In case you missed it, our CEO Bre Pettis and Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson had a wide ranging discussion at World Maker Faire last weekend about the Maker movement, the possibility of a new industrial revolution, and MakerBot’s place in those.

You readers of this blog over the last few weeks have been incredible in sharing your thoughts and criticisms with us. Sorry to be so quiet lately while we manage the launch of new machines, software, and a retail store. Let’s get this conversation going again. Here’s the topic:

A central part of Chris’ presentation is the analogy between desktop 3D printing (what we do at MakerBot) and desktop publishing (the explosion of word processing on personal computers). At about the 13:50 mark, Chris says that the new tools have…

made us all into designers. In the way that desktop publishing made us all into publishers…we now have access to design tools. And this means we’re going to have to get good at it. Fortunately it’s getting easy.

Chris goes on to discuss the Autodesk 123D family of applications, including 123D Catch for scanning through pictures. MakerBot owners have used 123D Catch quite a bit for capturing things in real life, and this blogger has done a few *pretty impressive* captures of fire hydrants and siamese drain pipes. It really is easier than you think.

But once you have your scan, altering it in a design program is another question. Following Chris’ analogy, the ability to create nice documents came from simple icons and menu items in word processing programs. Throwing together quick web pages became possible with programs like Adobe Dreamweaver. In the world of 3D design, what are the easy generation tools that will turn your neighbor into a manufacturer?

Perhaps there will always be some push and pull here. Programs like Tinkercad do an amazing job of walking novices through the basics of designing on a computer. If you need more proof, check out our series of Tinkercad tutorials from last week. But just as there is a big gap between your average Dreamweaver user and an expert web designer/developer, there will always be a spectrum of 3D design expertise.

So here’s my analogy: Thingiverse is the Facebook of 3D design. Back in the day of personal homepages (remember when people had their own Geocities pages?), only the motivated person bothered to make a nice page and actually maintain it. Chris says we have to get good at 3D design, but in fact, not that many people ever got good at web design. When MySpace came along, it was a big relief for those of us who didn’t want to bother with html. But MySpace was still fairly complicated, and Facebook took the stress out of compiling a personal homepage. Facebook just passed the 1 billion user mark. Anyone have a good count on personal homepages?

Thingiverse makes it easy to get designs and follow instructions, even for those people who have no interest in learning 3D design tools. I mean, they’re missing out on half the fun, but most of us miss out on half the fun of most things, am I right?

Okay, that’s all. We’ll have more on the blog now.

 

Photo credit: Industry of the Ordinary

More and more, we see methods of 3D printing popping up in the art world, and we are lucky to have great relationships with so many daring MakerBot artists out in the wild.

One of these is Tom Burtonwood, a co-founder of the What It Is gallery in Chicago. For another exhibition initiated by the artists collectively known as Industry of the Ordinary (and ordinarily known as Adam Brooks and Mat Wilson), Tom created a unique piece of 3D scanning and printing that has since been featured on Thingiverse. The exhibition is being dubbed a “mid-career retrospective”, so it is fitting that Industry of the Ordinary invited others to produce their portraits.

Tom’s piece, “Two Heads are Better than One”, was made on his MakerBot Replicator and uses scans of the artists’ heads from Autodesk’s program 123D Catch, stitched together into a model using Netfabb. Merging the heads together on each bead of the necklace celebrates the duo’s collaboration over the years. There are four different beads, each showing the heads three times, strung together with a white leather cord. As you can see in the photos below, these are beautiful scans and prints, showing how far we’ve come in using MakerBots for art.

There are two things to know here. First is that you can see the whole exhibition yourself and get a feel for 3D printed art (details bel0w). Tom’s Improbable Objects collection is also an incredible exploration of 3D printing as an artistic medium.

The second thing to know is that Tom is encouraging the community to find the necklace on Thingiverse and upload new derivatives. This could be any variation on the necklace, or a new use of the head scans.

Industry of the Ordinary: 2003-2013 Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
Chicago Cultural Center 4th floor
78 E. Washington Street, Chicago
August 17, 2012-February 17, 2013

Sid Meier of Civilization (and many other games) visited Baltimore this past weekend.  He was a judge for the Art Bytes Hackathon at the Walter’s Art Museum in Baltimore, MD.  This is the second hackathon I’ve attended at an art museum, and after the successes at both of those, I can only imagine other museums will want to host them too.

