The Age Of Infinite Treasures

I was always very happy about 3D printing, I taught myself precision modeling.

And I spent countless at the microscopic level, in one of my 3D printed wallet prototypes.

From the design perspective in my program, I was about the height, of the thickness of the credit card.

I carefully studied precision design, chamfering corners that no 3D printer could ever print in such detail.

I chose wallet design, because it was fascinating and simple, I was able to mix it with fancy thread wrapped elastic bands.

And I actually own thick rubber money clips now, which can hold my my wallets together and make them stylish and amazing.

Think of this as a composite wallet design, Rubber and PLA, the materials that 3D printers print in.

But, I detected, that there would be no stopping is f I continued.

3D modeling and printing, is just about a 10 on my fascinating scale.

I bravely pushed myself away, from my fantastic wallet prototypes.

And I dove into jeweler making, including spending a whopping $8 dollars on baroque motifs.

I imagined an intricate solid brass ring, the baroque meshes were imperfect, good for games, but not for precision.

They were baroque meshes worth 8 dollars, and profoundly educational.

As I was sitting down to create precision engineered brass jeweler, which I could sell on the internet, under a print on demand model.

Basically, a well known company offers a storefront, and only prints and casts when a sale is made.

Something even more incredible captured my attention, in a way, the other spectrum of 3D printing: 3D scanning!

What if instead of modeling a ring, I made it out of clay, scanned it tidied up, and put it up for sale.

And as I was entertaining this rather incredible thought, looking at jewelry photos, pendants and rings.

I came across a photo of an ancient artifact, a fat little figurine of a prehistoric dame.

And the idea of copying an ancient artifact, and turning it into a pendant or ring, or earring, stole my heart.

A precision made lion head ring, is wonderful, especially if it comes with a matching wallet and bracelet.

But, oh my goodness, a perfect replica of prehistoric mammoth carving, turned into a necklace, earrings, or bracelet doodads, that is special.

Suddenly the Venus figurine we are all familiar with, stops being a museum piece, and becomes a little keepsake.

What was life like back then, I suspect the ladies were the leaders of the tribes, they were the most admired, and the strongest and wisest.

And on top of that you can now hold the mammoth figurines in your hand, these maybe family treasures that warriors made for their kids.

As they needed to train them, in the art of taking down a gigantic mammoth.

This was no longer a product for sale, this was now something even I wanted to own.

And then, just to make things even more interesting, and I mean it, I am a huge fan.

I discovered that museums collect prehistoric knives, and making even plastic replicas of those, still has me in awe.

These are teal weapons, tools of great warriors.

They look so primitive, antler handles, quartz or obsidian blades, what a treat.

And again I ended up, in danger, of never returning from this incredible world.

And I pushed myself away, and said, I am a computer programmer.

My time is precious, and if there is any 3D printing to be done, especially the base components for jewelry that I decorate with artefacts.

It has to be done through programming, boolean 2D programming, and I left that standing as a promise to myself.

Returning to my studies of Visual Programming Languages, with a focus on building them.

Earlier this week, I came across ComfyUI, a Visual Programming language for Artificial Intelligence Models.

Before I knew it, mus curiosity had me eagerly awaiting, something that shouldn't exist.

An artificial intelligence, that creates 3D models from 2D pictures, this is all open source and free.

I dragged Venus on the image node, and clicked run.

20 seconds later, there she was, fully 3D.

I dropped a modern ring, and a prehistoric knife, and a ton of other artifacts, they all transformed into 3D objects, in seconds.

And then, in all this incredible, speechless confusion, I realized, that I don’t need to design a base bracelet to hols the little replicas.

I can just tell the AI to generate the pendant, and earring images, then convert it into 3D and work with that.

Finally, my computer crashed, because I connected the image generator, to the 3D mapper.

And told it to start creating images of bracelets, that are studded with famous ancient arifacts.

I don’t know how to tell the computer to unload one AI model, and load the next.

Though I learned a lot about linux RAM compression, and large nvram swapfiles, I have a 126GM one waiting for a large model.

I went to sleep, wondering, how is this possible?

What is this world we live in, that I can realistically program a production line of prehistorically themed jewelry.

After a few hours wake up to creations, no one had ever seen.

I wonder if perhaps the 3D prototypes would not be precious enough, to pay a proper jewelry designer to model them by hand, and get serious about it.

Still for knives, and my personal favorite, cowboy belt buckles, you don’t need much more than that.

Print it out, put in in plaster, melt out the PLA, melt some copper in your furnace and cast it.

For all the artifacts lost to history, even a Venus stature purely generated by AI is a wonder and a treasure.

What an age to live in, and come the day Humanity takes to the starts, that will not be nearly as fascinating as our discovery of generative AI.