One of my personal projects for 2011 was to design something and print it on Shapeways. This weekend I decided that I had a couple of hours to do that and so as the first step I installed Google Sketchup.
Having never done any 3D design before, instead of jumping straight into the program, I decided to watch some of the videos explaining how to use Sketchup. The videos are really easy to follow and from first sitting down to beginning to draw 3D shapes took about 15 minutes (includes the install time). I was interested in doing something really simple, so I could quickly see the end-to-end process.
I settled on creating chopstick rests (yes, those little things you can put on the table to prevent your chopsticks from sticking with food to the table). My design idea was absolutely trivial - two square boxes joined by a cylinder in the middle. After watching a couple more videos, I made sure I had zoomed in enough to be creating objects in the centimeter size range (it would be easy by mistake to create vastly over-sized objects). A couple of false starts and about another 20 minutes later, I had my chopstick rests designed.
Now all I had to do was export them as a Collada file and upload to Shapeways. That turned out to be trivial and took about 5 minutes. I then immediately placed an order for 10 rests in the white material and am excited for the Shapeways package to show up at our house. The entire process from start to finish took about an hour and that includes the time learning how to take baby steps in Sketchup.
I came away from the experience excited about designing more complicated objects and working with the kids on some fun projects. By the way, since Shapeways makes it easy to sell items in a store, if you are in the market for some trivial chopstick rests, you can go ahead and order them here!
