Project Hail Mary Official STL

The reach of 3D printing is expanding, and not just in our own community. For example, take Project Hail Mary. Hopefully you've seen the movie -- if not, stop everything and correct that oversight immediately. It's that good.

 

And on the home page of their website, you'll find a little bit in the bottom right corner that says "3D MODEL DOWNLOAD NOW." Click that and you'll get the STL for this little guy:

 

Since you've seen the movie (you did drop everything and go see the movie, right?) you'll recognize it. It's cool. It's fun. But what's more important, from my point of view, is that it was just a little giveaway to promote a movie, one which requires a certain level of technology on the user's part. Admittedly they are aiming at a particularly geeky audience -- us! -- who are more likely to have, or have access to, a 3D printer than the average movie-goer is. We have our own printers, friends with printers, makerspaces, 3D print bureaus, and so on. But most important, there was no big hype about it -- just "here, have a movie thing" much like, ten years ago, they'd have a nice cast photo to print on your inkjet printer.

 

I've been following 3D printing since my local Sam's Club had some early filament printer for $1k. Given that their demo machine was printing a spaghetti monster at the time -- that's what it's called when layers of a print lose adhesion and the print becomes, well, spaghetti -- I wasn't very impressed! It's taken a while, but it seems that it's now arrived -- that it's as much of an expectation that a movie-goer might print a little movie prop now as that they might print a picture of Rocky (not the boxer!) ten years ago. Which I, personally, think is pretty cool.

 

And see Project Hail Mary. It really is good.