It has certainly been a long first day for the workshop at ICTP, where lectures and participants have had the possibility to learn about various applications of 3d printing and have a first look at some of the principles and softwares used for 3d modelling.
During the morning we had Alessandro Ranellucci, developer of Slic3r, introduced the RepRap movement and its derivations, followed by William Hoyle that explained the 3D4D challenge and it’s followups.
Jonas Martens closed the morning session describing Perpetual plastic, the recycling project that was developed in the Netherlands to show how plastic trash can be cleaned, shredded, fused into a filament and finally transformed into a new object.
After lunch Oliver Knill, from the Department of mathematics of Harvard, showed some fascinating mathematical structures that can be illustrated with the use of 3d printing, followed by Stefan Rossegger of CERN who brought some 3d models of the ALICE collision models.
We then had two very interesting lectures on applications of 3d printing for medicine: Waldir Roque from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul explained the possibilites opened by 3D printing in the studying of trabecular bones and osteoporosis while Paolo Rossi (Cooperazione Odontoiatrica Internazionale NGO) and Carlo Campana (Radiologia Trevenezie) described the use of 3d-printed dental replicas for medical and educational purposes in developing countries.
After the coffe break it was time to showcase some of the free software that can be used to create 3d models: Daniel Pietrosemoli from MediaLab designed very quickly a personalized key tag to show the capabilities of SketchUp, Gaia Fior explained the different, more organic approach of Sculptris and Carlo Fonda (ICTP SDU) illustrated a few web apps and ipad apps. Marius Kintel, developer of OpenSCAD, closed the session giving a demostration of the incredible capabilities of this software explaining step by step how to draw a roman column and all the code that lies behind the drawing.
Daniel Pietrosemoli was the last lecturer for the day, but the demo of the use of Kinect for 3d scanning was so interesting that the room was still full of people, even though it was past dinner time.
The lab will be open for the particpants for the next hours, and tomorrow morning we will start with other interesting topics.
Have also a look at the short video that Antonio Giacomin from fluido has already prepared to sum up the first day at the workshop
