(3-D printing... not *exactly* a Hexagon-related message) Those doodle-art pen things
Roman_K2
Posts: 1,206
A couple of years ago I saw one of those plastic "doodle art" pens on display at an art store. Cool - I could see bits of colorful, commercial art here and there that I would like to have, made with the pen.
What I didn't realize was that there are other types of vaguely similar pens in the category. I didn't know there even was a category!
So I had a look on the WWW just now and there's people using what is like a hot glue gun squirting out black plastic, and you can make polys that exist in the air. It's sort of like "3-D printing" but my initial take on it was these folks are drawing out Hexagon-like objects in the air.
In the attached screenshot you can see the person has first made a pyramid, and now they are stretching over, or over-laying a mesh, over the main facets! And the thing is big, and strong enough to hold in your hand in less than fifteen to thirty seconds! I have heard of 3-D printing and additive manufacturing; both of those processes take a while for the form to be slowly build up. This here is more like instant comprehensize 3-D roughs and maquettes! Wow!! They must be accomplishing this with different melting and setting times, as compared to regular hot glue and doodle-art pens.
Again this is a live person doing the "modelling" - those definitely are not V4's hands or Genesis' hands in the screenshot - this was a real person.
No idea what exactly this is good for but there's probably room in the Hexagon work flow process for it to be a handy adjunct for some users. Yer welcome.
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Comments
And if you go on Youtube you can watch people use these things.
Like this.
Personally, I had not seen much in the category on Youtube (to early summer 2018)... the product you referenced is a sort of toy version, eg. there is a picture of a happy kid on the box. Something for kids to fiddle around with.
The more... serious pens on the other hand deliver a better result, and at least one looks like it could be taken into a meeting for a presentation to senior executives: it's serious stuff, with fairly precise-looking lines and meshes that look like actual polygon meshes on the Hex screen, only these are physical models that you create in the air, in front of you. There's also something about the curing time for the material that seems to be "just so" for modelling as opposed to, say a hot glue gun or a soldering iron.
You're right though; looking around a bit on Youtube *does* reveal some fairly clean-looking, professional work. However (as I mentioned in my OP) I didn't even know this was a category. I only went to an arts and crafts store and saw something that I rather liked.
Walmart sells such sulptury devices.
FWIW, I've looked at a couple of Youtube videos, focussing on this one pen that looked, ahhh, a bit better than most... one customer said the thing had been crowd-funded and there had been years of trouble with non-performing, faulty units: the bottom line being that his total time with a working pen was on the order of nine seconds. So it was apparently not a mature product and definitely not something you could pick up at a nearby store.
Looking closely at another video (screenshot below) it must be noted that the "free-form" drawing has been done over a blueprint-like guide. In this second or third clip the process is maddeningly slow and they suggest blowing on your work to make it harden more quickly. You have to admit, the lines and balls do resemble the Hexagon logo though!
Oh, well.
Just takes practice is all.