Thingiverse Blog

By popular demand, Thingiverse now has a Thing Publishing Checklist!

We want each thing on Thingiverse to be as useful as possible for the community, so we’ve added the following checklist to ensure that each new Thing, at minimum:

• Has a name (“Untitled” doesn’t count!)
• Has a description
• Has at least one file which is not an image

This is a small change, but we hope it will help cut down on the number of Things that are accidentally published before they are complete.

Sculptris is a neat little tool for clay-like modeling that takes care of a lot of the annoying chores associated with using sculpt tools in a traditional mesh-based modeling environment, along with providing a lot of nice extras that apparently were worth the author’s being bought out by the makers of ZBrush.

It’s now free to download, and can spit out model files when you’re done sculpting.  The material settings are fun– it’s just surreal sculpting what looks like solid gold as though it were soft putty.

Via Blendernation

Thingiverse/Makerbot web warrior and all-around impressive coder Marty McGuire is going to be at SXSW Interactive on a panel about Flattr, the monetization service he brought to Thingiverse!  In addition to creating awesome plugins on Thingiverse, McGuire also impresses me on a regular basis on Thingiverse with his sweet Unicorn goodies.  If you’re going to be at the conference, be sure to stop by and drink in all the awesome at the panel!

If you’ve been following this blog, or have kept an eye on the DIY 3D printing world, you’ll remember the DMCA drama from last week. I’m happy to say that there is a new and interesting development: Ulrich Schwanitz has decided to drop his DMCA claims and place his design in the public domain! I am not privvy to the reasoning behind it, but perhaps he was inspired by the thousands of other open designs here on Thingiverse?

I would like to publicly re-iterate my words of encouragement to Dr. Schwanitz to post his designs to Thingiverse. I’d like to show him what an awesome community we are, and that making money is still possible while giving away your design. So if you see a thing or two by him, please be nice!

We have re-enabled both of the designs in question, so feel free to print them to your hearts desire. With this recent development, the whole “Copyright Challenge of a 3D Printable Model” chapter of 3D printing comes to a close. As my mother used to say: All’s well that ends well.

For better or worse, we’ve hit a milestone in the history of digital fabrication. We’ve just received our first DMCA takedown notice for a copyrighted object. Due to the DMCA we are required to respond to takedown notices in a timely manner or risk losing protection under the “Safe Harbor” provision. Since we’d like to continue to be a place where people can openly share their designs with the world, we have complied.

If you are unfamiliar with the DMCA and/or the Safe Harbor provision, there is an excellent FAQ at Chilling Effects. In this day and age, knowing is half the battle.

As a result of this, we’ve also had to learn more about the DMCA. To this end, we’ve updated our legal page with a new DMCA specific policy. Thanks to our friends at Etsy, we were able to quickly add the appropriate language to that document. Please take a read and feel free to give us your feedback and opinions in the comments.

In the interest of openness, you can also read the email that prompted our new policy below the fold. You may have noticed that this design has been getting a lot of attention on Boingboing and imaterialize.

» Continue reading “Copyright Policy”

Tony Buser’s Thingiview.js is an in-browser 3D file viewer powered by WebGL.  If you have a WebGL-enabled browser, you can view 3D files in your browser almost as fast as viewing them with a desktop application.

Now, Thingiview.js is available on Thingiverse! Just look for the little  cube icon next to the thumbnails for any STL file.  For example:

As a bonus, and as shown above, you can embed Thingiviews into your own pages! Each Thingiview page has an “Embed This Thing” button, which gives you the HTML to copy-and-paste into your site. You can even customize the colors!

If your current web browser doesn’t support WebGL, you might want to try the latest Google Chrome, which has WebGL support built in, or check out the latest Firefox and Safari betas.

The ability to preview 3D files in-browser has been on our wishlist for a while so it is great to be able to get this feature into the hands of the citizens of Thingiverse!

Please keep in mind that Thingiview is an experimental feature. If you run into any files that don’t work, please let us know!

The Popular Things section of Thingiverse has been a great showcase of some of the most popular Things ever posted to the site.

Unfortunately, this didn’t really reflect what the citizens of Thingiverse like right now. As a few things became really popular, they took over the top spots and stayed there.

We want popular things to showcase what the community currently thinks is the best stuff coming out of Thingiverse, so we’ve tweaked it to only take into account the last 30 days worth of “Likes” and other information.

Check it out! You’re bound to find something awesome in there.

The Creative Commons announced the Open Attribute project yesterday:

Open Attribute, “a suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work,” launched today with browser add-ons for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The add-ons “query the metadata around a CC-licensed object and produce a properly formatted attribution that users can copy and paste wherever they need to.”

…

Open Attribute uses CC REL metadata found in the pages to generate the attribution metadata. You might remember that we developed a guide with real examples to make CC REL metadata much easier to implement: CC REL by Example contains example HTML pages, as well as explanations and links to more information. If you’re curious to see how Open Attribute pulls the metadata, the guide includes a specific section on Attributing Reuses.

As you can see from the image above, Thingiverse already includes license information on the page for each Thing. That means that these add-ons already work for any Creative Commons licensed Things on Thingiverse!

We look forward to seeing more cool stuff from the Open Attribute project.

They say that sharing is caring. If that is the case, then I believe that auto-sharing is auto-caring!

Thingiverse can now automatically post to Twitter whenever you upload a new Thing, make a copy of somebody else’s Thing, or whenever one of your Things is featured! We’ll also show your Twitter username on your profile if you like.

Getting everything set up is easy! Just visit your profile, click on the “edit my profile” link, and look for the new Twitter section. Clicking the “Sign-in with Twitter” button will run you through the process to authorize Thingiverse to tweet on your behalf. Once you’ve done it, you’ll see something like this:

For the curious, the automated tweets look something like:

@schmarty: I made a Thing on Thingiverse! http://thingiverse.com/thing:1046 #thingalert

Enjoy, and be on the lookout for new features like this in the future! If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line.

What is Flattr?

What’s that? You say you already know everything there is to know about the awesome European social micro-payment service, Flattr? How amazingly in-the-know you are!

Well, for the rest of us, Flattr is a flat-rate flattering system that lets you give (and receive!) cash money for things that you like on the web.

And now Thingiverse works with Flattr!

How it Works

First, you’ll need to sign up with Flattr, if you haven’t already. Once you’ve signed up and added some money to your account, you can start Flattring your favorite things, designers, and even Thingiverse itself!

But you said “receive”!

Indeed I did! Receiving Flattr’s on your things is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Copy your Flattr User ID from your Flattr settings page.
2. Go to your Thingiverse Profile and click “Edit my Profile”.
3. Paste your Flattr User ID in to the Flattr section and save.

Once we know your Flattr ID, Thingiverse will automatically put Flattr buttons on your profile and on every thing you upload! Awesome!

Flattr works on a give-to-receive philosophy, so get out there and start Flattring! Check their website for more info about how Flattr works.