I don’t see established companies to do that.
Autodesk is racing ahead with 123D.
Alibre (owned by 3D Systems) has the Personal Editions and the free Xpress Edition and is sold together with the @Bits_From_Bytes and the Cube 3D printers. With very good tutorials and books.
What company do you see ignoring this?
PS:
No, such tools don’t exist. That’s one of the fundamental problems. There ARE NO working converters that output OpenSCAD and there ARE NO working converters that take any meaninful STL and make it into e.g. a STEP file.
STEP, IGES, AD_PRT, … all are parametric and of cause contain the whole parametised history of how not only the objects ot the assemblies in serveral configurations where created. Each and every step ready to be graphically edited at any moment. Parameters and their formulas easily accessible in one place and valid across multiple parts of one assembly.
OpenSCAD is what html1.0 is to the web2.0 .
It doen’t SHOW me how the result was achieved. It gives me a (usually uncommented and unstructured) sourcecode to work through.
Learning OpenSCAD is EXACTLY “learning an obtuse program”. The learning curve of 123D was 30 minutes. Alibre Design a day. Some others also a day. Autocad maybe a month.
That a lot of people are using OpenSCAD does not mean that it’s any good e.g. compared to the 2 programs mentioned above. FreeCAD is on the way but still not complete or usable enough.
They arn’t innovating this area though. Seems more like being pushed into it by the likes of google sketchup. For instance Autodesk bought 123 catch, I can’t see them ever bringing that if it wasn’t already out there. They’ve released part functional versions as a gateway to their pro apps, but the point that they are missing is that most people arn’t ever going to make that transition. The aim shouldn’t be to bring users into CAD but to demystify 3D modelling and allow it in a way that is natural to the user.
In the article he says anyone can type but CAD is a white collar skill. He assumes that the skill of the user is the barrier but in fact it is the ease of use of the software. Children can draw or model things, it does come naturally if you are putting it in the right terms.
What would you “innovate”? It’s usable by a lot more people. You can easily get it and the tutorials are geared at giving an average user a quick way of getting started.
Of cause the engine was already there.
It’s a childproof interface to some Autodesk Inventor like engine. I don’t see how you can make something like CAD even more accessible then that.
A no no amount of childproof interfacing is going to teach the users mechanical engineering. No UI can tell you that you are designing the wrong object for your purpose. Where it will break, that a 5mm shaft will not fit into a 5mm hole without a hammer and never turn, that your axis needs a bearing on both sides or the bearing will wear out ahead of time,…
Children can draw things but they can’t engineer things.
That does NOT come naturally. It comes with serveral years of dedicated learning.
A cellphone-case is not mechanical design, is hardly even CAD if you already start with a blank that has the right dimensions and allows for shrinking of material and for taking your phone out without a crowbar. It’s trivial 3D graphics.
That’s why I stated that we need wizards. All the engineering should be done by experts and the end user should only change non critical part of the design (a little customization touch)
I’m inclined to agree with the article, this devices are awesome hobbies. It’s going to be a long time before they are as common as a microwave. When they are, all the technical details will have been abstracted to a few choices and options - auto everything, not callipers. 3ders are people with time and fascination, that’s a small niche. Print services are much more likely to be the way people encounter 3d printing.
So your wizards are your idea of the missing innovation?
Some kind of AutodeskPlayer that can read a design created with Inventor and give you just the parameters, their names, values and descriptions, a preview and allow output in a few reasonable formats? (e.g. STL and some other format that knows real circles.)
As a print service that is easier to implement.
A service that allows you to specify the parameters uppon ordering a part to be printed/manufactured, possibly cleaned, assembled, painted, packaged and shipped.
(It hardly ever ends after having printed a single part.)
Designers being enabled to offer individualised manifestations of their own designs to people.
@Marcus_Wolschon I’ll have to partially disagree with you on the “children can’t engineer” things : children are instinctively following the most basic scientific principle : try something, see how it works, try again and again until you get it right.
Since 3d printing enables very short iterative cycles : ie design, print, check if it works, modify , print again etc it enables even people who are not engineers to do workable things after a while.
