3DP Applications

Birth Card Application

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