a typical mashable article... quantity over quality, how sad

They also neglected to mention http://www.thingiverse.com/

My dad owns a tool and die design/engineering shop, they generally make fairly small, specialized parts for automotive design. When I was young, I went to work with him to see what he does, and noticed a wax model of the project they were working on. He said they model the project by hand to get a good vision of what they were designing (this was before 3D CAD came around). When they were nearing completion, they'd present the wax model to the customer to make sure all the specifications were right. If they were, my dad would complete the design and send it out to the die makers. The die makers loved having a handmade physical model of what they had asked for before they paid for the completed design (which could have had unseen errors).

Fast forward a few years, and my dad acquired a competitor who happened to have a 3D printer. Now my dad's company would make the design, print it out, and show it to the customer. One customer did not like this at all, so much in fact that they sued my dad's company. If the engineers could make these parts themselves, how long until they could make them with metal? How long before the die makers were turned redundant? The die makers have a lot of money invested in very expensive equipment to make these parts, and now 3D printers can make plastic replicas of them much cheaper (though there are obvious downsides in terms of scale and tolerance).

When the company filed suit, they dropped the contract with my dad's firm (which happened to be the die maker's only design shop) and spent all their contingency funds on the suit. The company was bankrupt before it ever saw court. So yeah, this technology has a lot of important industries very concerned.

If you're really interested in buying one, there are a few kickstarter projects trying to break the sub $1000 market via RepRap designs. Here's one: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/printrbot/printrbot-your...

> RepRap was the first of the low-cost 3D printers, and the RepRap Project started the open-source 3D printer revolution.

(from http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap)

I believe this is one, but you'll have to build it yourself after sourcing parts.

Small shops, fewer workers and many more new shops (since they cost little to start).

> Your future soda bottle will become a toy will become part of your shoes will become...

Our current and past soda bottles have become the great pacific garbage patch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

I think the future of recycling is going to be more largely affected by a reduction in consumption.

I don't know if you've tried to use 3d non haptic input devices before, turns out that they suck for modelling. and not due to noise or lack of precision issues. The main problem is that a general person's absolute 3d positioning skills are pretty poor, and even there 3D directional skills are pretty damned poor.

Making general models by waving a phone around would be difficult enough, I can't imagine trying to use it to create a model detailed enough to actually print a usable part.

Now, making 3D modellers is actually something I have a lot of experience with. If anyone wants to have a discussion about how we could actually create an interface for a 3D modeller targeted at consumer modelling of 3D printable parts; Well, that's a discussion I'd love to have.

Yar. there's also blender, sketchup, wings3d, art of illusion - there's a ton.

I guess, it's easy for me to imagine a shape - i can draw that shape on a piece of paper, but i find it hard to express that same shape using modeling software.

Say, wrap some text around the surface of a sphere. I'm pretty sure i could, letter by letter, orient and kern text in OpenSCAD but it would take me a long time to do.

i imagine in the not to distant future there will be a motion tracker or kinect app to allow shaping stuff like clay - or maybe just use clay and scan it in.

In any case, all the software i've used feels clunky. iMovie for modeling will be a big deal.

But it's not particularly useful for the kind of parts we'd like to be able to 3D print, in general.