One of the problems that many of the museum curators wanted teams to focus on was helping visitors find their way around.  The Walter’s Museum is made up of four separate buildings that are connected with complex staircases and passageways.  One of the teams who won the way finding award was The Waltours team and you can check out their progress here.    The winner of the ‘Wiz Bang’ award was team Time Machine who developed an truly amazing augmented reality app to turn back time on the sculptures in the museum to see what they looked like before natural weathering took its toll.  One team developed Frame which provides historical context alongside the gallery pieces.  Another developed Tanzaku, which allows you to interact with and leave messages for other people at the museum about galleries, collections, and specific works of art.

Sid presented the ‘Fun Award’ to me and Thomas for our work with the MakerBot.  We were able to use 123D Catch and Meshmixer to capture dozens of pieces at the museum.  Thomas and I were able to clean up and share most of them here on Thingiverse and more will be uploaded soon.  Check out our restoration work by looking at the digital rhinoplasty we performed!  Thomas Troy is only 14 and had never used any 3d modeling tools before this weekend, nor had he ever used a MakerBot.  Here is Thomas with his new Serapis swag.

We gave Sid Meier a model of the front cover of the first Civilization game, which I made with The Replicator and boy was he happy.  You can make your own by downloading Cover of Sid Meier’s Civilization.

 

Next Friday night, MakerBot will host a very special MUGNY (MakerBot User Group NYC) meeting at the beautiful Marymount School Fifth Avenue Campus right across from the Met Museum. Marymount is an an independent, Catholic all-girls day school that actually has a rocking fab lab full of MakerBots — so this is a special pleasure for us. What’s more, this venue allows us to host a special RSVP only (grab tickets quick here!) opportunity to do a walking tour through the Met Museum so that a number of the artists can share about their derivative works right in front of the originals!

At 6:30pm, MakerBot Operators, Thingiverse Makers, and the curious public will cross the street and join us at the Marymount School for refreshments, snacks, the latest community show-and-tell, and inspiring keynote talks featuring the Met MakerBot Hackathon and the Capture Your Town project that emerged: a chance for all of our community to dive in and digitize buildings, artwork, and other objects that they want to share with the world about where they live.

MakerBot User Group meetings are monthly meet ups for members of our world-wide community to get together locally to share what they have been up to with their MakerBots. The events typically include a featured guest or keynote arranged beforehand, and tend to attract a large crowd of those from the general public as well as those actively involved with MakerBot and Thingiverse — all are welcome!

Check back early next week for further details about the Hackathon artists, digital archivists, and MakerBot community members who will be speaking — and reserve your “5:00pm Pre-Event Demo and Art Talk at the Met Museum” and “MUGNY Event @ Marymount School” RSVP tickets so that you can receive instructions for attending this very special evening.

Thanks again to inspiring maker and educator Jaymes Dec for connecting us with the Marymount School.

Sweet! Another 123D Catch tutorial video, and this one shows how you can use the same process to make a model out of paper or card stock slices.

Photos are a century-old invention that store 2-dimensional memories. Isn’t it time technology improved upon it?

 

The line above got me thinking about the possibility of capturing a memory in 3D. How nice would it be to have a 3D model of your child’s school portrait?

 

Free Art & Technology (okay…F.A.T.) suggests a new activity for your favorite wax museum: 123D Catch. If they’ll let you, get some shots of a few of your favorites and MakerBot some statuettes for your mantle. I think I’d make a Samuel L. Jackson of my very own, because I can, and because I can do it from the sidewalk on 42nd Street.

This is a pretty cool thought, too.

The best part about going to the wax museum is they often have celebrities both living and dead. Historical figures? No problem. I now have a 3D model of the entire last supper.

Think of the animation possibilities!

 

On the night of March 18, 1990, a pair of thieves disguised as Boston police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and roamed the museum’s galleries, stealing thirteen works of art.

Perhaps the biggest property theft in recorded history, this 1990 theft of paintings including Rembrandt’s only known seascape, remains unsolved. Holy shhhhhmoly! That sounds more like a movie plot¹ , than something that could have happened in the 90′s.

It’s Day 2 at the Met MakerBot Hackathon and everyone’s down to work on their new art, and it’s crazy to think that we’re at this point. Because here’s the thing: we thought we’d have to come in and “steal” this stuff, until the Met listened to the idea and got excited about it and helped us take it a few steps further.

The idea of an art heist has still been tossed around. Let’s face it: heists make good stories. It’s good drama about a few people against a big group and you start cheering for the underdog. But what you never see in the movies is all the people who won’t see that art because of some trickery.

