As part of Pixar’s exhibition at the NYC MoMa, we created a rather large zoetrope of some of our Toy Story characters. You can see a movie of the thing in action here. It’s really very cool and nifty.
Don’t know what a Zoetrope is? Wikipedia does, and is happy to tell you..
The figurines in this animation were all designed using our regular animation system, and then “printed” using a 3D rapid prototyping machine (I wasn’t really involved with the project, so I have few details on the machine itself). Such machines are very, very cool, but are well beyond the means of ordinary humans like myself to buy. It is then with some interest that I heard about the Fab@Home project, which is an attempt to create an open source design for such a rapid protoyping machine that individuals can build themselves.
Too cool not to think about.