Also why can no UI tell me the things you mention ? If you have some way of specifying “I want this part to fit into that part at that position”, of course the Ui can tell you it won’t fit:)
I might be naive on this one, but I am absolutely certain, given time, that we will see the emergence of adapted tools/software.
If anyone had told me 10 years ago “you will have multiple 3d printers in your home and you will be able to do robot parts, gears, etc” I would not have believed them, and yet, here we are!
There are so many things missing on personal manufacturing systems. The main problem with the technology is standardization. There are many efforts put on the subject. However due to missing synergy the progress is limited.
Because it’s specifying such configurations with all the constraints you want (how easy shall it turn? What material is this? How long must this last? What load does this carry? How far does this turn? Does it get wet? dirty? hot? frozen?) is real difficult.
It also requires you to model all parts you don’t print very precisely.
It requires you to know a great deal about your printer and what post-processing you’ll do after printing.
(painting? cutting a thread? sanding? how much sanding? lubrication? PTFE or oil?..)
We’re talking about dumbing finite element simulation down to a teenager’s level.
I don’t say it’s impossible but it’s a herculian task and simply won’t happen any time soon.
@Marcus_Wolschon that’s what the iterative process is for. The reason you have to be so careful to specify all that is a) because you don’t want the part to fail quickly and b) because the design cycle is measured in weeks or months. Nobody’s saying that you will be designing parts at home to go into the steering column on your car, or the functional part of a heart-lung machine — in much the same ways as DTP enabled people to send pretty family newsletters and school papers, and not full-on publish books or newspapers or magazines. Initially, anyway.
Then you know it failed. Not how to fix it, how it could have been made with much less material in the first place and why it failed.
Joe Average will probably stop at printing a read made phone-case and self-designed fixtures.
Hobbyists with time and dedication will do the robots, tools and simple mechanics and professionals with such a printer at home will do the real impressive mechanics.
That everyone can get a 3d printer allows for the first and second group to exist but doesn’t teach the first one how to suddenly design a new coffee machine.
That’s the point where hype meets reality.
I think consumers are more likely to purchase other people’s designs and print them online, in-store, or at home. Replacement parts will be a killer app for that. The other thing I don’t hear much talk about is 3D scanning. I see huge potential there.
I haven’t seen enough advances in simplification and cleanup of scanned meshes. Certainly no way to get these huge meshes into CAD. Even handling them in a mesh editor is tiresome at best.
Given the amount of cleaning up to do, you’re currently still faster and get a much easier to use result when using a caliper.
I’m teaching the kids with Tinkercad You’d be amazed at how adept they are at manipulating 3d objects in a 2d representational viewport; it’s almost like they’ve had thousands of hours practicing that…
I partly agree with Randall’s view, but he is writing from the standpoint of investing. The above vigorous discussion shows me that 3D printing is at about the stage that cars were in about 1900: beginning to really take off; a few companies, but mostly hobbyists in garages, without much standardization at first.
My grandmother never learned to drive, because she viewed cars as too unreliable and fleeting, and thought folks would soon get back to horses.
Right now, I wouldn’t invest in a 3D printer company, but I will closely and raptly follow these folks in their garages-- I believe this is the future, but it won’t follow the patterns of the past.
i think the article has some good points but i didnt even know what a 3d printer really was, 20 months ago, yet i acquired one 13 months ago, taught myself CAD in 2 months, and made enough things with it to convince 2 friends to buy their own printers-niether of whom had any interest in 3d printing beforehand.
I think the missing variable in his analysis is that there are alot of people who dont know what they dont know, i.e., there are many many people who wont make, using his example, “replacement chess pieces”…they will make a new type of game (in relation to the chess metaphor) that has no relation to chess and is only possible because of this technology.
companies that worry about consumers creating ripoffs of their products are soooo gonna be screwed, because i dont believe people will “pirate”, say, the iphone design, they will design a device that is more personal and commercially unviable. this is what will make the next genration of designers, most of whom, i predict, will be internet-taught, get into this new world and evolve it.
You’d be amazed at how adept they are at manipulating 3d objects in a 2d representational viewport; it’s almost like they’ve had thousands of hours practicing that… 