Madox.NET

Too lazy for many words, click the link below for a SWF animation showing the process…

Exporting Alibre Xpress Files to Shapeways STL

The problem

I’ve recently signed up Ponoko’s Prime account and wanted to get something made.  I rather into a rather annoying problem, Alibre Xpress doesn’t have a SVG export.  I needed a way to design something and export it as SVG.

I’ll admit the long post title is a problem too

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Heart Rings painted by Peter Paul (Shapeways)

I just ran into this Shapeways Blog Post and couldn’t resist reposting this photo of those colourful ring fest.  If you’ve read earlier in my mechanical iris diaphragm post I was just playing around with Alibre Xpress and see if I could design a ring using that, guess someone at Shapeways thought they were cute and printed them out!  The rings are painted using a water based paint, I just wonder how it’ll look with an acrylic paint to smoothen out the surface somewhat.

So I set out to design something in the shortest amount of time and yet would still give me a good ‘feel’ of what 3D printing is capable of today.  The time constraint was probably also due to the fact I read about the offer at midnight and wanted to send it to print before I sleep   Result? Concept, Design, Upload, Ordered all within 2 hours!

Concept