This just mysteriously appeared on the table at SDCC booth #5336 (where MakerBot and @Toy_Tokyo have been jamming for the past few days). It comes from the man who’s been killing it on Thingiverse lately, and sparking some controversy, too.

There’s no mistaking this. This must have been the work of Cosmo Wenman, whose own photo of the piece is really stirring.

This piece is titled “The Replication of Venus”¹ . It’s a brilliant mashup of his cosmonaut figure and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, emerging from The Replicator. In Cosmo’s words:

Archetype meets Renaissance meets 1920′s futurism meets bleeding-edge pop culture. She’s getting closer and closer to stepping out into the real world.

If you haven’t been following it, there has been a discussion about Cosmo’s most recent project on Thingiverse, which so far involves requesting high quality scans of some pretty challenging targets: Oscar Wilde’s tomb, Richard Branson’s beard, the vocalists from Die Antwoord (yes, the actual people), any shape from the floor of the deepest known part of the Earth’s ocean, Challenger Deep, and a single square meter surface section from an asteroid. In case you think he’s talking about a meteorite here on Earth, he’s clarified:

Location: Space

Maybe these requests themselves are an art project, or maybe Cosmo’s trying to make a point about the responsibility we each bear to digitize the world. Or maybe he’s just trying to tell the rest of us to use photos and other resources that are available to turn these things and everything else into 3D models. What do you think? What would you request of the rest of the community to scan if it could be anything?

1. whose face do we think that is in the glasses? [↩]

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.