Finally setting up to shoot some stereoscopic 3D print melting, I heard a loud bang. One of the lights had exploded. Luckily there was safety glass in front of it as there was little left of the lightbulb.

The idea is to shoot timelapse footage of 3D printed objects melting. Which of course destroys the object, so I can not have lamps quitting on me while shooting. So I changed my setup and will be using the LED lights I had bought during the pandemic to light the green screen I use to record virtual lectures.

The big tube in the picture above is intended to vent to outside. I am using an old computer fan in hopes of getting rid of the fumes that escape the PLA plastic as it melts. I think I may need something stronger, or simply more fans.

For this test I build a little tree out of the scaffolding I had removed to clean up 3D prints. I wanted to record a time lapse of the material melting. For this I am using an old heat gun I once used to strip paint off our porch.

Before the light blew I had hit a different snag. Turns out the stop motion software DragonFrame can only record time lapse sequences using still cameras, and I am using webcams. So in stead I set up OBS Studio to record the images from both cameras side by side, at the lowest available frame rate of 10fps.

I had wanted to shoot at more like one frame a second but it the plastic melts a lot faster than I had anticipated and 10fps may not even be enough. Here is a video of the result (not stereoscopic obviously) playing back the video at 24fps:

The process will need some tweaking, but I think I am getting somewhere. Baby steps, but steps nonetheless.