3D Models

For many years, I’ve been sporadically dabbling in creating 3D models; for reasons that are probably obvious to anybody who knows me I used OpenSCAD and saved my projects in git, which made them at least somewhat public.

However, SCAD sources in a git repository aren’t the most convenient way to get a 3D model, and for a long time I never had a consistent way to publish “binaries” for my models: some have been added to my old website, some to my craft patterns site, but it was always an ad-hoc thing.

Then two things happened more or less at the same time.

One was me finding out that slic3r had been definitely removed from Debian. I know it was going to happen, and I postponed thinking about it as long as I could, but eventually I had to move over to PrusaSlicer, whose packaging is in better shape.

The other was that lately I’ve been doing a bit of lucet, and talking about it online, and I’m really happy with the shape of the lucet I’ve designed and printed, the one in the picture at the beginning of this post, and while there are other models available, I wanted to make it more convenient for people to also get mine.

Since PrusaSlicer did look still maintained upstream in a way that doesn’t feel like at danger of immediate enshittification, I considered making an account on Printables, and asked on the Fediverse if somebody knew something bad about the company behind it, as it’s getting more an more common these days.

Apparently nobody did, but in the thread somebody mentioned that there is a federated platform for publishing 3D models, called manyfold !

I didn’t want to add “self host a(nother) web thing”, especially not one that is not in Debian, to my list of projects, but I did create an account on a public instance: @valhalla@3dprint.social <https://3dprint.social/creators/valhalla> and started publishing models, both a selection of old ones and a few new ones I designed in the last few days, since I was in a 3D printing mindset.

Then I decided that since nobody had serious objections to it, I could also create an account on printables, as that’s probably more easily accessible to the general public.

I have been somewhat slower at publishing models on the latter, but I expect that eventually most of what I design will end up on both platforms; I still have a few older models I want to add, and a few ideas for new models to make, then I guess stuff will slow down, and only get new ones now and then, as that’s how I usually approach hobbies.

Of course, the self-hosted git repository is not going away: that’s still the canonical location for my models, with all of the non-self-hosted options as a convenience option.