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Deviousness `anmari has been spreading her infectious positivity throughout our community for over 6 years. Throughout this time Ana has been at the core of all things devious, passionately developing an eclectic gallery, helping organise devmeets, participating in chat events and also recently completed dedicating her time as a Community Volunteer. We are absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for May 2013 to `anmari, congratulations! Read More
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Sta.sh
But I've also just run out of plastic for my machine- lol. Ordered more two days ago and it's supposed to arrive by the end of the week, but just know if you do order one, I have to wait for the plastic to get here before I can print anymore.
The problem with the generated raft is that it's often overkill. My own experience tells me that you can get away with a lot without using raft support, but the slicer puts in a ton of raft support anyway. It's overly-cautious, I guess, and because of that, it uses a huge amount of material that's just going to get thrown away. So it's a big waste of plastic sometimes. I've done a few models where I put in my own support structures into the model itself and printed without any rafting. But making your own support structures is sometimes a pain.
!!
You can actually build one from old printer and scanner parts and various parts purchased online - but since building one from parts on your own is generally a rather daunting prospect for most people, you can also buy them assembled from various places. My machine is a Makerbot Replicator ([link]) other popular ones are the various RepRap machines ([link]), the Ultimaker, the Afinia, and the Up!3D.
Prices vary a lot depending on what machine you get, and different machines have different limitations and different quality results.
It's still a very DIY sort of community since it's only early adopters, hobbists, and prototypers who own the things right now.
I actually run a group here on DA for 3d printers -
I posted a journal a bit ago that has a bunch of embedded videos that demo these machines working -
[link]
Anyway - the objects that you print with the machines have to be modeled in 3d in some sort of 3d package. Since lots of people who own these things are just hobbyists, a lot of them use free software like Google Sketchup, or cheap software like Blender.
I actually do 3D art for a living (I work in the video game industry) so I own several professional 3d package licenses, and used Maya and zbrush to model this object.
People who do this thing often share their models on the Thingiverse - [link]