Meet DIYLILCNC, an opensource CNC milling machine project set to teach anyone to build there own milling tool. The initiative came from 2 chicago-based artists and educators of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thanks to them, today with around 700 dollars and some time invested putting the parts together, anyone can have their own CNC milling machine at home.
While Computer Numerical Controlled machines are nothing new, the availability of open-source building plans is a reflection of the democratization of innovation we have been seeing in the last years.
Choosing the right colors for a product is not an easy task, what usually happens is that a designer also doesn’t have enough time left to experiment with color because he spent it all on finding the perfect shape and solving out all technical requirements.
That’s were design combinatorics can come in. Dr woohoo, an artist based in the USA has post a video demonstrating a way of generating numerous color combinations from a given design concept. He is using the new capabilities of creating flash plugins to interact with applications like adobe illustrator CS4 through the use of ActionScript, a scripting language used primarily for the development dynamic websites on Flash.
In this video, Dr. Woohoo demonstrates a little application that generates color and stroke variations on a vector rendering of an Adidas shoe. In the video, we can see that the application automatically exports jpeg files of an enormous amount of color variations of the design. How cool is that!? As you can see in the video, the amount of generated combinations is huge, so a new challenge arises, which is, having to sweep through the thousands of combinations to pick the ones you want. But anyway, having an app doing the color combinations and afterwards having you to pick the most interesting results can be a nice way to speed up the design process and to even surprise yourself.
I did a little research to find out how he made this little app, and by now I would guess that his combinatoric application was made possible through the new “PatchPanel technology” Adobe is releasing on their developer website:
“PatchPanel is a Flex library and set of services that make it possible for Shockwave® Flash® (SWF) files to work as Adobe Creative Suite CS3 and CS4 plug-ins. Flex developers can include this Flex library in their projects in order to create Flash plug-ins that access the ExtendScript Document Object Model (DOM) of Creative Suite applications through ActionScript objects.”
I was totally excited to see something I always wanted to have as a designer shine in front of my eyes. Let’s hope Dr. Woohoo brings more info on how to implement this.
And of course we totally dig the “evolutionary mindset” taking over the field of “design tools”. What about you? Do you have any wish for a “combinatoric” design application? What about automatically generating renderings out of CAD software like Maya or Cinema 4D? Those used on spending hours and hours tweaking light and material parameters for rendering 3D models in such programs know how nice it would be to have some “Charles Darwin twist to it”.
Render probes in Cinema 4D - Could finding the right light setting be easier?
For example, design combinatorics could have been of great use in the renderings of the folha seca skateboard. The image above shows a little overview on the rendering attempts in Cinema 4D before getting the right light and shadow results. It took me almost 3 hours..could it have been faster using design combinatorics to auto generate light, shadow, and material settings overnight and to have some options to choose from in the next morning? I wish..
With Adobe having bought Macromedia, we are seeing the merge of the capabilities of flash and its Creative Suite Softwares. As of in generative design, the combination of mathematical algorithms in the design process is opening up a whole new set of possibilities for designers and artists to express their creativity. Lets just hope that other design software companies will follow.
This next article seems to Letsevo as a great mark in the collaborative design process. Wikitecture, as the folks from the Wikitecture Studio are calling it, is the first attempt I have seen in order to solve a long anticipated challenge of coming up with a programming language to build CAD constructions in a Wiki-like way. Wikitecture, as demonstrated in this youtube video, is a Secondlife scripting based project, to empower people to build Architecture together just like writing and editing Wikipedia entrances.
This is the birth of a whole new ecology system of Industry, software companies and contributors collaborating to build great things!
Are companies going to ignore that we, the people, can help each other build all the products we want when technologies like Wikitecture become more mature?? Are companies going to react like majority of the Academic field reacted against Wikipedia, rejecting the fact that the wisdom of the crowd could in deed create a Encyclopedia from scratch?
I am a true believer that the things are going to change around here. Maybe it is time to start a new Letsevo project together!! A problem so complex that we would need the help of each other to achieve great results. Something around mobility, an collaborative electric moped? Something so modular, everyone could have its own customized electric moped to cruise around the neighborhood. Seems challenging to me, and fun to work on.
Can we get some companies to “Blend-in” their CAD parts for us to design around it? Batteries, Electric Motors, suspension forks, Disc brakes?
Can we get some brothers that share this dream? Marcello, Piers, Jochen, Nico, Christian, Basti, Peter, Gross….all the creative minds out there…Lets Wikit!?
