News Archives • Page 2 of 7 • Celtic3d

Posted on 2, January, 20182, January, 2018 by Gavin Bain — Leave a comment

Welcome to 2018

Happy New Year!

Wishing a happy and prosperous 2018 to all our customers, partners and friends!

The past year has been a rollercoaster and a huge (and fun) learning experience. We have particularly enjoyed working on collaborative projects, especially where we take an idea from a client and make it into a physical model. It gives us huge pleasure and satisfaction seeing our client’s face light-up when their idea or innovation is made a little more tangible through a 3d printed model or prototype.

Looking forward

We start 2018 with some exciting projects lined-up already. During January our systems are producing literally thousands of individually customised avatars for Vattenfall which will be 3d printed by Make Aberdeen for two exhibitions in February. We have some scale exhibition models to produce showing off some pipeline equipment, a new scale model of a subsea trenching system, and a couple of other projects we need to keep under wraps for the time being. We couldn’t ask for a better start to the year.

If 2018 is the year you decide it is about time you figured out how 3d printing can help your business, please do get in touch.

We would love to hear from you.

Posted on 21, December, 201722, December, 2017 by Gavin Bain — Leave a comment

Create your mini-me

Celtic3d Teams-up with Make Aberdeen

Celtic3d have teamed up with Make Aberdeen for an exciting project for Vattenfall and the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre. Members of the public in the Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire area can personalise and create a complimentary avatar of themselves. These will appear in two special exhibitions in February alongside a scale model of one of Vattenfall’s innovative offshore wind turbines. The Wind turbine model (at the same scale as the avatars) stands at 3m tall!

The venues for the exhibitions are:

Balmedie Library: 1st – 10th February
Aberdeen Central Library: 13th – 22nd February

Provided you can visit one of the exhibitions to pick up your avatar, members of the public are invited to create their own mini-me (link below).

How we did it

Celtic3d developed a web service that can automatically create 3d model files from user input. Virtually any sort of customisation is possible, we can add or subtract shapes, apply colours, adjust scale and so on. We also provide the 3d modelling services to create the components that can be combined. For this project, users needed to customise a cartoon-like version of themselves on a web-page, behind the scenes our systems create a 3d model based on the user’s choices.

For this project, we worked with Make Aberdeen, who using their 3d printing facilities, manufacture the avatars from the 3d model files. Because we plan to 3d print thousands of unique avatars. Make needed to download the model files in batches so that they could maximise the efficiency of their 3d printing process, but we also needed a way for users to find their mini-me versions in the crowd. Celtic3d developed a batch management system to give them total control over the process along with notifications to users to inform them which batch they were in.

If you would like to learn more about Celtic3d can help with your 3d project, Please contact us here.

Posted on 16, December, 201716, December, 2017 by Gavin Bain — Leave a comment

Make Aberdeen to close on 21st March

We are disappointed to learn of the decision to close Make Aberdeen from 21st March 2018.

Make is a public-access digital fabrication space in the centre of Aberdeen. It supports a community of Makers, SMEs, students and artists giving them studio space and access to some high-end laser-cutters, 3d printers, digital sewing, digital vinyl cutters, and a really impressive printer that can print on any surface.

While we don’t rely on Make for 3d printing (others are not so fortunate), we make use of the facilities at Make whenever we can for laser-cutting sheet materials. Laser cutting facilities have been especially useful for our architectural models. Without the facilities at Make, we will either have to buy our own laser cutting equipment or use out-of-region online services. We are still evaluating our options. Thankfully, no current or committed work is directly impacted but, unless we can find alternatives, we may well need to adjust our services going forward.

For our own needs, we will find an alternative solution. However, closing the doors on Make makes it harder for start-ups, individual Makers, local schools and companies to access digital fabrication and an important route to innovation. Moreover, Celtic3d have become involved in several interesting and innovative collaborative projects through people we have met at Make. This source of creative inspiration will be sorely missed.

We would like to thank the staff at Make (Ben, Eilidh and Kerry) for their hard work and support.

With so many start-ups and SME in the city, and with the huge potential for innovation in digital manufacturing. If ever Aberdeen needed a facility like this, it is now.

We hope that an alternative can be found without delay. We would be interested to hear from anyone with ideas on how that could be done.

Correction: Date corrected to 21st March (previously posted as 18th)