Heads up: a free tool for designing solid objects

A free beta is available of the 3-D modeling program Autodesk 123d. In four different flavors, looks like. I’ve only tried the basic.

The news story that tipped me off said you could use the program to design your own objects in three dimensions, to exact spec however desired, and then send the file to a shop with a 3-D printer and pay them to replicate that object as desired.

People have already used 3-D printers to make parts and other items that they would otherwise have had to find for sale. I think I’ve written before about the potential of “3-D printers,” or “rapid prototyping machines,” and more broadly “fab labs” and what have you. One thing I truly regret about the last few years is not having had about $800 in one piece, so that I could have gotten the parts to cobble together my very own open-source RepRap machine. Poverty slows everything down.

But one component of this area has always been the ability to use a software program to make the 3-D plans. And this program – at least this beta version – is free, which is an acceptable cost of entry. (Where a shop or machine can be found that would actually build the results… that’s a question for later.)

So far, I have just mucked around with it a bit. The visual menu choices are ultra-bare-bones, I’d say too much so, so I haven’t been able to just walk in and instantly know how to do very much. The one thing I’ve tried to make so far is a model of an interstellar spacecraft… because no one knows what an interstellar spacecraft would really look like, so I can just agglommerate whatever crude shapes and volumes I can figure out how to draw. (All right, it’s not quite that formless; I was trying to draw a Project Orion or Daedalus ship, which would have a massive solid plate to catch the force of all the nuclear explosions behind the ship and then some gigantic shock absorbers between that and the actual vehicle. But that still leaves a lot of room.)

But I can’t even make a good-looking model starship if I can only make accidental shapes, and my exploratory experiments are going slow. I spent half a day simply trying to figure out whether it’s possible to make a hollow hemisphere in the program, a hemispheric shell – or even how to split a solid sphere in half! – and Google couldn’t help me. Fortunately Autodesk has some tutorials, so I guess I will be trying to follow the step-by-step directions to make a fancy coat-rack over the next few days, learning the tools as I go.

When I’ve learned how to use it… well, I don’t have to know what I’ll use it for yet. :o)

Maybe not very many things, or not as long as I have to pay someone; that’s a a disincentive when I’ve been daydreaming about having a machine on my desk. Then again, maybe. A perfect-shaped custom trowel is one thing I was thinking of. (Or – what if I could design my own Halloween costume accessories in time to have a company mail them back to me by this October? or certainly by next October…)

Anyway, for any crafty types that read me, I thought I should mention this and pass on the link. (There’s extraordinary room for an artist. For one thing, a 3-D printer can “print,” layer by layer, a solid one-piece sculpture that could not have been carved with hand tools of any kind, because it would not have been possible to get the tools into all the places. Images of amazing examples can be found online.)