www.3ders.org

July 7, 2015 | By Alec

3D printing is a fantastic futuristic technology, but it is always important to know exactly how far we’ve come. That’s why we were so happy to see how a Dutch team led by animator and designer Klaas-Harm de Boer used 3D printing to travel back in time to the nineteenth century, when people didn’t even have access to electricity. For with the help of Leapfrog 3D printers, he and his team created a gorgeous, multicolored and functional zoetrope called ‘The OctoMadness’.

Now that sounds and looks great, but what does it actually do? Now for those of you who don’t know what a zoetrope is, it is essentially one the first animation devices, popular before people even had access to electricity. It consists of a series of animation frames placed inside of a spinning cylinder. It can be powered by hand and makes the frames move around too quick to see with the human eye.

But when viewing them through slits in the drum, the frames of the animation become visible for a fraction of the second. When used with successive frames, the illusion of animation is created in your head. And you can imagine that this was a wondrous and spectacular thing to the ordinary 19^th century person in a time before television.

This fantastic OctoMadness zoetrope was built as a challenging entry for the 2014 KLIK animation festival, and is the result of hardcore 3D printing and hours of assembly work by hand. As the team explained on the website of 3D printing provider Leapfrog, the goal of this project was to show just what can be achieved with animation and free design. ‘This zoetrope enables the audience to see each individual frame separately and gives a great insight into creating the final animation,’ they write. And with 64 unique characters working together to create that animation, they definitely succeeded.

Klaas-Harm de Boer himself showcased this very cool project at the KLIK Animation Festival held at the EYE. ‘Octomadness is made from 64 unique characters that, when spinning around, create the mesmerizing illusion of live. […] For many visitor it was the first time they had seen an installation like this and it was great to see their surprised reactions,’ he happily reports on his own website.

But as you can imagine, this isn’t exactly easy to 3D print. If you’re looking to properly create one yourself, you have to begin with animating a short 3D sequence. This subsequently needs to be cut up in enough separate frames (in this case the 64 characters), which all need to be 3D printed individually. As one engineer from Leapfrog revealed, they had three of their 3D printers running 24 hours a day – so just imagine how long that will take you yourself. All then need to be assembled and painted by hand before attaching them to a rotating base and strobe. But all these hours of love result in an inspiring divergence of the oldest and the newest technologies, that still amazes everyone who sees it. Just check it out for yourself in the clip below.

 

Posted in 3D Printing Applications

 

 

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