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.

Last month our Curriculum page had a new idea for every school day in September, running the spectrum from MakerBot-made tweezers to a foldable fan.

This month, Liz Arum (@lizarum) has put together a brand new batch of daily tips, this time in tutorial form. Win!

Follow along this week for some excellent guidance on using Tinkercad, one of our favorite tools for getting novices started with 3D design. Today, Liz shows you how to upload STL files directly into Tinkercad, a relatively new feature. This is great for taking something you like from Thingiverse and using it as a starting point.

Personal note: I had forgotten all about this capability in Thingiverse, so this was a helpful reminder. Nice! Tomorrow, Liz will walk us through making mashups in Tinkercad.

There’s a lot more to come with the Daily Tutorials, so stay tuned. Same Bot time, same Bot channel.

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.

We have seen some sensational stuff done on MakerBot technology in the past. This collection from the artist David Hirmes has got to be a quick entry into the hall of fame. Check out “Boolean Buddhas“.

These pieces are all based on a single Buddha head model that was uploaded to Thingiverse back in 2010¹ by Peter Bios. David Hirmes notes that the 3D design file is listed in the public domain, which is important. The licenses available on Thingiverse allow everyone else to adapt the file for other uses. Because of that licensing, he felt free to go wild with this art.

Using the free design program Blender, he mashed up the head with other shapes using boolean operations. A boolean is when you subtract the outer surface of an object from another solid object, leaving a negative space in that shape. Two other boolean operations are “union”, or when you mash two things together, and “intersection”, when you leave only the space that the two objects have in common. David’s graphic explains it much more simply.

Look at the insanely cool shapes he got from this process.

The gold paint looks incredible. And here’s the sweetest part, and the part that we have all come to expect: David has graciously shared his entire process on his own website and put all of the design files up on Thingiverse for you, yes YOU, to play with.

1. Take note! There may be some untapped gems for you to explore from years past! [↩]

There’s something about seeing kids making things that just makes you think, “the future’s going to be fine.”

Here are some shots from the 3D Design/Printing workshop “On the Move”, hosted by MakerBot and NYU-Poly last week. MakerBot education wizards Liz Arum and Jon Santiago¹  were there to show kids ages 10-13 how to use free modeling software and a MakerBot to make mechanical parts like gears for larger moving objects.

1. Jon’s organization HTINK “provides academic enrichment programs and professional development services that connect Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) concepts to issues of environmental justice, community development and workforce readiness.” Find out more at www.htink.org [↩]

The work that has come out of the Met MakerBot Hackathon has been really ground breaking, especially since it has inspired people who weren’t even with us a couple of weekends ago.

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is one of those artists. I posted about him during the Hackathon and it generated a lot of interest about his ideas of “remixing” and “sampling” physical objects.

The video above, “We Met Heads On”,  is a new addition from Matthew, drawing on what has so far been captured with 123D Catch and uploaded to Thingiverse. Here’s the description of the video from the Vimeo page.

This video titled ‘We Met Heads On’ is my remix of the 3D scan hackathon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY organised by Makerbot. The public were invited to scan artifacts to then modify and 3d print derivatives. The files ended up on Thingiverse, giving me access to the scans, in particular ‘decimation study – met heads’ by scotta3d which is a derivative from another thingiverse user tbuser. To continue the lineage of derivatives, I have placed the low-polygon heads from scotta3d into a Processing sketch that distorts the meshes in realtime in response to sound and outputs the modified stl objects. The soundwave is analysed from the streaming audio and used to force the mesh to twist to the strength of the soundwave. Performed and recorded in real-time.

We are going crazy about this video right now. Imagine what could be done with some of these ancient figures, animating them (re-animating them?) to appropriate music. Renaissance sculpture to ancient Greek music, Oceanic sculpture to Oceanic music.

It’s time to make art dance.

Thingiverse user sirmakesalot has been busy in the last month, with several good uploads, and a few more soon, he tells us.

I really like one of his recent Thingiverse additions in particular, this three-legged chair.

3 legged chair by sirmakesalot

This is especially cool for a couple reasons. The first is why Greg made it. As a person with a disability, he wanted to draw attention to the idea of something being disabled. This chair, as he puts it, was “born without one leg.” It turns out this was a project that became real furniture in his home (the final product is a beauty, go check it out), and the chair is fully functional. It stands upright without the need for the rest of the fourth leg.

This use of Thingiverse for awareness is interesting. There are a few other examples, and I bet we’ll see a lot more in the future.

The other cool thing is that Greg didn’t design this to make on a MakerBot. He designed it in Rhino for a class and ultimately made it out of wood. However, he shared the design file with the world on Thingiverse and now someone could easily MakerBot it if they wanted to. The original may be in Greg’s living room, but you can have a sirmakesalot 3 legged chair of your very own.

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.