Graphics Reference
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wasteless for metal manufacturing. As printing materials improve, “Net shape”
manufacturing could be a greener way to make things.
Principle nine: Ininite shades of materials
. Combining different raw materi-
als into a single product is dificult using today's manufacturing machines.
Since traditional manufacturing machines carve, cut, or mold things into
shape, these processes can't easily blend together different raw materials. As
multi-material 3D printing develops, we will gain the capacity to blend and
mix different raw materials. New previously inaccessible blends of raw mate-
rial offer us a much larger, mostly unexplored palette of materials with novel
properties or useful types of behaviors.
Principle ten: Precise physical replication.
A digital music ile can be endlessly
copied with no loss of audio quality. In the future, 3D printing will extend this
digital precision to the world of physical objects. Scanning technology and
3D printing will together introduce high resolution shapeshifting between the
physical and digital worlds. We will scan, edit, and duplicate physical objects
to create exact replicas or to improve on the original.
The titanium heel of this shoe was 3D printed in a single piece.
