GET MAKING with madMeshMaker_v.2.5

NOW OUTPUTTING TO 3D PRINTERS, CNC ROUTERS, AND LASER CUTTERS

The madMeshMaker is a generative modeling environment that bridges the processes between digital design and digital fabrication. This intuitive and playful virtual environment allows novices to Computer-Aided-Design or Computer-Aided-Manufacturing to rapidly generate aesthetically pleasing, ready-to-fabricate forms at the click of a mouse. The app embeds the technical knowledge of an experienced fabricator into the underlying framework of a physics-based modeler, allowing a user’s simple mouse-clicks to dynamically manipulate and splash the digital surface. On export, the madMeshMaker formats the user’s digital form to multiple additive and subtractive processes, including 3D printing, laser cutting, and CNC milling.

 
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>>>> Click to download for WINDOWS, MAC, or LINUX
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Connecting Digital Input to Multiple Physical Outputs

madMeshMaker_v2.5 has been updated to now include output to a robust set of digital fabrication machines that use additive or subtractive processes. By embedding multiple outputs, the novice user will gain hands-on experience with a wider range of CNC machines, while also developing a mature cognitive understanding of the dichotomous relationship between digital design and fabrication. The rapid design-to-physical-production turnaround of this application enables a student to discover that while there are no formal constraints in virtual space, each of the machines used to fabricate a design brings its own set of limitations.

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As a teaching device

The ease and quick pace at which a form can be virtually generated then physically made emphasizes an educational agenda of trial-by-error and learning through making. Today, many academic institutions recognize the benefits of teaching digital design that is integrated with physical production, and it has become a central part of the curriculum for progressive architecture/art/design schools. However, due to the inherent 3D-modeling skills required to use standard CAD/CAM software, digital fabrication is still designated as an ‘advanced topic’. As a result, students first experience digital design as a scaleless, a-material, approximated representation of a physical space/assembly/object. By introducing digital fabrication along side of digital design, concepts at the core of creative professions, concepts like scale, material, joint, and detail, can be incorporated within a student’s digital explorations from the very beginning of their education.

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As integrated CAD/CAM technologies become more standard to creative professions, academia must begin to shift their curriculum to not only introduce these technologies earlier, but to also introduce them as a way to provoke innovation and experimentation from their students. Although madMeshMaker is a single solution for presenting these tools and techniques as processes of personal creativity and expression, its higher-level ambition is to initiate an understanding that digital design and physical production are no longer separate processes. A creative professional can participate (or control) the physical production of a design or an idea. Similarly, their comprehensive understanding of the process and creative potentials of computer-aided-manufacturing should also influence and augment their objectives. As demonstrated earlier, the integration CAD/CAM applications in creative industries has a three-decade deficit behind manufacturing-based industries. In order to counteract this gap the role of these tools, and a student’s interaction with them, should begin to augment their skills in innovation and exploration from the very beginning of their academic education.

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>>>> Click to download for WINDOWS, MAC, or LINUX
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made with: Processing, with code adapted from Jos Stam’s “Real-Time Fluid Dynamics for Games” and openproccessing.org
peasyCam is used for 3D navigation, the GUI is made with controlP5, and exporting is handled through Processing’s dxf exporter and toxiclibs