Rietveld

Juicy Salif. Beautiful but unusable.

Sorry for the late reply. The 2nd semester starts indeed at February 6th. There might be some master introduction however for the people starting. This could be in the week before that, but I am not sure about this.

I'm a Strategic Product Design student at Delft University, and I think it doesn't matter that much if you start in January. Some courses are however follow-ups, in which you could use the knowledge gained during the autumn semester of you first year of your masters. This will make your first semester a bit harder perhaps, since some of the techniques available are explained during the autumn semester, but the second one easier. In the end, you will have had the same amount of courses, lectures, so there is no difference in that, it's just a matter of order of courses. In the second year there is basically no difference, since you are working towards your graduation by that time. Note that the Masters have changed some of the courses since last year, so that there might be a change since I took the Master courses, but overall, I think you should be fine starting in January.

I am using Rhinoceros as well as Solidworks. Rhino has already some good tutorials included in their program in the Help section. You could try those, and see if it works. I'm not sure on books however that are good though.

There are a couple of different materials used, depending on the 3d - printing machine. The cheapest usually is to use polyamide or a kind of composite. Besides this, you will also need a support material sometimes, depending on the model that you want to print. This could be either the same material in powder form, in which several layers are bound (stepwise, like described by Cyberdemon) and then solidified, so the surrounding powder supports the model and can then be removed afterwards. Globally, the machine would work like this: Another option is having a liquid, which the same material can be used as a support. A 'beehive' like structure is then used, which van be removed after production. Finally, there is another option in which two different materials are used to build it directly on the platform. One can be removed easily by putting it in contact with a kind of chemical. This one is used at our faculty., with a precision of a 5 microns. I am currently using this one for a small model of a car I modeled in Rhino.