Real Artist in this field have no repositories like GitHub, Gitlab etc. to my knowledge.
University Professors in this field have sometimes free software on their webpage or upon request.
This is crazy what you say, is the year 1999? How did this happen?
I can tell you only what I observed over the years.
Github presently has over 73 million developers and 4 million organizations, codeberg.org has 10k repositories, gitlab has over 100k organizations. Some of those developers must be 3d printing artists sharing code.
Yes, sure and those developers doing 3D printing or computer graphics in one form or another have also repositories there.
Are you saying people are leaving the maker philosophy of sharing crafting resources because they aren't haven success as entrepreuners?
No I am not saying this. The maker scene as I understood it in the 3D printing field are doing cool projects, no doubt, but they are to my knowledge not self-trained and talented artists who produce artwork, if you accept the term artwork for digital stuff.
That is not my experience. I've rented space in a makerspace, and there was a dense population of self-trained and talented artists there. Things one would never find elsewhere, each rented area completely different from the last. No procedural fractal-styled objects though, nor working robots. Maybe different in other areas.
Those things your friend built sound lots of fun.
Indeed.
Since you are a nice person I can give you a little tip, in case you are interested in. You can program and you know about computer graphics. If you would write an open source or commercial software (standalone app) which can either to 3D texture synthesis[1] or the creation of traditional [2]bas-reliefs, your life will probably change in a cool direction.
[1] Texture Synthesis in 3D is an international Research field, where students or professors only release .pdf documents and some of them have patents ...
I found https://github.com/JorgeGtz/SolidTextureNets from paperswithcode . It's demo code containing a pretrained model from 2020, looks like they didn't remember to specify a license.
3D bas-reliefs are also, if you study this topic a very interesting market. I developed years ago a technique to do them, which gave excellent results, which commercial or open source software could never archive and only 3D Artist, capable of modeling 3D bas-relief had the same results. I had also a tutorial for that (for free) never made a dime with that and when I lost it (no back-up) I received internationally often requests how to do that. You can check the quality of them at my behance Gallery.
What do you mean by 3D bas-relief? I imagine a bas-relief as a surface with indentations that appear like a picture. Wouldn't this be a pretty simple task to generate?