[Claywoven] mostly prints with ceramics, although he does produce plastic inserts for functional parts in his designs. The ceramic parts have an interesting texture, and he wondered if the same techniques could work with plastics, too. It turns out it can, as you can see in the video below.

Ceramic printing, of course, doesn’t get solid right away, so the plastic can actually take more dramatic patterns than the ceramic. The workflow starts with Blender and winds up with a standard printer.

The example prints are lamps, although you could probably do a lot with this technique. You can select where the texturing occurs, which is important in this case to allow working threads to avoid having texture.

You will need a Blender plugin to get similar results. The target printer was a Bambu, but there’s no reason this wouldn’t work with any FDM printer.

We admire this kind of artistic print. We’ve talked before about how you can use any texture to get interesting results. If you need help getting started with Blender, our tutorial is one place to start.

Step inside Aurel’s Grand Theater, an unconventional creative portfolio crafted with Three.js, Vue.js, GSAP, and Blender, bursting with animations and thoughtful details.

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Want to give an AI the ability to do stuff in Blender? The BlenderMCP addon does exactly that, connecting open-source 3D modeling software Blender to Anthropic’s Claude AI via MCP (Model Context Protocol), which means Claude can directly use Blender and its tools in a meaningful way.

MCP is a framework for allowing AI systems like LLMs (Large Language Models) to exchange information in a way that makes it easier to interface with other systems. We’ve seen LLMs tied experimentally into other software (such as with enabling more natural conversations with NPCs) but without a framework like MCP, such exchanges are bespoke and effectively stateless. MCP becomes very useful for letting LLMs use software tools and perform work that involves an iterative approach, better preserving the history and context of the task at hand.

Using MCP also provides some standardization, which means that while the BlenderMCP project integrates with Claude (or alternately the Cursor AI editor) it could — with the right configuration — be pointed at a suitable locally-hosted LLM instead. It wouldn’t be as capable as the commercial offerings, but it would be entirely private.

Embedded below are three videos that really show what this tool can do. In the first, watch it create a beach scene using assets from a public 3D asset library. In the second, it creates a scene from scratch using a reference image (a ‘low-poly cabin in the woods’), followed by turning that same scene into a 3D environment on a web page, navigable in any web browser.

Back in 2022 we saw Blender connected to an image generator to texture objects, but this is considerably more capable. It’s a fascinating combination, and if you’re thinking of trying it out just make sure you’re aware it relies on allowing arbitrary Python code to be run in Blender, which is powerful but should be deployed with caution.

A group of students from Lancing College in the UK have sent in their Critical Design Review (CDR) for their entry in the UK CanSat project.

Per the competition guidelines the UK CanSat project challenges students aged 14 to 19 years of age to build a satellite which can relay telemetry data about atmospheric conditions such as could help with space exploration. The students’ primary mission is to collect temperature and pressure readings, and these students picked their secondary mission to be collection of GPS data, for use on planets where GPS infrastructure is available, such as on Earth. This CDR follows their Preliminary Design Review (PDR).

The six students in the group bring a range of relevant skills. Their satellite transmits six metrics every second: temperature, pressure, altitude reading 1, altitude reading 2, latitude, and longitude. The main processor is an Arduino Nano Every, a BMP388 sensor provides the first three metrics, and a BE880 GPS module provides the following three metrics. The RFM69HCW module provides radio transmission and reception using LoRa.

The students present their plan and progress in a Gantt chart, catalog their inventory of relevant skills, assess risks, prepare mechanical and electrical designs, breadboard the satellite circuitry and receiver wiring, design a PCB in KiCad, and develop flow charts for the software. The use of Blender for data visualization was a nice hack, as was using ChatGPT to generate an example data file for testing purposes. Mechanical details such as parachute design and composition are worked out along with a shiny finish for high visibility. The students conduct various tests to ensure the suitability of their design and then conduct an outreach program to advertise their achievements to their school community and the internet at large.

We here at Hackaday would like to wish these talented students every success with their submission and we hope you had good luck on launch day, March 4th!

The backbone of this project is the LoRa technology and if you’re interested in that we’ve covered that here at Hackaday many times before, such as in this rain gauge and these soil moisture sensors.

Go behind the scenes of an immersive 3D museum built with Blender and Three.js, and explore the creative process, technical decisions, and browser-ready workflow that brought it to life.

Rokoko is a free AI tool which lets you capture motion capture straight from your phone or webcam. You can also upload a video and generate MoCap from that. Their online editor has some nice tools available to fix potential issues you might come across with your generated MoCap. The best part about Rokoko’s AI […]

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Dream Textures is an open-source Stable Diffusion plugin for Blender currently available on GitHub. It allows you to create a wide range of textures, concept art, background assets, and more with just a simple text prompt. With the “Seamless” option, you can create textures that tile perfectly with no visible seam. Use the “Project Dream […]

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Animate Anything is an AI animation tool that lets you rig and animate your 3D models. Simply upload your static 3D models and the AI will automatically rig and animate them, ready for games, VR, and metaverse worlds. The tool supports multiple 3D formats (FBX, GLB, GLTF+BIN) and rigged models can be imported into Unity, […]

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