Since the launch of Sculpteo, creating such tools has always been one of our biggest concerns and every time, we have identify a new great app edited by another company, we have done our best to let our users generate designs with it and directly order 3D print from it. For instance, we have already partnered with 123D creature and Let’s create Pottery.

While some of you have already played with it during the digital festival Futur en Seine last weekend,  we wanted to properly introduce Mecube as a new partner app to our blog readers. Mecube is a voxel based mobile design app that offers an easy way to design 3D models. By adding and removing little cubes from a  square base, you can imagine almost all the models you want.

All in all, Mecube’s using two modeling tools and eight colors. You can either chose the “add/remove cube” function, or the “deviate cube direction” function. With these two functionalities, you can generate an infinity of models.

It is quite similar to a virtual lego. You can choose the color of the cube and where you want to place it. Some forms are impossible to make, but Janos Stone, the CEO of Mecube, explained us that goal of the app was to created 3D printed ready designs, and that it was the price to pay for it. For the users printing directly at home or in a makerplace on a non-professional 3D printer with fused plastic filaments, some forms are impossible to print.

After using it for about a week at Sculpteo, we thought that the process is more intimate than with other voxel based design apps. It’s comparable to taking a pen and sheet of paper, and adding forms without any pre-consideration of where you want to go with it. More than a tool to help you design really precise objects, MeCube can be seen as an artistic tool to grasp imagination as it comes to the user and since it’s quite addictive, you will probably iterate around it for hours. Lots of us at Sculpteo ended up with personal forms that no one else could have imagined.

It’s also possible to add eight colors to the model. Each little cubes can be colored. The more you tap on a cube with a color, the more vivid the color is.

Mecube’s team has also done a great job implementing our 3D printing solution directly in the application. Once you’ve finished your models you can directly order a print from Sculpteo without leaving the application. You can choose the dimension and the material of the print directly in the app and receive your model a few days later.

Once it’s 3D printed and you have received it at home, you can freely play with them, offer them to your loves one, or make your colleages jealous.

Let us know what you think of Mecube! Positiv or negativ, we will make sure to relay your opinions to Janos. He and Andrej (the developer behind Mecube) have work days and nights to make it in time for a release last weekend. We wanted to thank them.

The three first blog readers to contact us at arthur@sculpteo.com will get a free print of their little model designed on Mecube. We hope you’ll find it amazing!

Beginning tomorrow, the french digital festival Futur en Seine 2013 is about displaying the enterprises and products of the future. Every year, the main event, hosted directly at CENTQUATRE centre, features the finest french startups and technological entreprises.

Once again, we are happy to have made the list this year. On our booth, you will find some freshly 3D printed products to play with and all the apps we created to help you design better stuff. Also, over time, we have partnered with some amazing applications creators such as 123D Creature, Lets Create Pottery, or MeCube. We will demo them on iPads to let you become familiar with it. Designing directly with its fingers on a screen as never been so easy. 

On friday, we have planned two events that you can’t miss if you’re interested in 3D printing and connected devices.

First, Eric Careel, the co-founder of Sculpteo ( and two others french entreprises – Withings and Invoxia), will participate to a round table about “ OBJECTS THAT RESEMBLE – AND REASSEMBLE US? “. The talk will be moderated by Jean-Louis Frechin, chief-curator of this year’s edition and the co-founder of NoDesign. It starts at 4:30pm and finishes at 6:30pm.

Right after this event, we will host the seventh 3D Printing Meetup by Sculpteo. It will also take places at CENTQUATRE in the Atelier 1. Feel free to come even if you don’t have any “3D printing skills” yet! There will be presentations about the technologies, 3D printed objects to see and play with, 3D modeling apps (Leblox and MeCube), and of course food and drinks

We hope to see you there! Don’t hesitate to come visit us, and ask us all the questions you have about 3D printing.

That’s all folks! Or at least for this week.

With just a few days left before sunday, you still have a little bit of time to create a custom gift with Sculpteo’s apps or choose a beautiful gift in our designer stores.

If like many of them, your father is addicted to its smartphone, you can try out the 3DP Case application to make a beautiful case for his phone.

And in case you don’t want to get your hands dirty, there are always ways to offer him finished 3D printed product. For exemple, you can find a beautiful chess set on this store.

Or even a beautiful dock for his brand new iPhone 5.

Happy Father’s Day Everyone!

Victoria Wilmotte twisted Legrand industrial product range and redesign, at the same time, the whole showroom. The french artist delivers her sharp vision of aesthetism claiming that “Demain…” (“Tomorrow”) stands for physical products brought to life through a digital 3D rendering and 3D printing.

Victoria Wilmotte and Legrand teamed up with Dassault Systèmes to display the whole experience and to bring a 3D printer in the showroom. Guests had a chance to customize their own product on a screen, and to see a live 3D printer in action.

Victoria Wilmotte reached out to Sculpteo to 3D print its creation. Tomorrow is the last day to go see the installation at Le Lab. It is located on the 38 rue du Bac, in Paris.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

The high school student, designed the splint on a CAD program, and made it so it can be printed in about 10 minutes for about 2 cents of recycled material.