Food for thought:

•  Just last year, a drawing by Picasso was stolen from a gallery in San Francisco. The gallery’s president, Rowland Weinstein, said his “greatest fear” was that “the person will realize it’s unsellable and will dispose of it in a less-than-proper manner.”

•  The frames of the stolen pieces from the Gardener Museum, mentioned above, are still hanging empty on the walls, just waiting for the art to return.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. actually that does sound a lot like the end of The Town [↩]

Two of the artists in the Met MakerBot Hackathon, Colette Robbins and Micah Ganske, sat down with us to share their perspectives on their #Met3D collaboration. Bios on these two artists below the video.

Colette Robbins was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from Parsons, the New School for Design. Colette shows her work both nationally and internationally. Recently her work has been featured in shows at Deitch Projects, NY, Workshop Gallery, Venice, Italy, Lesley Heller Work Space, NY, RH Gallery, NY, Art Star, NY, Yautepec, Mexico City, Mexico, Field Projects, NY, Sloan Fine Art, NY, and 92 Y Tribeca, NY. She is an affiliate of Parlour, a nomadic exhibitions project that holds one-night art salons in living rooms throughout the five boroughs of NYC and abroad. colette has been awarded grants for residencies such as The Cill Rialaig Project in Ireland, and the Vermond Studio Center. She now lives and works in Queens, New York.

Micah Ganske was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1980. In 2002 he received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from the Maryland Institute of Art in 2003. In 2005 he received his MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art. In 2005 he was the recipient of the Adobe Design Achievement Award in Digital Photography at a reception held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where his work was also displayed. In October, 2007, Deitch Projects exhibited Ganske’s first solo exhibition. In 2011 he launched his second solo exhibition with RH Gallery in Tribeca, where he is now represented.

This is the first collaboration of these two artists, which is remarkable since they share a studio. And they are married.

 

Here’s what we’ve learned from a marathon day at the Met with a full team of artists and museum staff. We want to share as much wisdom with readers as possible, and ask you to please chime in in the comments. Remember, this is a community! If you have experience with any of these technologies, we need to know!

The surest steps to success using 123D Catch to capture and remake art:

– Provide enough information with your pictures. Basically, make sure each point in your object is appearing in at least three shots, and make sure there is uniform light around the thing you’re trying to Catch. When you don’t have enough info, you’re likely to get a solid block of mass in your model or a total lack of mass where there should be some stuff. Check out the big hole underneath this ritual seat from the Oceanic Art collection.

– If possible, use objects in the background of what you are trying to capture to help the software parse depth. 123D Catch does not like a blank wall with flat paint.

 

– There is no right way to do this stuff. This is the frontier and we’re figuring this out together. Everyone in this group today was tossing out different ideas and each artist or team of artists was taking a different path toward the goal.

 

Overheard

“This is all experimental. There is no ‘way.’” — Bre Pettis (@bre)

“By taking a whole series of close up pictures just at one level, I got really good 3D detail. Really good reproduction of very, very small depth.” — Michael Curry (skimbal)

“I’m using an iPhone to do this.” — Adam (@adamfont)

 

The transfer of physical objects into the Thingiverse has begun. You know when Flynn gets digitized into the game grid. Yeah, like that, but in the Met! Get ready to start DERIVING/HACKING/MAKING!

The works of art that the team of artists from the Met MakerBot Hackathon are starting to be processed in 123D Catch and uploaded to Thingiverse. The first one is right here! A whole new chapter of universal access to art!

This means that the design files for the 3D models of these pieces, as well as the pieces that this team of artists are creating, will be available to everyone around the world to download for free. Whether or not you have a MakerBot (we hope you do), you can get up close and personal with this art in a whole new way.

Here’s what you need to know:

Thingiverse is designed so that one person can upload a design file and another person can download it. If you make a version of someone else’s Thing, here’s the one thing you should do.

PRESS THIS BUTTON.

 

That’s it! That’s the only step. Pressing that button shows the world that you are contributing by testing other people’s designs, and giving your thumbs up to the quality.

If you forget to do this and you upload your Thing on its own, don’t worry. You can actually go back through and name a “parent” for your Thing. Simply click “Edit” at the top of your Thing page, scroll to the bottom, and enter the Thingiverse ID number of the parent Thing.

 

This is important stuff on Thingiverse. Since everyone in the world is putting in the work to make new Things for everyone else to enjoy, it’s important to attribute stuff to its origins. This is how we build off each other’s work and ensure that everyone is a rock star.

Why are you still reading this?! There’s art from the Met on Thingiverse. Go!