Turning thoughts digital

Test piece in Meshlab

Working on my Digital Art Commission and getting a headache. The biggest problem is not coming up with ideas, but getting those ideas into a form that a 3D printer can work with. Anything you want to make has to be digitised and it has to have dimensions in three axes.

If you can imagine it, you can probably print it, but first you have to master a 3D design program. There are many sophisticated tools such as AutoCAD (used by architects and engineers) but, as beginners, we were introduced to Google Sketchup.  It's free and it's clever, but ultimately it's clunky.  If we had six months to do this, I'd work my way through it, but I have to produce a design by 10th August.

Can you re-model objects from the real world? Yes. There's a fantastic piece of free software that goes with cheap kit for home 3D scanning http://www.david-laserscanner.com/, but those scans still have to be stitched and cleaned using a clever but rather daunting piece of free software - MeshLab.

Can you import raw data and visualise it? Yes. That's what I'm trying to do, again using MeshLab. But turning numbers into objects can't be done at the touch of a button. I've needed a lot of help from a programmer friend, and we're not there yet. It's alien territory for artists as there are no test prints, no maquettes - nothing to touch. You work on a digital file and the next thing you see is your finished object. I guess that's why it's known as rapid prototyping.

I'm one of 30 artists participating in the Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission 2012, in partnership with the Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing (CALM) at Exeter University.