Introducing your baby for the first time is an emotional and very special moment. Sending the announcement out to friends and family using cards is common practice these days, but a designer from Materialise has given this concept an original twist with the help of 3D printing. Roman Plaghki, who works as a product developer at Materialise, Belgium, came up with this novel idea when his sister asked him to design a personalised birth card for her unborn baby.
“After some hard thinking work I finally came up with an idea. I asked my sister to send me an ultrasound where you could see the face of the baby when it was 5 to 6 months old. I uploaded the design in Mimics and after some designing I finally got the face right to send it to the printer,” Roman commented.
He started by printing five faces in polyamide, and then used it as a mould for his sister’s baby’s birth cards. “I put the faces under a thin sheet of polystyrene in the (kitchen) oven and used the technique of vacuum forming to create the 3D design. After hours of work I finally got 120 faces for the birth cards.”
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Source: Materialise
