3D printing for mathematical visualisation [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

3D printing for mathematical visualisation [pdf]

math.okstate.edu

54 pointslainon7 comments

This reminds me of a project I worked on a few years back. There was a blind chemistry student. There's lots of software to visualize chemical structures, but displaying things on a screen doesn't work for someone who can't see.

We ended up doing a series of file format conversions using python and blender. I believe we ended up with CML (chemical markup language) imported to blender. We gave each column of the periodic table of elements a shape, and each row had a scaling factor. This gave enough distinction to uniquely identify each atom in the molecule. We added cylindrical connections between the atoms as defined in the CML file then we could export to STL.

We called it Molly-Gen, a play on molecular generation. We were working on a web portal for it to bounce around various university approvals easily to go above and beyond, then were nicely told we didn't really need to do that.

I also spent about 2 years formatting text and pictures for the student. It was an interesting job early in my undergrad years.

Sounds cool - go CML!

There's also some work done by the Jmol project:

http://wiki.jmol.org/index.php/3D_printing

Hadn't seen the jmol stuff before. We were putting this project together around 5 years ago. Shapeways was around, but we had resources on campus for 3d printing which we used.

Typically a chemistry student would have been using MacMolPlt [1] to visualize the process. If I remember right, it let you see how the atoms move during a reaction (I'm rusty on it though). It also had the ability to show orbital clouds. We were able to import the set of vertices making up the orbital clouds and generate them as a surface in Blender.

Screenshots in [2]. Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding my pictures of the final printed models. These are from an earlier version before we had the shapes by periodic table column.

[1] http://brettbode.github.io/wxmacmolplt/

[2] http://imgur.com/a/duGDd

Coincidentally I just went to a nice exhibit in Edinburgh co-authored by Henry Segerman: http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/brilliantgeometry/ — the last day is tomorrow for Edinburghers.

He has a book with supporting material here: http://www.3dprintmath.com/

George Hart has .stl files of his mathematical forms on his home page, including a diagonally sliced Menger Sponge with its surprisingly star shaped holes.

http://georgehart.com/rp/rp.html

I like Henry Segerman's models. For thoses interested here are my models (also inspired by maths and some of them already printed) : https://www.shapeways.com/designer/ttoinou/creations and shop : https://www.shapeways.com/shops/sodorny

It should be possible to print those meshes without converting curves to tubes, because, obviously, any form of additive manufacturing gives non-zero line thickness. I mean not out of the box, but after modifying slicer software for the task

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