Analog to Digital and Back

In groups: spend 5 minutes exploring one of the following 3D modeling/printing projects below or the Book of Fortresses and Battle of Mount Street Bridge projects I asked you to explore and read about for today:

• Loveden Hill Cremation Urn
• Virtual Hampson Museum
• Smithsonian 3D
• Museum in a Box

Designate a reporter and answer the following 4 questions on a stretch of whiteboard:

• How do the analog and digital interact in this project?
• What new perspectives does it develop on presentation to diverse audiences?
• What new arguments or interpretations does it advance?
• What new possibilities does it suggest for your future work?

3D Printing and Fabrication

One of the biggest advances in recent years has been the democratization of 3D fabrication through consumer grade technologies like 3D printers, CNC routers and mills, and laser cutters. These tools allow digital 3D models that were previously only viewable through the imperfect 2D interface of a monitor screen or a 3D Virtual Reality headset to be brought into physical reality fairly easily and cheaply.

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Plastic Buildings and Wooden Maps

In this class, we are going to explore 3D fabrication by taking advantage of our brand new Makerspace in Anderson Hall, and the expert guidance of its manager, Aaron Heidgerken-Greene.

The last pre-pandemic class was able to use the Maker Space to make a hybrid digital/physical 3D model of Carleton’s Campus. This project moved back and forth across the analog/digital divide as we…

…researched the history of the physical buildings on Carleton’s campus to create a digital repository of archival images for each.

… refined a 3D digital model of each building that previous students working with our GIS Specialist Wei-Hsin Fu and our Academic Technologist for Digital Scholarship Andrew Wilson had already made.

… made a GIS digital map of campus with contour lines for topography, and buildings color coded by use: residential, academic, or other.

… 3D printed tiny physical versions of the digital building models

… and positioned them on a physical version of the digital map laser cut out of wood

… and finally linked the physical product to the digital repository via a QR code in the lower right portion of the map, so viewers can read more about each building and the sources underlying the reconstruction.

This year, you are all guinea pigs in launching a new ambitious effort to begin 3D modeling/printing and exhibiting objects from the Carleton archival, library and museum collections. We will experiment with individual components today, and you can consider what you might do along these lines in your future work.

Processing a 3D model for printing

In order to print successfully a 3D model needs to be an entirely enclosed solid. That means it needs to be:

• Watertight (i.e. have no holes)
• Non-zero width (i.e. cannot be a true 2D plane)
• Oriented correctly (i.e. cannot have “reversed faces”)

In addition, the model should be set up with its origin centered, so that the model will import and rotate easily in printers or other 3D viewing/editing software.

There are many ways to clean an STL file, which is the preferred format for 3D printing, that range from free software to very expensive licensed options through Autodesk and other companies. SketchUp itself has a Solid Inspector tool for this purpose, but it is only available for the paid tiers.

We will be using a dedicated free service from Formware to optimize for printing.

EXERCISE: Optimizing models for printing (SketchUp 201)

1. Log back into SketchUp at app.sketchup.com
2. Load your house project

Isolate geometry to be printed

1. Select the building and only the building itself, unselecting any landscape or animal features you may have modeled and don’t want to print (remember the marquis select tools are your friend).
2. Right click the selection and choose Make Group to make it unsticky and move as one

1. Copy the Grouped Model to the Clipboard
2. File > New to make a new model file for printing
3. Paste the model in, and hover over the Origin, then left click, or right click > Place
4. Select & delete the scale person model.
5. Save your project as LastName_House_print

Clean your model

First we’ll need to fill any holes to make a solid, then reverse faces and clean up any stray geometry

1. Rotate your model to find any missing faces, e.g. the floor
   1. You can fill these by drawing new faces with the rectangle tool, or lines with the pencil tool
      

Now we need to reverse faces. Sketchup lets you have faces either way, but most rendering software only “sees” one side of a plane and renders the reverse as transparent. Front and back faces are an issue with SketchUp, so we need to flip these to all face outward for the print to work.

1. Reverse a new face
   1. Find one of the new faces you just created and see whether it is white or grey. Sketchup renders the reverse as grey, so we need to flip those.
      1. If grey, right click and choose “Reverse Faces”
      2. Once white, right click again and choose “Orient Faces” just below, to flip all to face the direction of the selected.
      3. (This may end up flipping some faces back to reversed or loosing your textures. Continue to reverse any grey faces until all you see are white)
         

1. Save your new model as STL and
2. Click on the file in the Finder or Windows File Explorer and examine the preview. If it looks solid, you should be good

Formware Cleaning

One of the easiest free options to quickly get a clean model for printing: the online Formware service at https://www.formware.co/OnlineStlRepair

• Go to the Formware service, and upload your stl file
  • You may need to wait for the queue and the file to process.
    

• Download the cleaned and fixed model, e.g. Mason_House_print_fixed.stl
• Put the cleaned STL file in your google drive folder

Next week, we will tour the MakerSpace and if you want you can set up a print job to print your model.

Assignment: Final Project 1 — The Pitch (Thursday Feb 17)

Brainstorm your final project ideas and groups

Form a group of 4-6 and chose or invent a project.  Collectively write a blog post on the course blog, stating the following:

• The definition of the project topic and objectives for what you plan to produce
  • What is the context of your topic?
  • What are you trying to find out? What is(are) your research question(s)?
  • Include a link to one or more DH projects that might make a good model for what you plan.

• The proposed methodology:
  • Sources: What data do you hope to use and how do you hope to find it?
  • Processes: What tools and techniques will you use to gather sources and store your data?
    • What analyses or transformations will you conduct on those data?
  • Presentation: How will you present the results and integrate the digital assets you create as an interactive final product? What intellectual property issues do you need to be aware of?
    
• The proposed timeline of deliverables
  • Following the general project outline, what do you need to do each week?
    
• Team Members:
  • Who is responsible for what? Where will you work individually and where will you work collaboratively?

Create a unique tag for your group to tag all your posts going forward.
On your own blogs, write a brief message outlining your personal interests in the projects and what you hope it will achieve, and link both your post to the group one on this course site, and vice versa