Arabian Ceiling Project

[austinkbutler]

This is a large ceiling installation that was designed, 3D printed, fabricated, and treated by the amazing crew I work with in Orlando, Fl. The design was originally drawn by Ben Cremer who relied on Arabian style patterns and colors to inspire the design for the ceiling.
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Marc Leonard took Ben's drawings into the computer and where he modeled every component in 123D Design. Granted we used an array of other programs to supplement the 3D modeling to 3D Printer tansition (MeshMixer, Slic3r, ReppetierHost, PhotoShop just to name a few...) 123D Design was the workhorse to get the parts modeled. James Alday helped Marc with some of the modeling and later was crucial in the fabrication and treatments of the printed parts.
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This whole project started when our fearless leader Gabriel Collazo agreed to let Marc build a makerspace and start 3D printing things that would have traditionally just been molded and cast or sculpted depending on the application...but not anymore!! Once the plans were made to develop a studio in the shop where we could model and 3D print, Marc started designing and 3D modeling the Arabian ceiling. I came on board and helped facilitate the printing with my machine, and it wasn't long after that we received three kits for MakerFarm Prussa i3 8" 3mm ABS printers!!!

Here's a link to see more of the process and get some specific answers you might want to know about this project.

http://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/c..._printed_this/

http://imgur.com/a/s7F1A


The assembly frenzy began immediately and soon our shop was littered with laser cut parts, wires, gears, plastic wrapping, and of course cans of Mt. Dew and pizza. Marc, James, and I worked tirelessly trying to balance getting the printers assembled while monitoring our personal machines (I have a Tinkerine Ditto+ and Marc has his own Prussa 8"). We got everything in order after a few days and turned an old storage room into our very own custom makerspace to house 5 3D printers! We were on Cloud9 and couldn't be happier to be coming to work everyday and night to such a great place to work. With the improved facilities and 5 well calibrated machines, we completed the printing that was remaining in no time!



It was now time to start fabricating the pieces needed for the installation, which included about 8 wooden panels that served as the substrate to mount the 3D printed parts to as well as moulding that was CNC routed for us by a colleague. Once the final color scheme was decided we began painting the panels and priming the parts and moulding. The next step was to gold leaf all the 3D printed parts and the moulding. After everything was brilliantly gold and shiny, several coats of varnish, stains, and laquers were applied to give the ceiling an aged look, which came out to be very effective and beautiful if I may so myself. Everyone in the crew got in on this action, including Tim Dameron and Janelle Lyons who i believe are the only ones I haven't mentioned yet, but it was a very collaborative effort that couldn't have been pulled off so well without the amazing team effort involved. Once all the paint dried, we assembled the entire installation on the floor of our shop to see how it all fit together and looked. Much to our surprise, IT ALL FIT!! Everything was in place and looked amazing, the client was going to love it. The next week, we installed in the clients home over the course of two days. With some expert craftsmanship and ingenuity the installation was complete and stunningly gorgeous.

If you want to download a file that we used to create the center star medallion, please check us out on Thingiverse and get THING266288 for yourself.
http://www.thingiverse.com/austinkbutler/overview
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:266288

You'll have to take my word for it for the time being, I'm having trouble uploading pictures to this post but I'll attach them in comments below. You can also check out my Instagram to see lots of process pictures from this project along with all the other projects I work on among other things...
http://instagram.com/austinkbutler

This was a fantastic project to have been a part of and I can speak for everyone involved that we are looking forward to doing this again very soon! Thank you for taking the time to read this post, I hope you've enjoyed seeing our work. If you're interested in seeing what else we can do check out these projects.

http://aztecscenicdesign.com/

[austinkbutler]

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[austinkbutler]

If you want to see what else we can do, check out this video.

[3D_is_my_LIFE]

Awesome work! Do you guys plan on doing more ceilings for other clients, or was this just a one time thing. I'm curious as to how much this client paid for all that work you guys did.

[austinkbutler]

@3D_is_my_LIFE thank you very much for the praise, we appreciate it very much. This particular installation is in a private residence that we have done work in and are continuing to work in creating another ceiling. I am not able to comment on the cost for the installation but can tell you that the MakerFarm kits were less than $600 a piece and my Ditto+ was $1100 and we probably used about $200+ worth of filament. Thanks, again!

[Larry]

Amazing what can be done with just $200 in filament. One of the biggest misconceptions with 3D printing is that the price of filament is too expensive to make printing worthwhile in many cases. This is far from the truth, and your work shows this!

Awesome job!

[Eddie]

Thanks for sharing this with us Austin! We just did a piece on this at: http://3dprint.com/1547/custom-3d-pr...iling-amazing/

[The_Critter]

This is really great looking. I know when I built my house, it would have cost us probably around $5,000-$10,000 for a ceiling like this. I wonder if this client paid less than that.

[Calvin23]

Very impressive

[aamit81]

WOW, That's some impressive art