McHale stated:

“Finger splints can come in many shapes and sizes. A finger splint immobilizes a finger or joint after an injury. Countries with restricted economies and open boarders may use this type of “Field Splint” as a convenient and inexpensive temporary stabilization device. This file describes a “Field Splint” that can be scaled on any axis and printed using ABS Plastic. Depending on the platform up to 30-40 splints can be printed in one “Run”. Each of these can be scaled independently. ”

While 3D printing still is relatively expensive, the project showed that it is possible to use this technology to create very efficient low-tech medical device. All you need is a low-end 3D printer, a 3D file and some recycled plastic.

For its design, McHale won a prize at the Mercer Science and Engineering Fair. He decided to post the design online.

At Sculpteo, we liked this story because we often hear a few misunderstandings on 3D printing. Seeing a high-school student creating this kind of objects with just a few ressources is probably one of the best exemple to fully understand the potential of 3D printing. 

Source: www.3ders.org

For every material, the short description on the right side indicates the minimum required thickness of the wall. It lets users know if their design fit the requirement for a 3D print.

Our engineers at Sculpteo are always working pretty hard to create automated tools for users. We firmly believe that a better and flawless service means to integrate 3D creation tools directly into our website to empower our users.  That is why after noticing that wall thickness was often an issue for Sculpteo’s users, we decided to add this feature directly into the 3D viewer of our website.

This functionality is really easy to use. After the upload of the 3D file, you have to enable the solidity check feature right below the material choice and scale of the 3D print. Once it is done, you just click on the 3D model and the thickness measurement will appear. Click again and it’s gone.

You can control as much points as you want within the same viewer.

We hope this new feature will allow our users to create better 3D print ready designs. If you have any suggestion about this feature (or maybe a new one) , feel free to shoot us an email. Have a nice week everyone!

There are lots of 3D Printing competitions out there, but for this one CGTrader came up with a long list of partners to give away an impressive number of prizes. Sculpteo is happy to be one of them.

Competitors are running in two different categories: best 3D Printable Portfolio, where designers will be picked based on all 3D printable models uploaded during the competition, and best 3D Printable Model, in which the jury will reward the best 3D printable model. Inside each category, there will be one winner and two runner-ups.

Ultimaker is giving away two 3D printer kits for the winners. Among the prizes, you can also find gifts from 3D Print UK, FILACO, iMakr, Stash, and Sculpteo. Winners and runner-ups can grab gift cards from Sculpteo, they also have a chance to see their work displayed in the world largest 3D Printing store at the iMakr shop in London.

All uploaded models must be print-ready in the .STL format. If you have a doubt about the requirements, you can find the contest guidelines here.

You can join the challenge until June the 30th. This is a great opportunity for everyone to become familiar with 3D printing. Plus, you have a chance to win amazing prizes.

Good luck and happy designing! We hope to see some of our blog readers among the winners.

We’re happy to announce our next Meetup! It will take place at CENTQUATRE centre on June the 14th. Every designers, tinkerers, makers, web developers, students who are curious about 3D printed are welcome to come over and have a chat with us.

This Meetup will be an opportunity to present our different applications and the latest trends on 3D printing. But most of all, you will have a chance to share with people who are as passionate as us about 3D printing.

We will be bringing a wide range of 3D printed objects with different materials, so that you can touch them and play with them!

You can register on our Meetup group to get the latest updates. We hope to see you there! And don’t hesitate to bring any ongoing project to discuss it with us.

A few months ago, the six weeks old baby, Kaiba Gionfriddo, endured a real life-threatening event. While being at the restaurant, his parents saw him turned blue as he stopped breathing. The incident was due to a collapsed bronchus blocking the flow of air in his lungs. While almost all doctors had given up any hope to save the boy, two of them from the University of Michigan teamed up to find a solution. They came up with the groundbreaking idea to create a 3D printed device that could help to support Kaiba’s bronchus.

Glenn Green, M.D., associate professor of pediatric otolaryngology at the University of Michigan and his colleague, Scott Hollister, a biomedical engineer, proposed to 3D print a piece of biodegradable skeletton to replace the malfunctioning bronchus during the time needed by the body to repair it. For this project to come to life, they had to obtain an emergency clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to create and implant a tracheal splint for Kaiba made from a biopolymer called polycaprolactone.

Thanks to the use of 3D modeling software, the doctors were able to design a splint fitting exactly Kaiba’s trachea. The 3D printing process then allowed them to product the design very quickly.

On this issue, Dr. Glenn Green stated:

“We obtained imaging of his defect with a CT scan. Scott Hollister rapidly went about designing a splint that would meet this need. This is the first time this procedure has been done anywhere in the world.”

The boy was able to breath on his own only 21 days after the procedure, and did not show any sign of breathing trouble ever since.

Scott Hollister added:

“The material we used is a nice choice for this. It takes about two to three years for the trachea to remodel and grow into a healthy state, and that’s about how long this material will take to dissolve into the body”

And Dr. Green concluded:

“Severe tracheobronchomalacia has been a condition that has bothered me for years, (…) I’ve seen children die from it. To see this device work, it’s a major accomplishment and offers hope for these children.”

Below you can find a video that describes this amazing story:

At Sculpteo, we wanted to congratulate the team who has participated to this project! It is an incredible breakthrough for 3D printing, and it shows how much potential 3D printing has. We are looking forward to new medical uses of 3D printing!

Source: 3ders and on3dprinting

Credit: Image courtesy of University of Michigan Health System