Autodesk 123D Makes it on The Top 10 Tech Breakthroughs of 2012

Autodesk’s 123D series of free consumer products like 123D Catch made it into Popular Mechanics Top Ten breakthroughs of 2012 article!
20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
20+ Years of Design, Technology & More

Autodesk’s 123D series of free consumer products like 123D Catch made it into Popular Mechanics Top Ten breakthroughs of 2012 article!

The speaker is Dan Zucker Lead on Autodesk Social Media, and I was the co-speaker. This session will be great for anyone wanting to understand social web and media such as Facebook, Twitter, and more with best practices and applies to everyone from customers, partners, and Autodesk employees.
Unfortunately there is currently a class conflict as I have another session at the same time.

I recently was in in extremely Northern Kenya near the Ethiopian border on Lake Turkana for a few weeks with Dr. Louise Leakey, Deming Yang of Kenya National Museum, and my colleague Gonzalo Martinez for an Autodesk research project. It changed my perspective on the world, and life.

Perhaps you’re a gardener and have seen these evil little butterflies (Cabbage Moth / Cabbage Butterfly Plutella xylostella, Pieris rapae) that lay eggs on cabbage, then the caterpillars devour your vegetables. Why is it this is the only butterfly that I don’t like and does bad things? It is referred to as both a moth and butterfly so I will assume it is more annoying moth than a delicate innocent beautiful butterfly. It turns out these little delicate insects are highly territorial and wont go into a garden area where another is.
Old remedies were to spray tons of chemicals all over everything, spread egg shells in your garden, or place white paper butterfly decoys - but now we have 3D printing.
So I designed a 3D cabbage butterfly in AutoCAD end used STLOUT or 3DPRINT command to generate a STL file for use by 3D printers. I could also have easily designed the 3D Butterfly and generated an STL 3D Print export using the free 123D solid modeling software. I then printed it on my MakerBot Replicator and then affixed it with fishing line to some 1/8” copper wire.

This weekend I was doing things and started getting emails, tweets, and Facebook posts that I was on NPR. Back in March I was at the 123D event in New York City with many of our patterns and a gentleman approached me to discuss 123D and 123D Catch and the technologies possible uses. Turns out this gentlemen was from NPR and just published his story and interview edited clips.

Our wildly creative 3D mad scientist friends at MakerBot recently gathered a group of artists and captured several objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in a Hackathon event using Autodesk’s own 123D Catch which is free and available to use on your PC, your iPad or on the web. They were then able to create 3D prints from their MakerBot 3D printers as well they posted many on the Thingiverse for everyone to mod or print.

In the first release of Autodesk 123D Make it was available for only the Mac and took imported 3D models and sliced them into patterns so that you could create a real 3D object. Now there is not only a…

Autodesk 123D Catch is a technology where you take photos with your digital camera and then using cloud computing it constructs a textured 3D mesh model. There are three new flavors of this delicious 3D treat - one for the Windows desktop, one for the Apple iPad, and one web hosted version you run in a browser.

Several people have noticed recent images appearing in online articles and on the 123D Catch page of a 3D head created using 123D Catch, and thought it looked like me.

Re-imagining Design and Manufacturing in the future
Tatjana Dzambazova Autodesk Sr. Product Manager and Maker Extraordinaire hosted two live Master Class sessions at TED 2012 on Monday this week titled “RIP MOD FAB Re-imagining Design and Manufacturing in the future.