Blossom
This installation, Seamless Blossom by Richard Clarkson of the Victoria University of Wellington's School of Design not only looks the part but is a masterpiece in using multi-material 3D printing to create organic form structures from a digital process.
Produced with Stratasys Objet's Digital Materials machines Richard has managed to mix new materials at the point of print. This means that these flowers have rigid petals on the outside that house an inflatable structure.
"I've created an interactive installation, there's no electronics apart from the light underneath. It's all pneumatics and air pressure. Some of the blooming seeds are died in different colours, some are red, some yellow, some blue and it is almost this game of finding the coloured petals, you start to play with them as you would an instrument."
As we see machines improve there's increasingly becoming more and more demand for new materials. Stratasys Objet are way ahead of the game in terms of multi-material printing but even the desktop printers are now getting more and more materials. Nylon and flexible materials are becoming mainstream and wood-composite plastics and clay-composite filament is becoming increasingly popular.
Brilliant work Richard!
