A cool story popped up over on wired.com yesterday about how 3D printing was helping the design and visualisation of broadway sets. Kacie Hultgren uses the 3D printers to create scale model furniture to help visualize show sets on a tiny scale.
It's another case of the blurring of lines between professional and amateur, but more than that it's a really cool example of how 3D printing can help in the process of creating — whether that is creating a fuctional part, a concept model or just something you really wanted.
Looking at some of the chair prints that Kacie has achieved it's obvious that making these parts by hand would be fantastically time-consuming, and probably equally frustrating! The MakerBot system is operating at it's normal limits when producing the fine spindles of the Queen Anne chairs.
This is a great quote from Kacie: “The thing about a 3-D printer is, it’s almost like having light manufacturing in your house. For small quantities, MakerBot is great. You can test out what’s going to be popular."
You can see the original Wired story here
