EVE Technology Lab

About 3D Printing in General
As there were various questions on Facebook, even requests for step by step guides, I'll start by introducing the technique used for printing the ships. It is called plastic extrusion. This technique has the following basic operation principle: a thin plastic filament (it's like wire, just without the copper in it) is led into a moving printing head (called extruder), which has 3 degrees in freedom: it can move left, right, forward, backward, up and down. This printhead has a small heated chamber at around 200C which melts the plastic filament. The molten plastic flows out on a small hole on the bottom on the head (called nozzle) and almost immediately freezes. Below the head there is a print bed and the printer is building the target object on top of this bed layer by layer: it prints a layer of 0.3mm, then moves the head up, prints another 0.3mm layer, and so on.

This technique has several constraints on what it can do and what it can't. Let's start with the precision. While the motors driving the head are pretty exact (about 15 microns in precision), the smallest layer width and feature size they can print depends on the size of the "hole" on the extruder. It feels a bit like if you were to draw something using a yellow markup pen: you can position your pen very precisely on a paper, it will still be very difficult to solve a crossword puzzle using it. Because of this, there will always be visible "layers" on an object printed by such a 3D printer. This problem can be fought by using an extruder with a smaller hole on it, which results in smaller possible feature size, but it brings new problems and results in MUCH slower printing speeds.

Another limitation is that you cannot mix colors. There is only one thread of filament flowing into the extruder, which means one color. There are extruder designs which work with 2 print heads (called dual extruder) but they don't actually mix colors either, they can simply switch between the colors very quickly.

The third limitation is coming from the fact that an object is built layer by layer, on top of a flat bed. The problem is that no printer can print on top of thin air; this means that you can't just print anything; when the printer is printing the 10th layer, you have to make sure that there is something on the 9th layer so that the 10th layer can stick to it. While in theory this means that the only thing you should be able to print was blocks and pyramids, it's fortunately not true. The printer can "cheat" on the side of objects and create walls with an outwards slope of about 45 degrees. It can also create "bridges" between two walls because the plastic that's being extruded freezes so fast that it does not have time to flow down into the pit. The maximum length of bridge is is limited: you can print bridges if the trench is not larger than 1cm; otherwise, the bridge will bend.

Getting hold of a 3D printer
Most people build their 3D printers themselves. Depending on the level of hardcoreness, they do this either by trying to obtain all the parts themselves, or they order a complete or partial kit for a printer from a vendor and then assemble it themselves. I have assembled my printer from a kit and can't say that it was too easy. If you are lazy, I am quite sure you can find completely assembled printers as well for a couple more hundred dollars. This will save you the time spent on soldering and cutting and assembling but you'll still need to spend time regularly on maintenance and fine tuning.
I recommend getting a kit and building the printer yourself. If you are working off a kit, it's really not rocket science. Assembling it might take a lot of time because there are lots of things to do: you usually start by assembling the frame, then do the extruder, the electronics, the wiring. The most complicated part is the soldering the electronics, wires and thermistors; if you don't know how to do this, you better ask for some help.
I was a complete noob to soldering and mechanical construction when I started to build my printer, I immediately asked one of my skilled friends to come over and help with the complicated parts; spending about 5-6 hours a week building it I needed about 1-1.5 months to assemble it completely. I guess if you're a pro and have a lot of routine soldering electronics and fine tuning mechanics, you should be able to build it in less than a week.

The kits can be ordered online. Makerbot is selling the kits for their printers on makerbot.com. Reprap printers (Mendel and Huxley) are less specific, so the models people have built of them are all different. You should consult the RepRap wiki on the subject, they maintain a list of vendors selling kits and parts required for their designs. I've found 2 reliable companies which have perfected their designs and offer kits for sale: eMaker (UK) and TechZone (US). They both have their own Mendel and Huxley kits which have barely anything in common. Both companies provide pretty good assembly guides. I have an emaker Huxley and I am quite happy with it.

Sources:
http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap
http://www.emakershop.com
http://www.techzonecom.com
http://www.makerbot.com

Printing EVE Online ships
As already described in the introduction, the plastic extrusion technology has some limitations which pretty much limits what you can print in one piece and what you can't. Basically, every model you print has to be printed from bottom to top, so it has to have a completely flat base, and while you can print walls that are slightly going outwards, you cannot have things hanging down from them. You also cannot have features on the models like antennas sticking out sideways in the air. You need something to support both ends.
Because if this, printing EVE Online ships is more than just exporting them from the game and hitting the print button. There is a lot of manual modeling and creativity needed to figure out how to cut up a particular model and possibly modify it so that it can be printed and then glued together. I'll leave this part to your own imagination, but I'll give you some hints about the software you need to do this.

First, you need TriExporter, made by Selvin. You can find it on the EVE forums. After pointing this tool to your EVE Online installation folder, it allows you to browse the EVE client's resource files and export files from it. Using TriExporter you have to locate the model file for the ship you want to print. EVE is using GR2 format for storing its models, so you have to look for .gr2 files with interesting names.

After getting hold of the gr2, you have to convert it to some more common format so that you can load it into your favorite CAD / 3D modeler program. Luckily, there is a command line tool called evegr2toobj, which lets you convert gr2 files to the much more common OBJ format. OBJ is a great format because it's so popular that even children should be taught to read it in pre-school. Evegr2toobj can be found on eve-files.com

After having your favorite ship in OBJ format, you have to start the process of cutting it up into printable pieces. You will need some 3D modeler program to do this. There are several open source modelers you can use, for example Art of Illusion (for beginners) or Blender (for nerds). I personally used a commercial product, a really old version of Lightwave3D for the modeling, because this was what I was messing with when I was a kid and wanted to create animations of USS Enterprise shooting at Shadow ship from Babylon 5.
After you found the tool of your choice, you will start manipulating the ship model with boolean operations. You will cut it in half several times in several ways along various axis. You will have to remove antennas and smaller guns, because they are too small to be printed anyways. You will have to reduce the polygon resolution here and there, because your printer will attempt to print the details even if it can't, and you will end up with ugly, unrecognizable surfaces. If a model has overhangs and you want to avoid splitting it into even more parts, you will have to modify it so that an overhang is not an overhang any more. Its really up to you how you do it, the point is that you end up with spaceship parts with a flat base and no overhangs / hanging parts.

After you managed to cut up the model, you will need to convert its parts to STL format because that's what the printer software takes. I use MeshLab for this, which is a free, open sourced 3d file format converter which understands every major format plus STL.

Once you have the printable parts in STL format, all that's left to do is to use your printer's software (Printrun / ReplicatorG) to print to. It will take care of the layering and the movement calculations and stuff.

Once the parts are printed, you might have to fix them here and there using sandpaper, then simply glue the parts together, and if you did everything right, you have a nice model of the ship you can hang from the chandelier. Or print a stand for them and put them on your desk.

References:
TriExporter: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=269677
EveGr2ToObj: http://eve-files.com/search.dxd?search=evegr2toobj
MeshLab: http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/
Art of Illusion: http://aoi.sourceforge.net/
Blender: http://www.blender.org/

Awesome models , great description, it's a shame that I don't have a 3d printer.