by drafting in Autodesk Inventor and printing it out on the Ultimaker 2.

Veiw the 3D model here…[Read more]

Edgar’s been training up with 3DS. Inspired by the UCSD shuttles and dumb transformers movies we decided to try out this concept.

Here’s the model on sketchfab:

The Digital Media Lab is located in Geisel Library, 2nd Floor East. We offer free 3D printing and advanced media consultations for all UCSD…[Read more]

We’ve spent a lot of time modeling Geisel. We used campus floor plans, laser measurements, and Autodesk Inventor to build it.

It’s an important symbol for the campus and for La Jolla, people seem really excited about it. We’ve made the files available for VR viewing and download below:

Hi Res…[Read more]

Tiltbrush isn HTC Vive VR game which lets you paint in 3D space with your controller. It’s really fun to work this way.

Here’s one of Crystals creations, a beta fish. (sketchfab)

The Digital Media Lab is located in Geisel Library, 2nd Floor South. We do free 3D printing…[Read more]

This is our lab’s pet Gnome, we love him despite his sad judgmental gaze. Using photogrammetry software we were able to take a bunch of pictures from different angles and stitch them together into a complete 3D model. See the complete version here.

This is getting to be a big…[Read more]

Playing with wayfinding application, we decided to make some 3D floorplans of the Geisel Library’s 2nd floor. We already had the CAD floorplans, so for most areas it was just adding another 9ft line on the z axis. The entrance required some manual measuring though. A benefit of using sketchfab (link below) is that users can load the model in VR…[Read more]

Trying to represent Library checkout transactions and foot traffic over a whole year. We formatted an excel spreadsheet into an OBJ file, so that every value corresponded to a vertices. Then in Blender you can just load the cloud and drag a shape to it to make something like this.

I’d like to make it more representative of the actual story…[Read more]

This is a model of an infant’s heart with Kawasaki syndrome, the surgeon (working with the Cardiac Research Group) wanted a model to show the parents and explain process. We used a program called 3D Slicer to convert CT Scan Data (.dcm file) into a printable stl and VR ready model. View the full model…[Read more]

We got this really cool new VR app called Gravity Sketch.

It lets you build 3D printable models in VR and upload directly to sketchfab. The interface can be a little confusing, but the process is a ton of fun. I made half of a tree today before I got called away.

The Digital Media Lab is located in Geisel…[Read more]