What first resembled nothing more than monochrome trinkets from a craft room can now look translucent and metallic: 3D printing has grown up and is finding more and more uses in industry. Dr. Philipp Urban, the head of the 3D Printing Technologies Competence Center at Fraunhofer IGD, gained deep insight into the latest technologies and requirements of the sector through the development of the printer driver “Cuttlefish”. For the “Printing for Fabrication” conference, he has collected his experiences into a presentation titled “Fabricating Beauty: The Art and Science of Graphical 3D Printing”.

The presentation will focus on the growth in design freedom, since sheen and translucence now make it possible to print skin tones and thus whole human bodies and faces. Starting with an overview of the current state of the research, Dr. Urban will move on to the challenges and solutions of the digital workflow, then present future areas of application in which graphical 3D printing technologies will be able to shake up entire sectors or make entirely new methods of fabrication possible. Dr. Urban will conclude with 3D printing in movies: “Cuttlefish” was the printer driver used in the film “Missing Link” by animation studio LAIKA, which had 106,000 faces printed for their stop-motion production.

About “Printing for Fabrication”

The “Printing for Fabrication” conference is held from September 29 to October 3, 2019 in San Francisco, CA in the United States. Its goal is an exchange between industry and science in application-oriented 3D printing. The keynote by Dr. Philipp Urban will be on Wednesday, October 2 from 9.00 am to 10.00 am.