Eric Haines is engineer at Autodesk. In his spare time, he develops Mineways, a software that lets you 3D print Minecraft worlds and characters. He does it just for fun. His program is fully open source and free. Users share their Minecraft 3D prints on the Mineways Flickr pool.

This episode is about someone’s passion for creativity and learning. It’s also a great introduction on how to launch an open source side project taking advantage of 3D printing online services. Mineways exports STL files from Minecraft and prepare them so that they can be send to 3D printing services such as Shapeways or Sculpteo (read the story of one of these 3D prints).

Mineways is also a great educational tool that can be used by young programmers and kids to learn about STEM, using gaming and 3D printing. A community of developers and users has also emerged from the project, leading to creative uses of his software.

In this episode, we also talk about how to use the sandstone material (multicolour composite material from Z Corporation, now owned by the giant 3D Systems), which is one of the few to allow for complex multicolour 3D printing.

And remember: cute is cheaper.

For those of you who want to meet other 3D printing enthusiasts, Eric talks about his experience with Artisan Asylum, a huge makerspace near Boston. We also share a few ideas on service bureau vs. personal 3D printers.

Eric will give a workshop for kids on April 12 at Parts and Crafts event in Somerville, MA. You can register here. Check also free Udacity classes instructed by Eric Haines on Interactive 3D Graphics and How to Create Virtual Words. Seeing how clear and interesting he is in this podcast, I’m sure this class is a great experience.

Go on Mineways website for the latest version.

How to listen to the 3D Printing Society Podcast?

As usual you can find the podcast on iTunes, RSS feed, archive.org and now more. Thanks to Sacha, a super cool listener of the podcast who reached out to me, I added the podcast on Stitcher, which accepted it right away!

Let me know how you listen to podcast in the comments, I’ll add the podcast on your favorite app.

Happy Minecraft 3D printing everyone!

Credit photo homepage: Matteo G.P. Flora