Create Jurassic Park Monsters From Computer Graphic Images - Cornell, Harvard Research

3D printing is evolving by the day and soon we will have the opportunity to convert the computer-generated images of our favorite movie or game characters into 3d objects. Moritz Bächer and Hanspeter Pfister of Harvard, Bernd Bickel of the Technische Universität Berlin, and Doug James, Cornell associate professor of computer science - all researchers in computer graphics, have designed a software that lets you do just that. Using  a hand-drawn character or a graphic the software manufactures a 3d model made out of posable plastic. The researchers demonstrated this project at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles.

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An alien created in the video game Spore and fabricated by a 3-D printer.

In the above image, you can see a model of a character from the video game "Spore", which goes to show why this research work is of importance; very significant because till now 3D printing revolved only around solid shapes. Here, the computer represents skin as a network of tiny triangles. So, now by studying the angles between these triangles all those "skinned characters" can come to life. To put it in the right terms - Elbows and knees now get hinges, while torsos, tails and perhaps tentacles get ball and socket joints get what engineers call "three degrees of freedom."

Now we can eagerly wait for the day when we get 3D printed motors and actuators so that the dinosaurs come walking out of the printer.

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