I just had to try to build something in 3dvia Shape to see what it can do. I was also curious to test 3dvia`s uploading process. After downloading their Shape sofware, which didn`t take more than a minute, the program prompted me with a screen to login the system. After typing in my 3dvia username and password I could start playing with the functions of the software…there are not many I have to tell… and 3dvia has some video tutorials about using the software which I didn`t check, accept for the one about applying textures.
I was set up to build a 3D modell of skateboard bmx ramp for all the brothers and sisters who like to go big virtually. I just had to do it!
I started out by drawing the side view line and then extruded them to give some volume. After photoshoping a EVO skateboards logo to one off my wood texture files I was prepared to give this ramp a unique look. Pretty simple and not much of novelty in this. Applying the textures was pretty easy so was scaling and rotating it to match the scale of the Ramp. After being pleased how it looked, I just hit the Publish button and I was taken to their website where I could fill some details about the 3d model I was uploading. You can choose publish your model for everyone or to keep it private which means only you or who you want to show/give can see/download (this is nice if you want to keep it hidden before you have everything build or even if you want to collaborate in top secret style with other people) You can set a creative commons license and tags to make your model easily searchable. The modell is added to your profile page and can be at any given time edited again.
Here is a link to a screenshot of the 3d ramp in 3dvia shape
Everything is still pretty ruff, there isn’t much accuracy in building as a product designer would like.Lets hope Dassaut systemes, responsible for the software bring some functionality to the game. I think it only then it could be an awesome tool for collaboration projects like the ecosk8 project that has been happening at Lets Evo since 2006.
Some questions to start a discussion about the impact of such tools into the design process:
What benefits could it bring to companies?
Are user really motivated to participate?
Will 3dvia Shape develop itself into a tool for designers and engineers and users to communicate in real products?
Are we designers going to get used to interacting so early with users about design decisions?
A couple of months ago I wrote in a post my humble manifesto to democratization of design, claiming that we “hyperlinked” kids want to influence more and more how products are. I also wrote in another post about the changes that simple free CAD software could bring to the product development process alowing brands to collaborate with its most valuable asset: its users.
Dassaut systemes is aiming to grasp the user-generated design wave by enabling everyone to create 3d Modells and share them in their platform just like you do with your pictures by flickr. So at www.3dvia.com anyone can login and start creating, sharing and rating each others design.
Google started ahead with its Sketchup software and 3dWarehouse but deliver very low-quality graphics and accuracy to build real stuff with it. I found it so bad I didn’t even boder writing about it here in Letsevo. Now 3dvia Shape sofware, seems to have has a lot more graphic power than google`s software. One thing that bodered me is that even dough you can see amazing models made by some users in their gallery, I can seem to imagine that they were build right inside of the program. I may be wrong but by looking at the avaiable tutorials in their website it seems like their software still lack a lot of the building tools most of the product design software have (Sweep along rail, Lofts, fillets….) meaning you cannot build complex shapes right away. Lets hope they increment it right away.
But what really sets 3dvia apart from google is it´s nice social network features where users can build profiles and embed 3d models as widgets in other websites just like youtube. You still need to download a plugin to view it but it is awesome.
Download the player and check the following out:
This guy build a sweet bmx bike!! That could be the user of the future saying: look! BRAND, this is how I want my product, are you going to ignore me? I think this is going to be awesome, this platform can serve as place to exchange files with other designers, engineers and to also show the users what is beeing done and have there comments write on the spot!
Sweet huhn? Now in my opnion its is going to be a long way for it to be reallity, but I have the feeling they are in the right track.
My two hints for Dassaut Systemes are:
1.Let people import and export geometrical data from other 3d sofwares like .iges, .dwg, .3dm ( don´t try to be like sony and the blue-ray disc!!!) If you let us use your software to read existing data than design companies are going to take this serious. Until then it will be only internet hype not a social revolution.
2.If you want to be really a tool for the product design STARTUP companies in the the collaboration era, think wiki or basecamp for product design: 3d files with construction history and the ability to handle multiple layers. To help my point picture this scenario. I want to build an electric bike and I am only a designer. I have some nice design ideas and I find in the internet a couple companies that procuce batteries, other companies produce motors….other build suspension forks…I call them up and invite them for a project hosted at your site and we all start uploadings components in to one file having the power to collaborate in real time! How cool would that be!? Content Central and e-drawings for the masses?
Give us the tools and we are gonna build stuff you could never imagine of! Yeah.
