
3D printing for mathematical visualisation [pdf] - lainon
https://math.okstate.edu/people/segerman/papers/3d_printed_visualisation.pdf
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froindt
This reminds me of a project I worked on a few years back. There was a blind
chemistry student. There's lots of software to visualize chemical structures,
but displaying things on a screen doesn't work for someone who can't see.

We ended up doing a series of file format conversions using python and
blender. I believe we ended up with CML (chemical markup language) imported to
blender. We gave each column of the periodic table of elements a shape, and
each row had a scaling factor. This gave enough distinction to uniquely
identify each atom in the molecule. We added cylindrical connections between
the atoms as defined in the CML file then we could export to STL.

We called it Molly-Gen, a play on molecular generation. We were working on a
web portal for it to bounce around various university approvals easily to go
above and beyond, then were nicely told we didn't really need to do that.

I also spent about 2 years formatting text and pictures for the student. It
was an interesting job early in my undergrad years.

~~~
gilleain
Sounds cool - go CML!

There's also some work done by the Jmol project:

[http://wiki.jmol.org/index.php/3D_printing](http://wiki.jmol.org/index.php/3D_printing)

~~~
froindt
Hadn't seen the jmol stuff before. We were putting this project together
around 5 years ago. Shapeways was around, but we had resources on campus for
3d printing which we used.

Typically a chemistry student would have been using MacMolPlt [1] to visualize
the process. If I remember right, it let you see how the atoms move during a
reaction (I'm rusty on it though). It also had the ability to show orbital
clouds. We were able to import the set of vertices making up the orbital
clouds and generate them as a surface in Blender.

Screenshots in [2]. Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding my pictures of
the final printed models. These are from an earlier version before we had the
shapes by periodic table column.

[1]
[http://brettbode.github.io/wxmacmolplt/](http://brettbode.github.io/wxmacmolplt/)

[2] [http://imgur.com/a/duGDd](http://imgur.com/a/duGDd)

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imurray
Coincidentally I just went to a nice exhibit in Edinburgh co-authored by Henry
Segerman:
[http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/brilliantgeometry/](http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/brilliantgeometry/)
— the last day is tomorrow for Edinburghers.

He has a book with supporting material here:
[http://www.3dprintmath.com/](http://www.3dprintmath.com/)

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deepnet
George Hart has .stl files of his mathematical forms on his home page,
including a diagonally sliced Menger Sponge with its surprisingly star shaped
holes.

[http://georgehart.com/rp/rp.html](http://georgehart.com/rp/rp.html)

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ttoinou
I like Henry Segerman's models. For thoses interested here are my models (also
inspired by maths and some of them already printed) :
[https://www.shapeways.com/designer/ttoinou/creations](https://www.shapeways.com/designer/ttoinou/creations)
and shop :
[https://www.shapeways.com/shops/sodorny](https://www.shapeways.com/shops/sodorny)

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roman_savchuk
It should be possible to print those meshes without converting curves to
tubes, because, obviously, any form of additive manufacturing gives non-zero
line thickness. I mean not out of the box, but after modifying slicer software
for the task

