Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Plastic Dresses

With all the great products that can be made with 3-D printing, clothing is the newest product that can now be printed. Nervous System has created a novel process that allows a 3-D printed dress to move and sway like real fabric. The software that Nervous System uses is called Kinetics. Kinetics combines origami techniques with novel approaches to 3-D printing. The dress starts out as a model in CAD, where Kinetics breaks it down into various triangular segments. Once the designer is satisfied, algorithms add hinges to the triangles uniting the garment into a single piece and compress the design into the smallest possible shape to optimize the printing process.
The plastic that is used are cleaned and dyed to various colors of interlocking bricks of plastic. This dress flows and moves as a person does various motions. For Designer Jessica Rosekrantz, she made sure that the 3-D printed dress was comfortable instead of it being a plastic suit of armor. The model's body is 3-D scanned to ensure a perfect fit.
The problem with this dress is that it costs $3000 dollars and does not exactly keep a person warm. It was very interesting to think that designing can now be done on CAD, instead of hand drawing or experimenting with other fabrics. 

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