Fabbing for Beginners: Digital Making Techniques and Autodesk 123D Tatjana Dzambazova Autodesk FC6582 Exciting innovations in hardware, software, reality capture and fabrication services are now at your service to help unleash your originality, express your creativity, or exercise your entrepreneurial spirit! This class will start with an overview of a personal fabrication trend that is growing and will forever change the way products will be demanded for, designed, made and sold in the future. It will then move to a sneak preview into some exciting new software tools that are currently under development, which will provide an unprecedentedly easy way to make prototypes, final designs or art objects. The second portion of the class is exclusive to attendees of AU Vegas and will not be covered in this written handout. Learning Objectives At the end of this class, you will be able to: Have a good understanding of the personal fabrication trend (Overview of the personal fabrication trend, discuss the entire eco system, share world wide examples of empowered small players) Intro to 123D MAKE Sneak Peak into some exciting fabrication software tools that we are currently developing About the Speaker Tatjana Dzambazova, architect and technologist. Trained architect with over 12 years of experience as an architect in Vienna, Austria and London, UK; For the last 12 years she has worked for Autodesk mainly in technology expert advocate and product management roles, always on the front end, driving emerging products or initiatives. Mostly known in the AEC community as the leader of Revit, for which she also privately co-authored three books. After various other product management and business development roles, Tanja spent the last years focusing on personal fabrication, a trend enabled by the democratized tools of making (3d Printers, Laser cutters, Shopbots etc.) accessible design tools and online fabbing services. In particular she led the development of new exciting personal fabrication software tools that will change the way prototypes or final objects can be made fast and inexpensively. (123D MAKE is the introductory version of a wide collection of such tools currently under development.). Tatjana.dzambazova@autodesk.com
Personal Fabrication We live in very interesting times: Technology penetrates every aspect of our lives, and enables us not only to make things faster, easier or more conveniently than before, but to actually make things we never thought we could! Tools that used to be exclusively approachable and accessible to big corporations, governments and high end professionals are now finding their smaller, cheaper, easier to use and affordable versions that empower all of us, from amateur to small professional players to play the Big game. We are living through a new Industrial revolution that brings the means of production back into the hands of all of us, changing the way products will be demanded for, made and sold in the future. 2008 Autodesk The internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, communication and as a result of that there is an amazing increase in the variety of participants/creators/mash-uppers and everything digital. Now, it is the same for physical. People can now make just about anything! The digital content generation now becomes the maker generation! This happens due to three main factors: Democratization of tools of production (machines)- computer controlled, powerful yet accessible and approachable and most importantly, liberated from sole ownership of corporations. Democratization of tools of design better, more accessible in price and ease of use. Enablers that allow for sharing and connectivity the internet and web collaborative systems, fabrication services, membership based workshops. Tools of making Computer numerically controlled machines have long ago replaced analog fabrication methods, but what s new is that these new machines are starting to get cheaper, smaller and easier to use, enabling anyone interested to have access and make anything with them. Laser Cutters, 3D printers, Shopbots, Tormachs are just a few of them. In the presentation we will discuss how are they used today and what creative users can make with them. 2
Laser Cutters 3D Printers Tools for design creating digital input for the CNC machines Smart and accessible machines will not go very far if there are no software tools for making digital models to feed those machines. Digital models can be made from scratch, can be made by editing and changing existing models that one can download from the web (123Dapp.com; 3D Warehouse; Turbosquid etc) or can be made by capturing a real life object and converting it into a 3D digital model. Professionals have been taken care of with good professional software tools, but in the last 5 years, a myriad of tools that are much more accessible and affordable started popping up; and due to their ease of use and low entry point, have broaden the reach to new audiences, empowering them to express their creativity in 3D digital models. The majority of those tools, however, have been more focused on the digital on screen representation of ideas without too much thought about the makeability of an object in real life, mainly limited by the underlying technology they use, the level of precision for certain topologies or the lack of tools specifically designed to support the fabbing processes. Autodesks solution for this space is to create new affordable and accessible tools that will bring this to the next level and make a stronger link between these creative people and the new fabbing machines. That is the 123D line of products, that started with 123D a free, easy to use solid modeler that makes not only models that can be visualized on screen but can be designed with high accuracy and precision, the assembly/component structure and tools specifically 3
designed to support laser cutting and 3D printing make for a good and desirable tool for making physical objects. We also offer 123D Catch that eliminates the need to start with blank space in a software and instead, capture real life objects and bring them into the digital world by converting photos taken with a cell phone camera into a 3D digital model. 123D MAKE however goes further, and solves the problem of how to translate any 3D model into a physical prototype of a final object. Enablers In the last years we also see the emergence of enablers that make sense of all this and offer creative people access to fabbing machines or fabbing services and a place to order or sell their creations. Membership based workshops, like Techshop, teach and give access to these amazing machines for $3 a day, Ponoko offers anyone access to such machines to produce it for you, wherever you are. Maker Faire gives the opportunity to show off your creations and inventions and connect with others who ride this wave. Techshop PONOKO It seems that everything is set up for any one of us to do just about anything! SO, HOW TO MAKE JUST ABOUT ANYTHING? 3D printing seems to be what will forever change the way things will be made in the future. It is quite exciting and it will go a long way. 3D printing today however is still in its early stages home 3D printers, while they evolve on a daily basis, are still somewhat slow, the models are still expensive and the level of precision of home 3D printers is still not there to call it a done deal. Laser cutters, however, seem to be the machines that currently empower most of the creative people. They are easy to use, can cut on a range of materials and the materials and final outcomes are quite affordable. Leveraging smart machines such as laser cutters enables anyone to make anything. There is still however a certain know-how when it comes to making objects that can be cut with laser cutters. Laser cutters require a 2D vector input which is easy to if you have a simple 2D objects as the examples below: a name tag, piece of jewelry of even 2D cut fabric. You can make the digital drawings that would be the base for this in any Autodesk tool, Illustrator, Corel Draw etc. 4
But what if we want to make a 3D object out of laser cut 2D sheet materials? You could design your object consciously, with laser cutting in mind, to be executed out of flat sheets of material as the objects in the illustrations below show. The real challenge though is how to make physical artifacts out of any 3D geometry that was already designed in any software? Figuring out how to make them out of flat sheet material is not easy and requires a lot of calculations and figuring out. That's where some of the new Autodesk fabrication software tools comes in: In collaboration with some smart mathematicians and engineers at Otherlab, Autodesk is working on a series of smart fabrication software that will help users of any skill level to translate any 3D model into a fabrication pattern that can be sent to a machine. These tools automatically decompose geometry into manufaturable pieces and automatically generate the instruction set for their reassembly into a physical 3D object. These tools can assist both professionals and amateurs in realizing their creative ideas and make fast, easy and cheap prototypes of designs, art pieces and sculptures, final unique objects or even short run manufactured items. The idea is that these tools could be applied to any object that you design in any software, as long as it is saved as STL or OBJ; any object that you might have created with 123D Catch or other reality capture software or by simply downloading ready made objects from 123Dapp.com or 3D Warehouse as a base for your idea. From that geometry and a choice of decomposition methods and 5
materials, the user can get cut files and patterns including assembly instructions for the object they are trying to realize. 123D MAKE is just the beginning of some exciting smart tools.. In the class we will expose to you some inspiring new ways to move from a 3D digital model made anywhere to some amazing physical artifacts shown below. 6
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