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)

A lot of the pictures and shots from Maker Faire last weekend hit the cutting room floor, but we wanted to share them with you to give you a feel for the environment. Saturday and Sunday were two action-packed days as you can see. Read the rest of the post to find out who else made MakerBot a part of their booth in order to show off their own technology or just the joy of Making.

I’m taking a short break from the blog series this week, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging.  I’ve put together a short screencast on how I use the creation tools in 123D Catch, specifically reference points and reference distances, to create scans that print in my desired scale.  This tip is great for anyone who wants tight control over print size, whether you’re working in scale or not.

A Quick Note: I’m running Autodesk 123D Catch on my mac through VMware Fusion.  Autodesk just released a web version, which is great for mac users, but it lacks some of the advanced features like creation tools.  So to use this tip, you need to use the desktop application on Windows.

From Fabbaloo:

Autodesk is previewing its Inventor Fusion software, which “unites direct and parametric workflows within a single digital model created in Autodesk Inventor.”

Here are the updates touted in the press release:

Surfacing support! Users can now work seamlessly between solids and surfaces, expanding their confidence and capabilities to tackle design changes. By enhancing the existing translators to read surface data and adding new Parasolid, Rhino, IGES and AliasDesign .wire file import capabilities user have access to an even larger number of design formats.
Simplification wizard. Simulation users now have one button simplification of designs. This makes simplifying common geometry fast and easy and ensures that mesh and solves times are as fast as possible.
Ease of use improvements. New marking menus, sketch ease of use and modeling ease of use, make this release of Inventor Fusion the easiest to use yet. Did we mention it was easy?

Well that sounds fun. I downloaded Inventor Fusion for myself, and there’s just a brief questionnaire to fill out beforehand. If you’re looking for a great 3D modeling option, give it a try. But act now, since the previews will expire.

– The Microsoft Windows compatible technology preview executable expires on April 1, 2013.
– The Apple OS X compatible version of the technology preview expires on January 1, 2013.

Hey Mac users, see that? You can use this Autodesk program!

There was a really nice set of responses to a post last week about sketching. Basically, I asked whether blog readers and MakerBot operators were accustomed to sketching their designs from the very beginning or using CAD tools to 3D model a design from the get go.

I just thought the responses deserved a quick recap, especially because they underscore the point that there is no right answer. As someone who jumped into this company with no background in 3D printing or any other hardware hacking, I have been continually surprised how accessible the concepts are. I think it’s nice to point out that those of you who do such great work all also have varying processes — so the results aren’t just individualized, the process is too.

The star of today’s episode of MakerBot TV, Kacie Hultgren (aka PrettySmallThings), said that the sketching stage is often absent from her work; not because she eschews pencil and paper, but because much of what she does comes from photographs. It’s pre-sketched, in a way.

Emmett, whose Things number among the most notable contributions in the Thingiverse, similarly doesn’t sketch much. But in his case, it’s because his “imagination works in 3D already.” Communicating an idea to someone else, however, deserves a sketch. Renee  not only sketches, but cleans that sketch up in Illustrator before bringing it into a modeling environment.

The creator of MakerBot mascot R.Maker (pictured above), ErikJDurwoodII, said he sketches to lend some purpose to the CAD process, even if that sketch will change over time, and Gregg Wygonik also uses sketching to make sure the computer phase doesn’t include avoidable elements that cause discouragement. (Visit Gregg’s Thingiverse page here.)

Stephen Holmes, who writes for Develop3D, pinged us on twitter with a really relevant article showing yet another mindset: 3D sketching. The people at the UK product design consultancy 3form Design (3fD) do specifically leave pencil and paper sketching out of their process. Founder Austen Miller argues that the “reverse engineering” required to take a designers sketch on paper into the domain of the engineer can cause the loss of original design intentions. Instead, the groups designers start in SolidWorks.

Echoing what our commenters said:

Miller doesn’t succumb to the argument that by jumping straight into CAD stifles creativity. In his opinion, just like pen and paper, CAD is a tool and depends whose hand it’s in as to the end result. “Creativity should not be measured by the medium we choose but how successful we can be with it…”

Thanks, all, for the input!

People are always asking, “How can I make a 3D model of Autodesk’s headquarters in California?”

By attaching a camera to an Octo-Copter UAV, silly!

The team at Autodesk, led by Director of Strategic Research Gonzalo Martinez, did just that, snapping some photos from a bunch of different angles and piecing them together with 123D Catch to build a 3D model.

Is it just me or does it look from the picture below that they took less than 30 pictures to get the highly detailed model that resulted? I’ve heard from several people lately that a successful model may require twice as many pictures. But even if it took 100 pictures to get an accurate model of a giant building, that’s not too shabby!

The copter in the picture above is not on Thingiverse, but this one from swepet is. It’s a quad-copter, and is designed to carry a GOPro, the same type of camera used by Autodesk to get the video you see below, but they can also be triggered remotely to take stills.

What I’m saying is: what awesome building or monument are you going to run out and capture and upload to Thingiverse?

MakerBot was on hand this evening as a key member of the Maker community, as Autodesk discussed direction for their family of personal 3D modeling and digital fabrication programs. Autodesk President and CEO Carl Bass and VP of Consumer Products Samir Hanna talked eagerly about their company’s embrace of the Maker Movement, with Bass describing himself as a lifelong maker and sharing some great photos of his own creations throughout the years.

As an aside, VentureBeat captured a shoutout from O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly, who suggested technical revolutions come from smart, creative people using the tools available to have fun. VentureBeat aptly tied the remark to the MakerBot community, and tonight’s event with Autodesk was a great reminder that this stuff is just plain fun.

Here’s what I mean: our MakerBot station was set up with a couple Replicators right next to the 123D Catch guys. This program allows a user to upload a set of images of an object. Snap 20 or so pictures of something like, for example, this garden gnome.

The photos are interpreted sequentially, so as you circle with your camera, the software knows to find its anchor points and reconcile them into a single 3D model. What you see on the screen in the photo below is not a photograph, it’s a high-res, finely detailed mesh that you can view from any angle. If it’s not clear to you, think: magic. That’s kinda what this is.

The end result is a printable file. We had this miniature gnome off the build platform in minutes, and it was just so easy!

Bass spoke recently at a panel about craftsmanship and technology where he commented that the ease of digital fabrication, with products like the 123D programs and printers like the MakerBot, is potentially “rewriting the fundamental economic equation of the industrial revolution,” an idea he repeated tonight. Rather than rely on mass production to achieve high quality at manageable costs, we can now produce high quality objects that fit individual needs. And there’s “no difference when I make one and when I make 1,000.”

With products like 123D Catch, which includes a free version, by the way, along with 123D Make and 123D Sculpt, the MakerBotting future seems eerily easy and bright.