Video: Modeling a 3D printed bristle dress

Ica Paru, an accessories designer and model, recently became the very first person to wear the Bristle Dress from Francis Bitonti Studio after donning the 3D printed garment at a Brooklyn photo shoot.

As MakerBot’s Blake Eskin notes, the two-piece dress is cloudlike, as much an armature that poses the body as a garment to pose in.

The Friday evening photo session, which yielded the striking images below, was the first time designer Francis Bitonti saw anyone wearing the dress.

“The computer is able to visualize everything accurately, I don’t really feel the need to do fittings,” Francis Bitonti told the official MakerBot blog.

“I wasn’t surprised about how it fit, I wasn’t really surprised about anything.”

Indeed, with the translucent top of the dress, Bitonti able “to bleed the body into the atmosphere.”

The Bristle Dress – made on an Atmel-powered MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer – is Bitonti’s second work of couture developed in his New Skins computational design workshop. The Bristle Dress was printed using MakerBot Flexible Filament and MakerBot Natural PLA Filament, with fake rabbit fur lining the tessellated skirt.

Interested in learning more? The relevant Bristle Dress 3D files are currently available on Thingiverse. The top takes 160 hours to print, while the skirt takes another 135.

MakerBot’s Flexible Filament hits the streets

MakerBot’s Flexible Filament for the Atmel-powered MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer is hitting the streets this week.

The filament – PLA and ABS – create new opportunities to stretch the limits of 3D printing. Essentially, Makers can more easily create and design objects such as functional hinges, joints and items that can be shaped to fit the body. According to the MakerBot crew, Flexible Filament’s low melting temperature of 60 degrees Celsius allows designers to deftly adjust the prints.

“For example, we heated this model of a human hand until it became translucent,” MakerBot’s Ben Millstein explained in an official company blog post.

“In this state, MakerBot Flexible Filament gets smoother and becomes easily adjustable, maintaining your changes after it cools. We decided to teach this hand the symbol for ‘love’ in American Sign Language.”

In other MakerBot news, the company is also shipping its new Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner, which allows users to quickly “transform” (scan) objects and items into 3D models that can be easily modified, shared and printed on 3D printers like the Atmel-powered MakerBot Replicator 2.

Last, but certainly not least, MakerBot MakerWare 2.3 is now live. The update offers Makers a number of new features and optimizations including advanced dual-extrusion, multimaterial printing using MakerBot Dissolvable Filament, UI changes and print preview. Interested? MakerWare 2.3 can be downloaded here.